Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having Communist ties. HUAC is best remembered for the Alger Hiss case and the Hollywood blacklists. But the American fear of socialism and communism pre-dates HUAC by a century. In...

Finally, on Oct 7, 1947, the French made their offensive into the Viet Bac region: Operation Léa – aka Princess Leia. So-called because it was a smart, feisty, brave diplomat and warrior of a plan. But because he had less troops than he wanted, Valluy scaled down his plans.  General Raoul Salan, the guy in charge of the operation, predicted it would all be over in three weeks. MISSION ACCOMP...

Ho wonders aloud to a journalist why the Vietnamese were not being given the same opportunity as the Philippines, who had just been given their independence from the US, or India, which had just won its independence from the UK. All the Americans seem to care about is whether or not he’s a Communist. Meanwhile French Minister of War Paul Coste-Floret declared, “There is no more military prob...

Ho and his team disappear into the jungle north of Hanoi. The French think they have won. George Marshall dithers. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player. If you haven’t heard any of the series and want to know if you’ll like it before you sign up, you can listen to the fi...

After the Haiphong incident, Ho started preparing Hanoi for an attack.  First, he made a public speech appealing to the French to withdraw their troops. They ignored him. “If those gooks want a fight, they’ll get it,” declared French General Valluy. Ho, Giap and Truong Chinh came up with a three stage plan, borrowed from Mao. And so the First Indochina War begins in earnest. HOW TO LISTEN If you&#...

Vietnam. 1947. The U.S. Consul in Saigon, Charles Reed, is the first American official to use the term “domino theory”. He’s talking about what will happen in Cambodia and Laos if Cochin China falls to the VietMinh, who he wrongly concludes are taking orders from Moscow. Meanwhile Ho is playing Good Cop Bad Cop while making preparations for war. While the French are convinced the...

Vietnam. Late 1946. The gears of war are turning. One President commits suicide. Another continues to fight for a peaceful settlement. A new government is formed. Then the French army in Indochina decides to take matters into its own hands. They seize a Chinese junk in Haiphong harbour – a deliberate provocation. The Vietminh fire on the French. The French respond by bombing the city. French...

Ho Chi Minh agrees to go to Paris for a second round of talks with the French about the independence of Vietnam. But just before he is due to leave, the French High Commissioner in Vietnam screws him over. And then, the next day, the French government collapses. Ho goes anyway, but has to spend a few weeks in the luxury seaside resort of Biarritz waiting for the new French government to get its sh...

Andrew Roberts has a huge new biography out on England’s favourite son, Winston Churchill, and he was nice enough to come on the show to answer a few of our questions about the man. You may remember Andrew talked to Cameron and David about his Napoleon biography a few years ago.                 HOW TO LISTEN If you’re already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player...

In Hanoi, a new provisional coalition government was established on January 1, 1946. Ho Chi Minh was to be named president and Nguyen Hai Than from the nationalist VNQDD party as vice president. The Vietminh and the Chinese controlled the north. The French controlled the South, with the full support of the Americans and British, and they prepared to send troops to the north as well. On March 6, th...

Peter Dewey was the first of nearly 60,000 Americans to be killed in Vietnam. Truman sells out the Vietnamese to keep De Gaulle happy. And the French arrive back in their old colony. Here’s a picture of the seahorse for reference.               HOW TO LISTEN If you’re already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast pl...

After Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam in September 1945, the British and Chinese troops arrived in Saigon and Hanoi to disarm the Japanese and prepare the return of the French – and the shooting begins. Some scholars thing that *this* was the beginning of the First Indochina War. Meanwhile, Ho continues to try to get Truman’s support. But who will Truman stand behind?...

* As they grew stronger, Giáp’s forces took more territory and captured more towns * And then on 15 August they heard that the Japanese Emperor had declared his country’s unconditional surrender to the allies. * Unfortunately for Ho and Giap, the U.S. had a new President. * Truman didn’t care, or maybe even know, about FDR’s plans for Indochina. * And the French, of course, saw their o...

