Dalat at War and Peace, 1946–1975

In 1949, with the first Indochina war raging, with French and American interests over the region clashing, a journalist recounts that all of Saigon seemed consumed with a strange collective bet. Would the French persuade the former emperor, Bao Dai, to forsake the casinos of the French Riviera and return to power? If so, under what conditions, and within what framework—bilateral relations, full independence, or as part of the French Union? Even more to the point, bets were taken on where and when Bao Dai would return to his native land. The journalist, Lucien Bodard, remarked that if anyone had placed money on Bao Dai making Dalat his point of return to Vietnam on April 27, 1949, they would have made a fortune. As we will see, Dalat continued, perhaps against the odds, to serve as a powerful symbol, as a strategic point, and a prominent prize in the war years between 1945 and 1975.

Current restrictions on archival sources make it impossible to contemplate the years between 1946 and 1975 at Dalat—even less the period between 1975 and the present day—in the same way, or in the same detail, as the colonial era. They do, permit, however, a series of microhistories of military clashes and war crimes at and around Dalat. They also allow some reconstitution of Dalat’s ongoing role as a center of leisure and power. The Viet-Minh’s determination as early as 1948 to shatter Dalat’s reputation as a bucolic, safe retreat demonstrates that the two thematic threads are more closely connected than they might at first appear.

Using materials that are accessible, this chapter also focuses on ruptures and continuities between the colonial and postcolonial eras, intertwining these with dramatic flashpoints when Dalat came to the forefront of the two Indochina wars. It considers in turn the resort’s reputation as a bastion of royal power, and as a safe harbor in a region at war. It explores in detail a 1951 massacre that shone international attention on Dalat. Such traumas, for all of their significance, should not detract from Dalat’s continuing role as Indochina’s prime resort. Despite a series of regime changes over the course of these decades—the most dramatic occurring in 1954 and 1975—despite the era’s carnage, Dalat continued to exert a powerful attraction over tourists, pilgrims, and political actors alike. Although it lost some of its centrality beginning in the 1960s, the hill station still held considerable appeal and significance for multiple constituencies during the Indochina wars. Most notably, the resort alternately struggled with, and thrived off of, the contested heritage of the late colonial era, when the city had become the keystone to federal, national, and minority “solutions” in Indochina.

BAO DAI’S KINGDOM WITHIN A STATE

The 1946 Dalat conference between France and the DRV, and the Fontainebleau sequel, both ended in deadlock. In November, French and DRV forces clashed violently in Northern Vietnam, with heavy loss of civilian life in Haiphong, a tragedy that engulfed Vietnam definitively into war. From the outset, the DRV controlled vast zones of Indochina. French forces, waging what amounted to a war of reconquest, faced challenges on multiple fronts. The political situation evolved rapidly, and the French response along with it: after initially promoting Indochinese federalism in the wake of the 1946 conferences, then a version of Cochinchinese secessionism, then an equally ill-fated quadripartite scheme, French authorities turned to a possible Bao Dai solution—betting on bringing back the emperor, who had abdicated in August 1945.

Once again, Dalat lay at the very heart of this plan. When Bao Dai finally returned to power under French auspices in 1949, he made Dalat his unofficial capital. The former ruler returned to Vietnam on April 28, 1949, landing in Dalat amid relatively little fanfare. Lucien Bodard, who was no supporter of the monarch, noted that Bao Dai left the Dakota aircraft “with the pace of an automaton. . . . Within minutes . . . his majesty entered an enormous limousine that took him to his villa in the woods. It is as if he had returned so as to vanish.” For its part, Agence France Presse reported laconically that the former emperor’s pilot waved an imperial standard out of the aircraft’s window as it taxied down the runway. In his memoirs, Bao Dai claims to have landed in Dalat rather than Saigon “out of courtesy,” no doubt wanting to steer clear from the imbroglio of Southern separatism. But Bao Dai was also keenly aware that he had negotiated with France for Dalat and the south-central highlands to become an effective kingdom inside a state. That Dalat was chosen for his point of return to Vietnam was therefore anything but coincidental or strictly diplomatic.

