Dien Bien Phu lingers somewhat in the memory, though. In November 1953, three battalions of French paratroopers dropped from squadrons of aircraft, and established their new fortress in a long valley on the border with Laos. Within weeks this swath of low-lying territory had been transformed into a formidable-looking base. There were two long airstrips, scores of gun emplacements, and subsidiary hilltop forts with winsome female names such as Beatrice, Huguette, Gabrielle, Claudine, and Eliane—which were supposed to help win the support of the war-weary citoyens back home, but which actually did the opposite.
Ho Chi Minh had the measure of the giant base almost from the start. It was said that he once took his topee from his head and turned it upside down. He thrust his fist into the concavity: “[T]he French are here.” Then, with a sly grin, he traced his fingernail around the rim: “[A]nd we are here.”
His equally sly military commander, Vo Nguyen Giap, had been preparing for weeks, bringing in artillery pieces bolt by bolt, trunnion by trunnion, barrel by barrel, along the maze of jungle paths. In total silence his soldiers dug rabbit warrens of trenches to within feet of the French lines. And once the howitzers up on the hillsides had been trained and the trench mortars readied, on March 13, 1954, one of the greatest, saddest, most heroic, most Orientally impudent and Asiatically triumphant battles of recent times got under way.
At a signal from Giap, a thunderous artillery barrage was unleashed from up on the surrounding hilltops, announcing an assault that would go on, uninterrupted, for a horrendously lethal fifty-four days. Day by day the French were pushed into what must have seemed like the unforgiving jaws of a meat grinder. Discipline held, and there were heroic displays that have never been forgotten in France to this day. But it was hopeless. The position was entirely surrounded; the odds, overwhelming.
The French artillery commander committed suicide, killing himself with a grenade for bringing dishonor (as a Frenchman naturally would put it) to his country. The most senior French general was captured in his bunker, well-nigh unimaginably. So desperate was the situation that brief consideration was given to asking the Americans to use tactical atomic weapons, to help drive the unstoppable Viet Minh away.
But that never happened; and for all its ardor, the fighting by the French turned out to be, essentially, all for nothing. They finally surrendered when their last central redoubt was overrun by Viet Minh troops at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, May 7, 1954. The very next day, the topic of Indochina was formally added to the agenda of the Korean War peace conference that was under way in Geneva; and there, in full view of the international community, the French announced their formal withdrawal from all of Indochina. They were done. They were out.
More ominously, the conferees also then divided Vietnam into two. A demilitarized zone was established around the Seventeenth Parallel. To its north were Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap and their Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a brand-new state that was now backed by Moscow and Beijing. To its south was the State of Vietnam, nominally ruled by Emperor Bao Dai, but in effect run by the United States and its chosen surrogates. The mutual hostility between the two states simmered through the remainder of the fifties; there were insurrections and outbreaks of dissidence and monkish demonstrations and assassinations, met with so swift a gathering of support from Washington that President John F. Kennedy was formally warned he was doing no more than replacing the French, and that he was likely to bleed just as badly as they had bled.
But both he and his successor ignored the advice; and on the flimsiest of pretexts, President Lyndon Johnson won congressional approval in the summer of 1964 to send troops to Vietnam without any formal declaration of war. American involvement in the heartache of the Second Indochinese War accelerated mightily from that moment onward. Yet the arc of progress for this conflict ended just as it had for the French, and just as Kennedy had been warned: with defeat, withdrawal, collapse, and humiliation.
The way stations and the dramatis personae of this second war were once familiar icons written in universally known shorthand—there was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, there was Operation Rolling Thunder, there was the My Lai Massacre, Agent Orange, Khe Sanh, the Siege of Hue, the Tet Offensive, Hamburger Hill, Da Trang, William Westmoreland, Hanoi Jane, Le Duc Tho, Operation Linebacker, the Cambodian evacuation operation known as Eagle Pull, and its Saigon equivalent Operation Frequent Wind. Many of these people, places, or events have now to be looked up in indexes; and as one generation is succeeded by the next, those who struggle to remember are fast being overturned by those who never knew. Sixty percent of today’s Americans were unborn when the war came to its end. It was not entirely incredible when some late-night comedian remarked that a sizable number of modern high school students fully believe that the Vietnam War was fought against the Germans.
Nine million American men and women served in the military in Vietnam. At the fighting’s bitterest, in 1968, more than half a million American troops were in the country. Thereafter, as domestic distaste for the conflict grew, the numbers began to drop, by many tens of thousands every year—until, at the very end, at the close of 1974, just fifty soldiers and marines remained. And then Operation Frequent Wind was staged in the final days of April 1975, to get those final fifty out, and to collect all available others and their friends, and to bring America’s formal role in Indochina to its sorry conclusion.