* Ho believed the army’s job was largely going to be propaganda until the conditions were right for war. * But he also decided that for propaganda purposes, they had to win a military victory within a month of being established, so on 25 December 1944 Giáp led successful attacks against a couple of French outposts. * Two French lieutenants were killed and the Vietnamese soldiers in the outposts su...

* Welcome to #100! * And we are still talking about 1944! * When we finished last time, Ho Chi Minh was making his way to the Red River Delta. * The Japanese have chased the French out of Vietnam and didn’t bother to protect the northern regions. * So Ho and the ICP are getting ready to make their move. * Surprisingly, they talk about a “post coup euphoria”. * Apparently the Vietnamese were so hap...

* On December 7 1941, Japan’s main carrier force, seeking to destroy the American fleet and thereby purchase time to complete its southward expansion, struck Pearl Harbour. * And the world celebrated. * As De Gaulle said “that’s it, the war’s over.” * He was totally confident in U.S. superiority. * He must have been part American. * Unfortunately FDR’s confidence in de Gaulle was much lower....

* Ho’s speech to the French socialist congress in 1920 was 12 minutes long and delivered without notes. * It got some applause but that was about it. * He realised that French socialists were more worried about affairs at home than they were about colonialism in a distant land. * When a group of socialists broke off to form the French Communist Party, Ho went with them. * He had read Lenin’s “Thes...

In 1919 a 29 year old Vietnamese man wrote a list of demands for political rights for his people to present to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. Nobody paid him any attention. His name was Nguyen Ai Quoc. He devoted the rest of his life to achieving those demands. History remembers him as HO CHI MINH. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re already a subscriber, you can listen to...

* America’s approach to providing financial aid wasn’t popular with some of their allies either. * Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, resented American dollar diplomacy, in particular the linking of desperately needed financial assistance to London’s submission on political matters central to British sovereignty. * The American loan agreement, signed in December 1945 after nearly four mo...

* Something that Marshall mentions only briefly in his speech is the effect that would have on the US economy. (around the 7’20″ mark) * Europe’s economy might have been destroyed after the war, but America’s wasn’t looking too bulletproof, partly BECAUSE the European economy had been shattered. * In 1947, there were serious concerns about the state of the US economy. * Benn Steil: * There w...

* One of the greatest pieces of mythology to ever be produced in America is the “Marshall Plan”. * It’s right up there with the idea of glorifying the “Founding Fathers”, who were actually just tax dodgers who orchestrated a bloody coup. * It’s also of course one of America’s greatest pieces of foreign policy. * The Marshall Plan is sold to Americans as the greatest gift mankind has ever received...

* The X Article. * George Kennan, the Soviet expert who wrote the Long Telegram, wrote another piece, but this time published publicly and anonymously, in July 1947, just after Truman’s “Truman Doctrine” speech. * The actual title of the article was “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”. * It was published in Foreign Affairs magazine. * He used the pseudonym “Mr X” and so it’s known as the X Artic...

* And so on March 12, 1947, before a joint session of Congress, President Truman articulated, for the first time, a comprehensive American foreign policy for the postwar world. * He did not mention the Soviet Union by name, or refer to the need to contain its power in Europe, though he did place American freedom against “totalitarian regimes.” * Appealing to American universalist ideal...

* So here we are in 1946. * The Truman administration has decided on a “containment” policy. * But who is going to contain the containers? * According to the Novikov telegram, the Soviets felt like they had to contain the US. * And the U.S. felt like they had to contain the Soviets. * So the Americans were trying to figure out how they were going to to it, and how much they were willing to spend o...

* The last, and certainly most conspicuous, of the four events that transformed the political culture of Washington in 1946 was a speech given in early March by Winston Churchill at Westminster College in Truman’s home state of Missouri. * Like Stalin’s speech of four weeks earlier, it was prepared for public consumption. * Truman had read a draft in advance and approved it, though he...