Dalat was no consolation prize; it reflected a particular conception of power. Within days, comfortably seated in the imperial villa, Bao Dai began to form a government that would operate out of the hill station, and rule over two constituencies in two distinct ways: nominally over all of Vietnam, and effectively over the south-central highlands. After arduous negotiations with France over issues of sovereignty and national unity, the new state, with Bao Dai at its head, became known as the Etat du Vietnam or the Vietnamese State. The French strategy of creating a Bao Dai state, of carving off minority zones from the rest of Vietnam, and of isolating the DRV, in many ways prefigured another elaborate partitioning, attempted by the French side during negotiations with the FLN (the Algerian Front de liberation national) in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

We have seen how the idea of a formally recognized Indochinese highland minority zone straddling different pays had been floated in French colonial circles with ever-greater frequency in the 1930s, before finally materializing with Marius Moutet and Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu’s creation in 1946 of the Commissariat du Gouvernement fédéral pour les Populations montagnardes du Sud-Indochinois (PMSI). The announcement that the PMSI were being placed under Bao Dai’s authority came on March 9, 1949.6 A subsequent imperial order and decree of April 15, 1950 confirmed the transfer of sovereignty of “non-Vietnamese populations traditionally under the Crown of Annam” to Bao Dai’s control. By May 21, 1951, the “Montagnard Regions of the South” were given their new status. The goal of these many texts was purportedly to “guarantee at the same time the eminent rights of Vietnam and the free evolution of [minority] populations in the respect of their traditions and of their customs.” Again, Bao Dai’s May 21, 1951 order insisted on ancestral connections between minority people and ethnic Vietnamese: “The territories of the PMSI, which have always been dependent traditionally on the Crown of Annam, are and will remain attached directly to our person.”

This language was on some level stunning, for countless colonial era schemes to create an autonomous highland minority zone had insisted precisely on distancing the region’s minority inhabitants from the crown of Annam. Yet now, as Indochina was plunged into war, as the need to drive a wedge between ethnic Vietnamese and highland minorities had given way to a new imperative of distancing minorities from the lure of Communism, a major break was achieved with the past. Read another way, however, Bao Dai’s PMSI can also be seen as the culmination of colonial pan-montagnard thinking, as the realization of General Pennequin’s counterweight strategy under a new guise, or as the final emanation of increasingly homogenizing colonial and ethnographic discourses towards the south-central highlands’ minorities.

In his memoirs, Bao Dai makes clear that his rule over highland minorities was designed in part to achieve a piecemeal consolidation of power, by pulling what he seems to have considered to be favorably predisposed groups, first minorities, then Catholics, away from the siren calls of the Viet-Minh. Whatever his motivations, Bao Dai’s government did deliver some major reforms in the realm of minority policies. That these reforms were largely aimed at winning hearts and minds can leave little doubt. That they were undertaken with some French input seems equally certain. On November 1, 1951, for instance, the French foreign ministry queried the French high commissioner in Saigon about “how montagnard labor is employed in the French plantations on the plateaus.”

On December 31, 1952, Bao Dai abruptly abolished forced labor in all its forms in the PMSI. Colonial rule in the area had largely run on prestations, corvées, and other unremunerated labor practices. Contrary to authorities in Paris who sensed the public relations benefits of such a measure, the French high commissioner’s office in Saigon deemed the abolition too radical and hasty, foreseeing the collapse of the highlands’ economy. Over a hundred years after the abolition of slavery in overseas French colonies (in 1848), echoes of antiabolitionist scaremongering endured. So too did the details of the dire warnings. A 1953 French report on the problem of montagnard labor spelled out that although highland minorities were generally “sympathetic” they remained “dirty,” “disorderly,” and above all “lazy.” Still, even French officials in Saigon acknowledged that prestations had become terribly unpopular, especially after they were ramped up in the wake of the Second World War. According to one report, French planters came to think of the prestations as a right, even begrudging the administration for diverting forced laborers away from their private plantations so as to repair the damage caused by typhoon Vae in 1952. In 1953, then, unremunerated labor practices made way to “team contracts.” These group contracts bound workers to an estate or plantation; in some ways they call to mind the “contract laborers” that both the French and British introduced in the nineteenth century, after the abolition of slavery, in a bid to maintain production levels. Bao Dai’s government even sent labor inspectors to verify that the reform was implemented. Warnings, then fines were issued. Yet neither the French nor the Bao Dai government seemed to have pinned much hope on the team contracts; they agreed instead that only an influx of ethnic Vietnamese could “resolve” the “labor problem” of the PMSI. Bao Dai’s ministers advocated introducing some 1,500 to 2,000 ethnic Vietnamese per year to the central highlands; in 1952, only 227 arrived. As Oscar Salemink has noted, these still ineffective strategies anticipated some of the massive internal migrations subsequently implemented under the Diêm government.