The last American hours of Saigon in 1975 were both wretched and poignant. Even the most Panglossian in the capital knew that their city, by then quite surrounded by Viet Cong army units, was about to fall. Elaborate plans had been laid for a helicopter evacuation of all remaining Americans and those friends and helpers and foreign journalists who were known as “at-risk aliens.” Booklets were published with instructions, to be kept as secret as possible: if a radio broadcast began with the phrase “The temperature in Saigon is 112 degrees and rising,” and was followed by thirty seconds of Bing Crosby singing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,”6 then it was time to go, with all deliberate speed, to one of a dozen designated spots where U.S. Marine Corps and Air America helicopters would be waiting.
But over the din of shellfire and shouting, few in Saigon heard the broadcast; fewer still understood it. Rumors spread wildly. Thousands crowded the landing zones, panic-stricken, frantic, desperate. Previously chosen landing sites came under fire; new sites had to be found in double-quick time—marines were to be seen cutting down tamarind trees to clear the way for the giant flying machines, which came stuttering to the city every few minutes, from a mighty armada of ships hurriedly assembled twenty miles out in the Pacific. The American ambassador was one of the last to go, shortly before 5:00 a.m. on Wednesday, April 30. “Tiger is out” was the coded signal, meaning that the American official presence was officially at an end.
Except that it wasn’t. Someone had forgotten to collect the ten remaining marine bodyguards, and a final helicopter had to be sent for them. At 7:53 a.m. this final machine took off; and at 8:30 a.m. it landed aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Okinawa.
Helicopters employed in the final frantic hours of the evacuation of Saigon were tipped into the Pacific, useless symbols of American power squandered in the hopeless quagmire of an end-of-empire war that should never have been fought.* [U.S. Marine Corps.]
Three hours later, precisely, North Vietnamese tanks smashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace and raised the Viet Cong flag.
Western occupation of the continental coastline of the far western Pacific was now, after 175 years, at an end. Those foreigners who would later come to this part of the world would do so only by invitation, and with the permission of those whose land it was now, at last.
The Pacific’s British colonists, by contrast, departed with rather less fuss. Instead of being run out on a rail as the Americans had been in Southeast Asia (and as had the French, Germans, and Japanese), they went like the country house guests who, on a muffled cough from the butler, suddenly realize they have overstayed their we
lcome. So they leave in a state of mild confusion, dropping things, tripping over their shoelaces, shutting their fingers in doors, and saying to their beaming hosts all too many farewells, in their embarrassed and befuddled haste to get away.
Until the 1970s, maps of the Pacific, like those of the rest of the world, were still awash with British imperial pink. The legatees of Captain Cook and Stamford Raffles still reigned over tiny but critical morsels of land in the ocean west of the dateline. This meant that British officials governed untold numbers of dark-skinned native peoples—Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the law.” Britain’s islands there were never to be abandoned, never to be forsaken. They were a reminder of what John Milton had once called England’s “precedence of teaching nations how to live.” This notion recalls the old joke of many a 1950s mother, who would tell her irregular child to eat prunes because the fruit had much in common with British missionaries in these parts: since prunes, like missionaries, “go into dark interiors and do good works.”
Malaya, Singapore, Papua New Guinea,7 Brunei, Sarawak, and North Borneo—they all form the fortress of the western flank. Then, farther eastward and out at sea, there are the poster children of Britain’s blue-water Pacific empire: the Gilbert Islands, the Ellice Islands, the Solomons, the New Hebrides, and Ocean Island. More distant still are the lonelier imperial holdings: Fiji, Tonga, and the Pitcairn Group. Finally, up north, alone and presiding magisterially over all else in the Pacific, is Hong Kong, an outpost of Britishness then little more than a century old, quite alone on the underbelly of China, looking especially vulnerable and impermanent. Few in the 1970s, though, could imagine just how little time was left.
So far as Britain’s long invigilation in the region was concerned, the clock was now ticking, insistently. There were three essential reasons. London’s treasuries had been emptied by the Second World War, and it had become too expensive to maintain all the imperial flummery and panjandrumry around the world. In the new, postwar world, there was a growing feeling that empires were unfair, immoral, and unfashionable, and this led to stirrings of revolt and disaffection among more than a few of the ruled peoples. All of a sudden London was facing the gnawing realization that this empire really had to be brought to an end.
A program for the empire’s divestment was devised, and the whole carelessly assembled confection of countries, enclaves, islands, lighthouses, and reefs and redoubts, on which no sun had set for scores of years, was let go, and Britain started to ease herself out.
Malaya was the first to go. The Duke of Gloucester came and read a message from his niece, Queen Elizabeth, wishing all the Malays deserved good fortune. The British rulers of North Borneo then packed for home six years later. Then, out at sea, the various colonial entities that occupied the 2.5 million square miles of ocean (and about ten thousand square miles of land within it) that were ruled as one by the British High Commissioner, as his full title had it, “in, over and for the Western Pacific Islands,” were given their independences in stages.
