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Carleton B. Swift Jr. was a U.S. Navy seaman, Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officer, and CIA officer between 1941 and 1974. Swift played a subordinate role to Archimedes Patti as part of the OSS team that met with Ho Chi Minh in September, 1945.
Carleton Byron Swift Jr. was born on 4 July 1919 in Portland, Oregon, and studied engineering at Harvard where he graduated in 1941. [1] He was the son of Carleton Byron Swift and his wife, Lila Leonard. His father was a member of the Swift meat-packing family.
After serving time in the Navy he joined the OSS and was sent to China where he was based in Kunming and monitored Japanese shipping. [2] He was later assigned to monitor the situation in what would become North Vietnam and after the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he traveled with Archimedes Patti and Jean Sainteny to Hanoi. [2] His and Patti's mission was to assist in the repatriation of allied prisoners of war which the U.S. government was concerned the Japanese might hurt following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and secondly to gather intelligence. [2]
During their time in Hanoi the OSS officers and their team met with Ho Chi Minh and although Swift did not speak French as Patti did he also met with Ho Chi Minh on at least one occasion. [2] Swift denied that the U.S. could have been significant in creating the Viet Minh because the OSS had never had more than three 12-14 man commando teams operating in Indochina. [2]
Swift and Patti both left Hanoi at the end of September, 1945 after the French alleged that the Americans had been fomenting a revolution there. [2]
Swift served with the CIA in Seoul, Baghdad, Tokyo, London and The Hague before retiring in 1974. [1]
Swift was married and divorced three times and had six children. [1]
Swift died on January 24, 2012, at his home in Washington. [1]
The People's Army of Vietnam, officially refers itself as the Vietnam People's Army (VPA), also less formally recognized as the Vietnamese Army or the People's Army, is the military force of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the armed wing of the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). The PAVN is a part of the Vietnam People's Armed Forces and includes: Ground Force, Navy, Air Force, Border Guard and Coast Guard. However, Vietnam does not have a separate Ground Force or Army service. All ground troops, army corps, military districts and specialised arms belong to the Ministry of National Defence, directly under the command of the CPV Central Military Commission, the Minister of National Defence, and the General Staff of the Vietnam People's Army. The military flag of the PAVN is the National flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam defaced with the motto Quyết thắng added in yellow at the top left.
Võ Nguyên Giáp was a self-taught general of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), communist revolutionary and politician. Regarded as one of the greatest military strategists of the 20th century, Giáp commanded Vietnamese communist forces in various wars. He served as the military commander of the Việt Minh and later the PAVN from 1941 to 1972, as the minister of defence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and later Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1946–1947 and from 1948 to 1980, and as deputy prime minister from 1955 to 1991. He was also a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
Hồ Chí Minh, commonly known as Uncle Ho, President Ho and by other aliases and sobriquets, was a Vietnamese revolutionary and statesman. He served as Prime Minister of Vietnam from 1945 to 1955, and as President of Vietnam from 1945 until his death in 1969. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, he was the Chairman and First Secretary of the Workers' Party of Vietnam.
Wilfred Graham Burchett was an Australian journalist known for being the first western journalist to report from Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb, and for his reporting from "the other side" during the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
The First Indochina War began in French Indochina from 19 December 1946 to 20 July 1954 between France and Việt Minh, and their respective allies. Việt Minh was led by Võ Nguyên Giáp and Hồ Chí Minh. Most of the fighting took place in Tonkin in Northern Vietnam, although the conflict engulfed the entire country and also extended into the neighboring French Indochina protectorates of Laos and Cambodia.
The August Revolution, also known as the August General Uprising, was a revolution launched by the Việt Minh against the Empire of Vietnam and the Empire of Japan in the latter half of August 1945. The Việt Minh, led by the Indochinese Communist Party, was created in 1941 and designed to appeal to a wider population than the communists could command.
Nguyễn Chí Thiện was a North Vietnamese dissident, activist and poet who spent a total of twenty-seven years as a political prisoner of the communist regimes of both North Vietnam and of post-1975 Vietnam, before being released and allowed to join the large Overseas Vietnamese community in the United States.
The Japanese coup d'état in French Indochina, known as Meigō Sakusen, was a Japanese operation that took place on 9 March 1945, towards the end of World War II. With Japanese forces losing the war and the threat of an Allied invasion of Indochina imminent, the Japanese were concerned about an uprising against them by French colonial forces.
The Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was written by Hồ Chí Minh, and announced in public at the Ba Đình flower garden in Hanoi on September 2, 1945. It led to the foundation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, replacing the Nguyen dynasty.
Relations between the United States and Vietnam have historically been complex and have repeatedly switched back and forth between positive and negative, but the United States and Vietnam share warm diplomatic relations in the present.