That Bao Dai’s regime should even have labor inspectors suggests that the new government, consistently decried as a puppet by the DRV, was at least trying to undertake reforms and to enforce them in the highlands. Bao Dai delegated minority governance issues to some of his most trusted advisors, Nguyễn Đệ for highland affairs, and Colonel Didelot, whose family was bound with Bao Dai’s, for the southern zone.

Other fundamental changes can be discerned. A degree of Vietnamization was certainly occurring at Dalat. Thus in November 1950, the keys of city hall were handed from Jean Rouget to Dr. Tran Dinh Que. In September 1952, the Bao Dai regime opened a new Vietnamese high school in Dalat, that would vie with the Lycée Yersin. The quest for independence took on other forms as well. Bao Dai’s ministers seemed prepared to play the U.S. card in Dalat. As part of his highland affairs portfolio, Nguyên-Dê invited the U.S. embassy to establish a rest center of its own in Dalat. Baronness Didelot’s cottage was quickly selected and rented out to the Americans for this purpose. Bao Dai had managed to gain an American ear near his palace.

At the time, Dalat was discernibly gaining in importance, making major strides to challenge Saigon and Hanoi as a center of power. In 1950, Bao Dai oversaw the opening of an officer’s training school in Dalat, a Vietnamese equivalent of Saint-Cyr. The school was established at Camp Saint-Benoît, and although funded by the French, its creator, André Gribius, made a point of flying primarily the flag of the Vietnamese State—a yellow standard cut by red lines. Two years later, Dalat witnessed the inauguration of a national administration school. When added to growth at the resort’s preexisting schools, like the Lycée Yersin, this made Dalat at the time the fastest-growing training center anywhere in non-Communist Vietnam.

However it also seems apparent that such reforms alone could not win Bao Dai the propaganda victories he needed in his battle with Ho Chi Minh for national legitimacy. In most other respects, Bao Dai did little to shake his reputation as a creature of luxury, a nightclub king, as the foreign press reprovingly dubbed him. Dalat itself only made matters worse. Lucien Bodard took Bao Dai’s choice of capital to signal: “I wash my hands of what is going on.” The journalist interpreted the move, in short, as a “self-quarantine,” a quarantine from his own people, but also from French attempts to control his government.

Though Bao Dai may have sought isolation, autonomy, and safety at Dalat, his choice of a de facto capital ultimately compounded some of his image problems. Bao Dai’s estate at Dalat featured a large private menagerie, boasting some of the emperor’s favorite trophies in living flesh: elephants and tigers. In 1950, Bao Dai berated the French gendarmerie for failing to enforce hunting restrictions based on 1930s-era laws, so passionate was he to maintain game reserves. Such a measure, which in time of peace might have been received as sage conservationism, might well have smacked of unacceptable entitlement in time of war. He was also fond of showing visitors to Dalat’s imperial villa the gun he had been offered by Francisco Franco. Here was another dubious portend for a self-styled reformer and modern ruler. Even his regime’s holidays seemed somehow futile. They included April 28, to commemorate Bao Dai’s return to Vietnam at Dalat—a fairly hollow moment, as we have seen—and May 24–25 to celebrate Vietnamese unity, when such a goal at the time was at best hopelessly optimistic. In short, Bao Dai’s Dalat suffered an almost Roman reputation for decadence, a reputation that the Viet-Minh relentlessly exploited. For all intents and purposes, Dalat had turned into the new “imperial city,” intrinsically linked to the emperor’s person.26 Whatever tarnished Bao Dai stuck to Dalat, and vice versa.

THE 1948 AMBUSH

By 1948, the French expeditionary corps in Indochina was trying to secure a variety of zones across the country. The force would grow steadily, from 67,106 men in 1946 to 183,945 in 1954. In 1948, the Viet-Minh had not yet been emboldened by the victory of the Communists in neighboring China, which would occur a year later, or by the recognition of the DRV by both China and the Soviet Union, which would take place in 1950. And yet, already in 1948, the Viet-Minh was taking the initiative, doing so increasingly in the southern half of Vietnam. Some of its attacks that year were marked by a dual sense of potential ubiquity and brazenness. The Dalat ambush of 1948 constituted a turning point in this war within a war: the struggle for initiative.