One of them, the Kingdom of Tonga, a centuries-old monarchy that had been under British protection since 1900, wrested itself free of this most cumbersome arrangement in 1970. So, too, did Fiji: Prince Charles did the honors there, though he was four hours late because his royal plane broke down in Bahrain. He was given twelve live Fijian turtles as a gift, and a set of gold cuff links. The prince said he was glad they hadn’t given him a silver spoon, since he and his siblings had been born with those already. As it happened, the violence for which the Fijian islands had long been known—the fork used to eat the Reverend Mr. Baker is still in a display case in the Fiji Museum—was perpetuated in postcolonial times, with coups d’état and constitutional crises on a heroic scale.
The imperial crown jewels of the Western Pacific, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, achieved their self-rule in 1976. They had been an immense Pacific possession of two million square miles, first made famous abroad by their former governor Arthur Grimble and his 1932 book, A Pattern of Islands, about running them—every British schoolboy raised in the 1950s knew passages from this classic book by heart and by jingo! The island groups had been stitched together for reasons of London’s administrative convenience—notwithstanding the fact that the Gilberts were populated by Micronesians and the Ellices by Polynesians, peoples not always on the friendliest of terms. So once the islanders scented the merest whiff of freedom, they voted to break away, not just from Britain but from each other. Today the former are known as Kiribati and the latter as Tuvalu, separate entities in the wide and decidedly non-British Pacific.
The British Solomon Islands Protectorate—best known in America either for the savage fighting on Guadalcanal or for being, during their wartime occupation by the Japanese, the place where Lieutenant John F. Kennedy was shipwrecked and where he carved the famous message on a coconut that led to his rescue—then became independent in 1978. (The American astronaut John Glenn, who had served as a marine in the South Pacific, was part of the celebrations.)
The New Hebrides, nearby, went two years after. Since 1906 these islands had been run for complicated reasons by a condominium of two uninvited European powers, the British and French. Two bureaucracies had been set up, exactly mirroring each other—the French official in charge of drains in Port-Vila, for example, had a British counterpart who was charged with exactly the same task.
The language of New Hebridean administration had to be translated twice, Canadian style, and sometime thrice, since the doubly colonized citizens actually spoke a third, Creole tongue called Bislama, and many of the territory’s more important legal documents had to be rendered into its mysteries as well. The colony’s laws were in consequence a magnificent mess: any New Hebridean could choose to be tried or to sue under either Napoleonic or Magna Cartan legal principles, or else by Melanesian local law in a native court—the chief justice of which was appointed by the nominally neutral king of Spain.
Two police forces, their officers wearing different uniforms, did their best to keep civil order in turns, performing their respective duties on every other day. (History does not record which police officers were the more lenient.) Finance was exceptionally cumbersome—French francs and British pounds sterling being interchangeable, Australian money accepted, and banknotes issued by the Paris-based Bank of Indochina in stores everywhere. National holidays were so numerous and so keenly celebrated in the perpetually torrid climate that little work was performed anyway—and in time, the whole unholy and intractable mess of governance exhausted everyone, collapsed internally, and was finally called to a halt in 1980, with the new and present entity being called Vanuatu. The French, who had wanted to retain a foothold in this corner of the ocean, sulked mightily when independence was eventually declared, and their officials stormed away from the islands with all their telephones, radios, and air-conditioning units, in a display of official petulance seldom rivaled.8
In the wider Pacific, foreign empires were nearly all done with by the 1990s, after this two-decade cascade of self-determination. Only one pair of imperially run places of significance then remained. By happenstance they were places that in all senses were the polar opposites of each other—and both of them were British.
One was the hugely populous, hugely rich, and world-renowned colony of Hong Kong. Four hundred square miles in extent, it was a crowded mountain home to six million people, most of them Cantonese-speaking Chinese, administered as they’d been since the middle of the nineteenth century by a tiny and privileged corps of very British diplomats, civil servants, and politicians.
The other was the tiny (just two square miles) Pitcairn Island group, which was hardly populated at all, a starveling child of empire (since 1838) with fewer than sixty people. It remains a persistent and unwanted colony today; and though its origins as the refuge of the nine men who, under Fletcher Christian’s leadership, mutinied in 1789 against Captain Bligh and his captaincy of HMS Bounty are seen by some as the stuff of swashbuckling romance, its present s
ituation has been clouded by a deeply unedifying scandal.
I first visited Pitcairn in 1992, by courtesy of the New Zealand captain of the HMNZS Canterbury, who gave me a ride on his frigate as she was making her way from Auckland to Liverpool to take part in a naval review to mark the queen’s fortieth jubilee.
We took ten days to reach the island—the colony in fact comprises four: Pitcairn itself, together with nearby Henderson, and then the further atolls of Ducie and Oeno, each about a hundred miles from the others. We saw not a single ship on our passage, sliding into an ever-lonelier sea each day that we pressed farther eastward.
Finally we spotted Pitcairn, a tiny speck of green volcanic hills that rose abruptly out of an otherwise empty tropical ocean. We were met by a flotilla of longboats. Islanders are always on the watch for any sign on the horizon that might suggest an approaching ship; when they saw us, dozens of miles away, they launched every craft available to make sure as many of them as possible got to see a modern ship of war—which, after all, was what the Bounty, burned to the waterline but still vaguely visible, had been.