Jean Sainteny or Jean Roger was a French politician who was sent to Vietnam after the end of the Second World War in order to accept the surrender of the Japanese forces and to attempt to re-annex Vietnam into French Indochina.
CIA activities in Vietnam were operations conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in Vietnam from the 1950s to the late 1960s, before and during the Vietnam War. After the 1954 Geneva Conference, North Vietnam was controlled by communist forces under Ho Chi Minh's leadership. South Vietnam, with the assistance of the U.S., was anti-communist. The economic and military aid supplied by the U.S. to South Vietnam continued until the 1970s. The CIA participated in both the political and military aspect of the wars in Indochina. The CIA provided suggestions for political platforms, supported candidates, used agency resources to refute electoral fraud charges, manipulated the certification of election results by the South Vietnamese National Assembly, and instituted the Phoenix Program. It worked particularly closely with the ethnic minority Montagnards, Hmong, and Khmer. There are 174 National Intelligence Estimates dealing with Vietnam, issued by the CIA after coordination with the US intelligence community.
Tôn Thất Thiện (1924–2014) was a South Vietnamese nationalist of the post-World War II generation who had the rare distinction of serving and watching at close quarters the two historic leaders of post-World War II Vietnam: presidents Ho Chi Minh in the Viet Minh coalition in 1945–46, and Ngô Đình Diệm 1954–55/1956–59/1963. He played a significant though understated role in the nationalist attempt to preserve a non-Communist Vietnam.
North Vietnam, officially the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was a socialist state in Southeast Asia that existed from 1945 to 1976, with formal sovereignty being fully recognized in 1954. A member of the Eastern Bloc, it opposed the French-backed State of Vietnam and later the Western-allied Republic of Vietnam. North Vietnam emerged victorious over South Vietnam in 1975 and ceased to exist the following year when it unified with the south to become the current Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The 1954 to 1959 phase of the Vietnam War was the era of the two nations. Coming after the First Indochina War, this period resulted in the military defeat of the French, a 1954 Geneva meeting that partitioned Vietnam into North and South, and the French withdrawal from Vietnam, leaving the Republic of Vietnam regime fighting a communist insurgency with USA aid. During this period, North Vietnam recovered from the wounds of war, rebuilt nationally, and accrued to prepare for the anticipated war. In South Vietnam, Ngô Đình Diệm consolidated power and encouraged anti-communism. This period was marked by U.S. support to South Vietnam before Gulf of Tonkin, as well as communist infrastructure-building.
The 1945-46 War in Vietnam, codenamed Operation Masterdom by the British, and also known as the Southern Resistance War by the Vietnamese, was a post–World War II armed conflict involving a largely British-Indian and French task force and Japanese troops from the Southern Expeditionary Army Group, versus the Vietnamese communist movement, the Viet Minh, for control of the southern half of the country, after the unconditional Japanese surrender.
In mid-1940, Nazi Germany rapidly defeated the French Third Republic, and the colonial administration of French Indochina passed to the French State. Many concessions were granted to the Nazi-allied Empire of Japan, such as the use of ports, airfields, and railroads. Japanese troops first entered parts of Indochina the following September, and by July 1941 Japan had extended its control over the whole of French Indochina. The United States, concerned by Japanese expansion, started putting embargoes on exports of steel and oil to Japan from July 1940. The desire to escape these embargoes and to become self-sufficient in resources ultimately contributed to Japan's decision to attack on December 7, 1941, the British Empire and simultaneously the USA. This led to the USA declaring war against Japan on December 8, 1941. The US then joined the side of the British Empire, at war with Germany since 1939, and its existing allies in the fight against the Axis powers.
Archimedes Leonidas Attilio Patti was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army and an Office of Strategic Services officer who headed operations in Kunming and Hanoi in 1945 when he was a Major. Patti is known for having worked closely with Hồ Chí Minh and the Việt Minh, this before and after Ho became President of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945.
When 1954 began, the French had been fighting the insurgent communist-dominated Viet Minh for more than seven years attempting to retain control of their colony Vietnam. Domestic support for the war by the population of France had declined. The United States was concerned and worried that a French military defeat in Vietnam would result in the spread of communism to all the countries of Southeast Asia—the domino theory—and was looking for means of aiding the French without committing American troops to the war.
1940—1946 in French Indochina focuses on events that happened in French Indochina during and after World War II and which influenced the eventual decision for military intervention by the United States in the Vietnam War. French Indochina in the 1940s was divided into four protectorates and one colony (Cochinchina). The latter three territorial divisions made up Vietnam. In 1940, the French controlled 23 million Vietnamese with 12,000 French soldiers, about 40,000 Vietnamese soldiers, and the Sûreté, a powerful police force. At that time, the U.S. had little interest in Vietnam or French Indochina as a whole. Fewer than 100 Americans, mostly missionaries, lived in Vietnam and U.S. government representation consisted of one consul resident in Saigon.