Japanese troops fighting alongside the British in Viet Nam

[raumatibeach]

Stumbled across this today War in Vietnam (1945
Anyone know anything more about this?I'd love to know more, or if the Japanese were re armed and fought elsewhere for the allies.
I love that scene in Ban of Brothers where the german and american soldiers are manning the roadblock and talking about their experiences, can't quite imagine it happening with the Japanese and British troops however.

 

[davebender]

WWII Japan was anti communist. So it wouldn't surprise me if they made common cause with British forces vs the Viet Minh.

 

[tyrodtom]

Japan might have been anti-communist, but even so many of those Japanese troops chose to stay in Vietnam after the war and fight with the Viet Minh, and later the NVA.

 

[Shinpachi]

This is an interesting topic which I did not know.
What I knew about the IJA personnels in Vietnam after WW2 was 600 of them joined the Viet Minh to train them.

 

[stona]

This is a VERY complicated area of history and is certainly not one that I consider myself qualified to comment in detail upon. However this is a simplified account of the series of events that happened at the end of the war in Vietnam.

Vietnam (actually all of French Indo-China) was divided at the 16th paralell at the Potsdam conference The Chinese would take the Japanese surrender in the North and the British in the South.

Although hostilities officially ended on 15 Aug 1945 Major General Douglas Gracey and his Anglo-Indian Force didn't arrive until 5 Sept. Saigon was occupied by armed Vietnamese. Gracey's initial reaction was to increase his available manpower by arming French PoWs and handing control of Saigon back to them. French Indo-China had fallen into Vichy French administration,it wasn't until after Germany's surrender that Japan declared it an independent nation.

It was the Anglo-Indian Forces that drove the Viet-Minh from Saigon but the city was effectively surrounded. Gracey realise that Japanese repatriation would have to wait until the Vietnamese country side was under control and did not disarm Japanese Forces in the country. Instead he allowed them to operate against the Viet-Minh. Throughout October 1945 the Viet-Minh launched attacks against Saigon all of which were repulsed by Indian and Japanese Forces.
It was not until January 1946 that the French were present in sufficient numbers to allow Gracey to hand over Vietnam to its former colonial rulers. The last British forces, the 2/8 Punjab, left in May of 1946.

So,yes,the Japanese did indeed operate with "British" Forces in Vietnam in 1945/6.

Cheers

Steve

 

[vikingBerserker]

That's very interesting!

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Yes very interesting. I was not aware of this until now. I wonder if there is more detailed info on this?

 

[Shinpachi]

At least, those 600 Japanese who joined the Viet Minh had no political ideologies but simply refused to be repatriated to their occupied homeland. Period is said from early September to December of 1945.

 

[davebender]

Maybe they did.

1933 Germany wasted no time shipping communists off to concentration camps for reeducation. Most were released after a few months. That doesn't mean they no longer had communist sympathies but they knew better then to admit it. When the Red Army occupied most of Europe these communists came out of the closet and historical accounts suggest there were quite a few. Japanese communists probably acted in a similiar manner. They kept their ideas to themselves until an opportunity presented itself to join a communist military organization.

 

[renrich]

I believe also that when the French took back control of Indo China some of the French Foreign Legion troops stationed there were former members of the Wehrmacht, some of them SS.

 

[tyrodtom]

I doubt that many joined the Viet Minh out of communist sympathy, they could see no reason to surrender. The IJA in Indochina was undefeated.

They probably didn't want to return to a bombed out, defeated, and occupied Japan. They had a marketable skill, and the Viet Minh welcomed them.

Not all that stayed behind joined the Viet Minh, some became farmers, shop owners, stayed as doctors, engineers, etc.

There were something like 50,000 IJA troops and Japanese civil service personnel in Indochina at the surrender date, but only something like 35,000 were repatriated within the year ahead. The rest stayed for several years, some well past Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

 

[raumatibeach]

Yes very interesting. I was not aware of this until now. I wonder if there is more detailed info on this?

Not much detail here about the Japanese but it gives you an idea of the politics of British involvement and the situation on the ground
The First Vietnam War - Peter M. Dunn - Google Books

Looks like it also happened in Indonesia British and Japanese Troops Cooperate in SE Asia, 1945 » Armchair General
I wonder who was paying the Japanese troops and if they ended up wearing British uniforms?

 

[davebender]

That welcome would be short lived unless Japanese troops go along with communist indoctrination that was routine in the Viet Minh and most other communist armies.

 

[Shinpachi]

The 600 Japanese contribution in the Viet Minh continued to 1954 when French evacuated from Vietnam.
Most of them returned to Japan after that.

 

[tyrodtom]

That welcome would be short lived unless Japanese troops go along with communist indoctrination that was routine in the Viet Minh and most other communist armies.

They had something the Vietminh absolutly had to have, technical knowledge of heavy weapons, engineering knowledge, medical etc.. The communist doctrine was for the locals, the Viets could be pretty pragmatic about comminist doctrine, when somebody had something they needed. Witness how during the later Vietnam war they were getting aid from China and Russia at the same time that China and Russia almost went to war against each other.