The 1948 ambush was certainly not without precedent. In fact, a year prior, the Viet-Minh had attempted to attack an earlier convoy to the hill station, only to see their plans thwarted by French forces, which stumbled upon the plot on September 23, 1947. Nor should one receive the impression that Dalat was somehow at the epicenter of combat during either the first or the second Indochina war. In fact, many sources claimed that Dalat stood as “an oasis of peace in a world out of control,” to cite a missionary testimony from December 1949. A 1953 French report still affirmed that the city “lives in absolute peace.”

This said, close inspection does suggest that the Viet-Minh was aware of Dalat’s symbolic value as a purported sea of tranquility, as the seat of Bao Dai’s regime, and increasingly, as an important military base. Indeed, in 1947, the French army opened a commando training school in Dalat. The city counted among the five “principal military bases” in all of Indochina listed in an August 1947 French military report.

Indeed, Dalat served as far more than an oasis: it also constituted the main hub of the SDECE, the French secret service’s counterespionage wing, in Indochina. Here again was a parallel with the hill station of Simla, which as early as 1905 had become a major headquarter for British intelligence services. At Dalat, after 1947 dozens of agents under Colonel Maurice Bellaux worked in total isolation, “like monks,” at cracking Viet-Minh radio messages in Dalat. The city, in other words, now served increasingly important military functions.

Whether or not the Viet-Minh was aware of this last secret activity at Dalat, it clearly set its sights on Dalat. The Viet-Minh would twice catch colonial defenses around Dalat off guard, first during a large-scale ambush on a convoy to Dalat in 1948, then in a set of attacks in Dalat proper in 1951. On March 1, 1948, after it passed the Lagna bridge in a densely forested area, a long French convoy headed for Dalat, composed of both civilian and military vehicles, came under heavy attack. The convoy had already traveled 115 kilometers from Saigon at the time of the ambush. According to military historian Philippe Gras, the attack’s significance lay in the fact that it was the first major convoy ambush of the Indochina war. General Raoul Salan, for his part, described it as the perfect ambush. He noted at the time its “minute preparation, as different groups of rebels were in radio contact, obeying a single order.” He remarked on the convoy’s vulnerable length, adding that it was composed of “numerous civilian vehicles, merchants, and people going to rest at Dalat. At the head of it were the officer jeeps, followed by female personnel.” All told, the multikilometer convoy was composed of some two hundred vehicles. The well-camouflaged Viet-Minh destroyed some fifty-nine of them, and according to Gras, claimed 82 fatalities, 11 of them military. Salan, however, provides the quite different figure of 49 dead, 28 of them military. By all accounts, the Viet-Minh also walked away with scores of prisoners. A French survivor who managed to crawl to safety recounted seeing “thousands” of Viet-Minh assaulting the convoy, yelling in Vietnamese, but also in Japanese and in German. This further spurred rumors about the role of both German legionnaire deserters, and refractory Japanese fighters, in Viet-Minh ranks.

The ambush proved psychologically potent. The French gendarmerie reported that the attack had succeeded in striking terror in the heart of Dalat’s residents, and in disrupting the local economy. Within days, gas and certain foodstuffs were lacking in Dalat. News of the ambush traveled quickly. Civilians began avoiding the road, taking aircraft instead between Saigon, the hill station, and back. This option’s safety would soon be called into question: on July 7, an Air France jet flying between Saigon and Dalat crashed, killing all 21 on board. Already before, Saigonese hoping to sojourn at Dalat had had to take part in inconvenient, cumbersome convoys. Now that a well-defended convoy had come under sustained attack, and that air travel proved similarly hazardous, Dalat’s sense of invulnerability was fast evaporating.

THE 1951 MASSACRE

Despite official French and Vietnamese State pronouncements to the contrary, Viet-Minh activity continued unabated in and around Dalat in 1949 and 1950. In September 1950, a Vietnamese-language poem signed by “Lang-Bian’s Viet-Minh Information Committee” was sent to several branches of Dalat’s administration, urging Vietnamese employees to join the ranks of the resistance. On December 14, 1950, three members of the French High Commissioner’s security unit were killed in Dalat near the Redemptorist building. On January 10, 1951, Viet-Minh agents shot to death a minority guard outside of Dalat’s electrical plant. Another two Vietnamese officers serving in the French security forces were lured to Dalat’s Trại Hầm villa and killed on February 8, 1951. Two days later, fire consumed Dalat’s “information hall”; the gendarmerie concluded that Viet-Minh arson was responsible for the blaze. Two more Vietnamese officials were murdered in Dalat on March 21, 1951: one a member of Bao Dai’s imperial delegation, the other a member of the city’s security forces. One of the two victims, Bui Thach Ngu, was found floating on Dalat’s Lake of Sighs (Hồ Than Thở), bearing dozens of stab wounds to his neck. The gendarmerie suspected a seventeen-year-old student at the Lycée Yersin of being responsible for the last of these attacks, after blood stains were found on his personal effects. There was, in other words, a sense of foreboding at Dalat in 1951. The war, which was at once a civil conflict and a guerilla campaign, had undeniably reached the resort.

