1) I like the name of the American OSS advisor to the Viet Minh (Archimedes Patti) and 2) Who remembers there was a famine in Vietnam in 1944-45 in which a million people starved to death?
Japanese destruction of French rule forced crucial decisions on the Viet Minh. It also provided the Americans with an opportunity to use the Vietnamese to fight the Japanese. The US began dropping arms from aircraft based in southern China, while the Viet Minh provided valuable weather reports and helped locate shot-down US aircrew. In March 1945 the OSS sent ‘Deer Team’ into Vietnam to liaise with the ‘old man’ who led the Viet Minh. One of these agents, Archimedes ‘Al’ Patti, penned an account of their stay in a jungle encampment. The emaciated Viet Minh leader, already tubercular, lay ill with dysentery and malaria, but rallied enough to chain-smoke Patti’s Chesterfields after the team doctor had treated him. The OSS agents taught guerrillas, commanded by Giap – ‘a wiry little man with large calculating eyes and a perpetually angry look’ – how to use modern weapons. The Americans spent many agreeable hours with Ho Chi Minh, who at one point inquired in English: ‘Your statesmen make eloquent speeches about helping those with self-determination. We are self-determined. Why not help us? Am I different from Nehru, Quezon, even your George Washington? Was not Washington considered a revolutionary? I, too, want to set my people free.’ Privately he thought that the Americans were all about business. As Ho heard news of the dropping of the atomic bombs and the Japanese surrender that August, he and Giap decided to launch their insurrection, their task aided by widespread peasant anger over a famine in the winter of 1944–5 that killed a million people, after the Japanese had refused to stop exporting rice to Japan from their state granaries.
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