 

[raumatibeach]

Interesting to think that former IJA soldiers ended up fighting against former Waffen SS in Viet Nam .Got to love histories twists and turns, almost as good as the Koreans captured in German uniform in Normandy.

http://www.warbirdforum.com/japviet.htm

[This subject has fascinated me ever since I read reports that the Japanese genius and war criminal Colonel Tsuji Masanobu had spent his last years in Vietnam, helping defeat the Americans. At last someone has done serious research into the subject. As a French scholar, using French archives, Christopher Goscha concentrated on the years 1945-1950, and there is of course no proof that any of the individuals he mentions were still serving with the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong during the "American War." What follows is condensed, with Prof. Goscha's permission, from his article "Belated Asian Allies," which appears in A Companion to the Vietnam War, edited by Young Buzzanco and published by Blackwell in 2002. -- Dan Ford]
Belated Asian Allies

Goscha estimates that perhaps 5,000 Japanese stayed behind in Vietnam in the fall of 1945. (The translator renders their status as "deserters," but I don't think that's honest. How can you desert from an army that has surrendered?) Famously able to subordinate the means to the end, the Communists naturally put them to use in their war against the French. As Goscha points out, the Viet Minh had very little experience in warfare or government, as opposed to guerilla resistance of the sort they had used against the occupying Japanese. They would have been glad of the expertise available in the left-behind Japanese population, both military and civilian.
Vietnam was divided at the 16th parallel by the victorious Allies, with the Chinese occupying the north and the British occupying the south. The Chinese gave the Viet Minh considerable freedom of action, while the British brought in French troops to relieve them of the burden of occupation; the French of course moved quickly to put down any independence movement.

The first Japanese aid came in the form of arms: in the north, Vo Nguyen Giap equipped his troops with French weapons that the Japanese had issued to its puppet Indochinese Guard. Japanese weapons made their way into the black market soon after the surrender. It wasn't long before Japanese soldiers and officers also became available: there was no immediate way home for these men, even if they wanted to go. They hadn't been defeated in the field; they couldn't understand why the Emperor had ended the war; they had nothing to greet them at home but shame and desolation. Many had Vietnamese wives or girlfriends. When the war ended, they thought of themselves in the tradition of the ronin or leaderless samurai warriors. Like the ronin, they simply gravitated toward whatever employer was willing to hire them.

And the Viet Minh wanted them, the officers and NCOs particularly, as training cadres. In September 1945, there were about 50,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians in northern Vietnam; by December 1946, about 32,000 had been repatriated and 3,000 escaped to the island of Hainan, leaving 15,000 still in the country. Perhaps a third of these, Goscha believes, may have joined the Viet Minh as cadre, combat troops, or civilian experts. In the British-occupied south, with the French returning and pressing the Viet Minh hard, a much larger proportion of the Japanese garrison was repatriated; Goscha estimates that only a few thousand remained in the summer of 1946, and that perhaps only a few hundred actually joined the Communist forces. (Apparently a larger number simply melted into the population as farmers and shop-keepers.)

In Thai Nguyen province, the Japanese apparently ran an arms factory. In Hanoi, a western-educated Japanese scholar named Kiyoshi Komatsu directed the Viet Minh's "International Committee for the Aid and Support of the Government of the DRV." In Quang Ngai, a Viet Minh officers' school had six Japanese officers on the faculty; in southern Trung Bo province, 36 out of 50 military instructors were Japanese. Major Ishii Takuo, a young officer of the 55th Division in Burma, deserted in Cambodia in December 1945 with several comrades and made his way to Vietnam, where he became a colonel in the Viet Minh, provisional head of the Quang Ngai military academy, and later "chief advisor" to Communist guerrillas in the south. Some specialists, including doctors and ordnance experts, were forced to work for the Viet Minh against their will. The French identified eleven Japanese nurses and two doctors working for the Viet Minh in northern Vietnam in 1951.

"One of the results of the Japanese presence in the Viet Minh army was an increase in French losses at the beginning of the war," Goscha writes. During the first battles in the north, Japanese soldiers served in the front lines. In Hue in 1947, the French reported battling a Japanese assault force of 150 men. Also in 1947, Colonel Ishii helped set up an ambush that killed upwards of 70 French soldiers.

Koshiro Iwai led Vietnamese units into battle and led commando raids behind French lines; by 1949 he was a Viet Minh battalion deputy commander. Later he became a planner for the 174th Regiment, helping the Viet Minh to employ their newly acquired Chinese cannon.

In 1951, the Viet Minh began to repatriate their Japanese (and European) helpers via China and Eastern Europe. After the Geneva Accords of 1954, which divided Vietnam into two halves, 71 Japanese left the Viet Minh and went home, and others returned over the years. "A handful would remain in Vietnam well into the 1970s," Goscha writes. "Others would never return." This doesn't necessarily mean they helped in the war against the Americans; more likely, these stay-behinds had simply gone native.

Supporting information