The latest victim in this string of Viet-Minh attacks was the Eurasian Sous-Brigadier Victor Haasz of the French security forces. Haasz was killed on May 11, 1951, at his home on 17 Rue des Roses, Dalat. His attackers had tied up the domestics, and lain in wait in the garden. The assassination complete, they left with Haasz’s car, handgun, and other personal effects. During their getaway, they stumbled upon a truck full of French soldiers, and showed their nervousness or perhaps their brazenness by opening fire on the far more numerous soldiers. Still, they managed to escape.

Why had Haasz been targeted in the first place? According to a Viet-Minh pamphlet found in Dalat on June 1, 1951, Haasz had a reputation for employing particularly brutal torture techniques during investigations. Yet Haasz was also, as we have just seen, one of many executed by the Viet-Minh that year in Dalat. His murder, in addition to constituting a clear statement against the use of torture, was no doubt also part of a deliberate Viet-Minh escalation at Dalat.

On the evening of May 11, 1951, three hours after Haasz’s death, and in direct reprisal for it, twenty Vietnamese hostages—in effect twenty unfortunate people who happened to find themselves in Dalat’s jail, most of them for minor crimes—were dragged to the Camly airfield and summarily shot. Fourteen of the victims were men and six were women. A woman by the name of Nguyen Thi Lang miraculously survived, riddled with eight bullets. She would testify at the perpetrators’ trial.

As details emerged, the events seemed to fit the pattern of vengeful rage. Court records would show that only seven of the executed prisoners were even considered dangerous, thereby reinforcing the randomness and senselessness of the act, and lending credence to the idea that common prisoners were being treated as hostages. Soon, some twenty-three suspects were arrested in connection with the massacre, although only the chief of Dalat’s police forces, Henri Jumeau, and Dalat’s mayor, Dr. Tran Dinh Que, were retained for long.

The press, both in France and in Indochina, seized upon the tragedy. Part of the Saigon French press presented it as a case of an officer cracking after seeing so many of his colleagues fall at the hands of the Viet-Minh. L’Union française of May 22, 1951 read: “the unforgivable execution on the night of May 11 finds its origins in previous multiple bereavements: a cold, implacable, and blind rage crystallized by Haasz’ murder.” The piece added that the Viet-Minh too routinely practiced summary executions. Such attempts to relativize the massacre drew criticism from other quarters. La Liberté heaped scorn on the journalist Marinetti for suggesting that only someone immersed in Vietnam’s climate of terror could understand the massacre.

The tragedy also led to considerable finger-pointing and recriminations between the French Haut-Commissariat on the one hand and Bao-Dai’s government on the other, as well as within French ranks. An intercepted letter from a teacher, R. Fauchois, at the Lycée Yersin to a relative in Cherbourg, reads: “The execution order was given by the Vietnamese Government and officer Jumeau had been given a blank check by Bao Dai to undertake severe reprisals in the cases of assassinations. But the order was verbal and not written, and that day Bao Dai was the first to cry out his indignation. Jumeau will be the one to pay.” This rendition also appears, interestingly, in Viet-Minh statements. In June 1951, Viet Minh radio reported: “This execution was carried out by the French officer Jumeau who was given the order to accomplish the deed and who now will pay the price himself. Alas, the poor Jumeau has inadvertently sown insecurity on the beautiful and peaceful Lang-Bian plateau, where French colonialists and their puppet scion once quietly fattened themselves up.” The equation of Dalat with a French colonial bastion, a symbol of bourgeois and aristocratic gluttony, could not have been any clearer. So too was the message that the time for Dalat’s “gluttonous colonials” and their purported allies was up.

