Fighting for a Different Heart and Mind: Andrew Bellisari on African Soldiers, Psychological Warfare, and Competing Internationalisms in the First Indochina War, 1946-1954

On Friday, November 6, 12:00-1:30 p.m. ET, the Asia Center will welcome Andrew Bellisari, Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University, who will be giving the talk Fighting for a Different Heart and Mind: African Soldiers, Psychological Warfare, and Competing Internationalisms in the First Indochina War, 1946-1954. Learn more about Professor Bellisari's research interests in the interview below and please join us Friday in S250 Porté Room, CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street for the event. Registration is appreciated.

Most people picture the First Indochina War as a conflict between France and Vietnam. How did you come to study the African soldiers who fought in it? Popular conceptions of the First Indochina War are defined by all manner of over-simplifications. Even saying the conflict was fought between “France” and “Vietnam” demands that we clarify our terms: When we say “France” who do we picture fighting in its ranks? And when we say “Vietnam,” which “Vietnam” are we discussing? The Democratic Republic of Vietnam? The State of Vietnam? Not all Vietnamese fought on the same side. And these sides were not monoliths.

I understood this firsthand during my first visit to Vietnam in 2016. While exploring the War Remnants Museum in Hồ Chí Minh City, I saw a glass case displaying several captured French military insignias. I was surprised that most were from colonial units, such as the 3rd Algerian Tirailleurs Regiment or the 4th Moroccan Tirailleurs Regiment. Despite these objects testifying to the presence of North Africans in Indochina, I was struck that none of the explanatory materials talked about them. To walk through the museum, you would think that Vietnamese Communists were fighting only white French soldiers. I wanted to know more.

At the time I was finishing my dissertation on decolonization in Algeria and I began wondering how the service of so many North and Sub-Saharan Africans in Indochina affected decolonization elsewhere in the empire. To figure that out, I would need to study how these soldiers experienced the war itself. When I began as a founding faculty member at Fulbright University Vietnam, I finally had the chance.

More than 180,000 men from France’s North and Sub-Saharan African colonies were sent to Indochina, the name for France’s colonial territories in what is now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Who were they, and how did they experience the war? Firstly—and perhaps most importantly—they were volunteers. After 1945, the French military was reluctant to conscript soldiers, so it raised a professionally trained volunteer army. To fill its ranks, the French military recruited soldiers from both mainland France and its colonies. Unlike the United States, France never segregated its military by race but divided units by geographic origin. On the frontlines, they fought side-by-side and units from settler colonies like French Algeria integrated white and indigenous soldiers.

African soldiers came from diverse backgrounds and enlisted for diverse reasons. Some were veterans of the Second World War; others were fresh recruits. Some came from families with a history of distinguished military service to France stretching back almost a century. Many more came from impoverished rural communities who saw military service as an opportunity for upward mobility. Vietnamese Communists accused the French of cajoling colonial subjects into service with money. Certainly, money played a role: the military offered regular pay, a rarity for many men in France’s colonies. But military service offered more: a chance to break away from domineering local hierarchies; social independence from cultural and religious obligations; the dignity of uniform, rank, and responsibility; and lastly a sense of adventure that appealed to particular masculine sensibilities. As in any conflict, North and Sub-Saharan Africans experienced the war differently depending on where they were deployed and what specialty they had. Many experienced the trauma of guerilla warfare and engaged in frontline combat. Others filled technical roles, such as radio operators and engineers, and increasingly assumed leadership positions as senior non-commissioned officers and even junior officers.

French officers and Vietnamese Communist cadres both worried about where African soldiers’ loyalties lay. Why did these soldiers concern both sides so much? The decision African soldiers made—to remain loyal to France or defect—was symbolic of a larger contest. Both French policymakers and Vietnamese Communists believed that mobilizing Africans to their side validated their respective projects: reformed imperial federalism or empire-wide anticolonial resistance.

France had great success deploying North and Sub-Saharan Africans in the World Wars. Unlike those conflicts, Indochina would be the first time colonial subjects would fight other colonial subjects during a war for independence. Nazi Germany’s humbling occupation of France and de Gaulle’s reliance on the colonies to support the Free French altered the dynamic between colonizer and colonized. As the Second World War ended, violent anticolonial demonstrations—some organized by African soldiers in uniform—demanded reform and even outright independence. Although Paris committed itself to the French Union—a federal model of empire that promised increased political representation and social changes—policymakers understood the precarity of France’s position. France desperately needed the manpower of its colonial subjects to fight in Indochina even though military leaders worried these soldiers would become easy targets of persuasive anticolonial propaganda. Maintaining African loyalty, therefore, would be a potent demonstration of postwar French power.

Since the 1920s, Hồ Chí Minh had promoted a trans-imperial vision of resistance that endowed Vietnamese Communism with a “missionary impulse” to spread revolution. Following the outbreak of war in December 1946, Vietnamese Communists quickly identified the necessity of rallying colonial soldiers to their side for both ideological and practical reasons. Although North and Sub-Saharan Africans serving in French uniform undermined their rhetoric of anticolonial solidarity, it provided an opportunity to spread propaganda. Convincing colonial soldiers to abandon the French military would not only demonstrate the righteousness of their cause but would sap the enemy of manpower and morale.

Both sides ran campaigns to win over these soldiers: action psychologique for the French, and địch vận for the Vietnamese Communists. What did those efforts look like on the ground? The talk will include lots of colorful examples! Both the French and Vietnamese Communists believed in the power psychological warfare. And both harbored prejudiced assumptions about North and Sub-Saharan Africans that undermined their own efforts.

From the outset, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam implemented a program known as địch vận (“rallying the enemy”). This campaign sought to persuade all those who served in French uniform to abandon the fight. But Africans were targeted because of their symbolic importance: future rebels who could be trained and returned to their homelands to fight. Today’s deserters might be tomorrow’s revolutionaries. More than mere propaganda, địch vận encompassed an entire infrastructure of psychological warfare that comprised printing clandestine newspapers and subversive pamphlets (often translated into Arabic), developing curricula for the political “re-education” of defectors, and managing their wellbeing in special camps. At its center, địch vận had a pedagogical mission: a belief that Vietnamese Communists would not only “entice enemy soldiers” (lôi kéo quân lính địch), but also “enlighten the enemy” (giác ngộ địch).

French officers developed action psychologique (“psychological action”) to meet the threat of Communist revolutionary warfare. Like địch vận, it went beyond propaganda and emphasized the wellbeing of “susceptible elements” to win hearts and minds. During the First Indochina War, the French deployed action psychologique against both the indigenous population and their own men. Military leaders believed that the best counter to enemy propaganda was heavily investing in the morale and physical comfort of their North and Sub-Saharan African soldiers while obsessively monitoring their behavior through bureaus dedicated to Muslim and African military affairs. These efforts involved providing culturally specific (and heavily censored) print, radio, and film entrainment, regionally appropriate meals, special provisions to observe religious holidays, and conjugal services provided by women from the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa.

You describe the war as a clash between two visions of internationalism. How does that framing change the way we think about the First Indochina War? This framing can help us reconsider how we think about the war itself. The First Indochina War was not one conflict, but several: a colonial war, a war of independence, a civil war, a proxy of the Cold War, and a battle for different expressions of sovereignty. By centering the experiences of African soldiers, I argue that we should see the conflict as a contest between two competing possibilities for postwar “internationalism” and leadership of the global South: on the one hand, the promise of renewed imperial federation under the Fourth Republic’s French Union and on the other, of global anticolonial solidarity spearheaded by vanguard Vietnamese Communism. The “choice” African soldiers would make would in some way validate one side or the other—a small part of the larger struggle to reframe the world after 1945.