Bao Dai’s entourage soon lashed back at the accusation that it had masterminded the massacre, countering that Jumeau was solely responsible for it. In this version of events, Dr. Tran Dinh Que had tried to calm an overexcited Jumeau, who announced “things cannot go on this way,” then “threatened to kill everyone,” before impulsively carrying out the threat.54 In an interesting turn of events, Lệ Xuân, Ngo Dinh Diem’s future sister-in-law (popularly known as Madame Nhu), also lived on the Rue des Roses at the time, and heard Haasz being shot. She commented on the dreadful coincidence that the Bao Dai cabinet was meeting at the very time of the ensuing massacre. This increased suspicion that the government had ordered the killing. At the very least, the timing of cocktails clinking as families screamed their grief made the Bao Dai government seem callous. Le Xuan added that the entire affair gave the impression that one Eurasian life was worth twenty Vietnamese ones. She concluded cuttingly that if Haasz had been “entirely French,” rather than métis, forty Vietnamese would have been shot instead of twenty.

Le Xuan was certainly not the only one to feel outrage. Within weeks, thousands of broadsheets and bright red graffiti adorned walls and electrical posts across Dalat. The principal of the Lycée Yersin noted inscriptions on the Cercle Sportif, the lycées, and the Institut Pasteur. At his own school, graffiti strongly condemned the “military-colonial clique” and the “Bao Dai puppet regime.” Lycée Yersin teacher Fauchois related the text of one flyer, left all over town: “It is an abominable criminal act, worthy of the butchers of Buchenwald and Dachau. Dalat compatriots! The debonair mask of French colonialism in Dalat is broken. The hideous face of true colonialism has finally shown itself.” A keen educator, Fauchois could not help but notice that some of the inscriptions found at the Lycée Yersin, condemning the massacre and calling for a celebration of Ho Chi Minh’s birthday on May 19, were drafted in excellent French.

The Viet-Minh made maximum reference to the tragedy in its propaganda across all of Vietnam. The death toll was sometimes exaggerated, as in a radio broadcast from “The Voice of Nam-Bo” from Sept 20, 1951, which cited the figure of 108 Vietnamese hostages shot, including “some close relatives of [Bao Dai’s] puppet regime.” The Viet-Minh also took care to justify the initial killing of Haasz as follows: “traitors are always punished, even in Dalat where they feel safe.” Here again was the recurring and blunt point that Dalat was no longer a safe haven.

As the previous mention of Buchenwald and Dachau makes plain, Second World War referents proved ubiquitous on the Viet-Minh side. “All social classes liken this odious act to the summary and savage executions used by the Japanese fascists at the time of the occupation,” hammered Viet-Minh radio on May 19, 1951.60 And again four days later: “When the Nazis occupied France, they used the same tactics towards French patriots.” Finally Viet-Minh radio asserted on May 18, 1951: “twenty Vietnamese executed at once. This has reminded the French . . . of the Nazi occupation and the executions of the now immortal Jacques Ducourt, Gabriel Péri, Pierre Senart. In Vietnam, French colonialists are playing the role of Nazis, whose methods they have learned.” In this savvy juxtaposition, French Communist resistors in the métropole were likened to the twenty Vietnamese victims at Dalat, while the French administration in Indochina was ascribed the role of Klaus Barbie and his consorts.

In metropolitan France too the summary executions at Dalat were widely condemned. Once again the Nazi occupation cast a shadow over much of this reaction. The article on the Dalat massacre in the Communist newspaper L’Humanité bore the unequivocal title “Nazis!” At the National Assembly, a deputy from the Vaucluse, René Arthaud, took the stage on behalf of the Communist group. He hit hard: “recycling Hitlerian methods, the government has just proceeded to execute twenty Vietnamese hostages at Dalat.” Arthaud then turned his focus to the initial murder of Haasz by “Vietnamese patriots,” comparing Haasz’s killing to “French patriots executing Gestapo agents during the occupation.” On a more measured tone, yet still implicitly referencing the world war, on May 18, 1951 France Soir maintained: “Our country, that keeps the painful memory of so many innocent victims, cannot tolerate that crimes of this nature be committed under our flag.”

On location in Dalat, tensions flared. On the French side, Jumeau was not alone in displaying a vigilante spirit. An anonymous French letter soon reached police. It threatened revenge for Haasz’s death. Its author bemoaned that Indochina had become “an unfortunate land full of asses (de cons), where there is no justice.” Soon police were able to crack the mystery of the note’s anonymity, ascribing it to a certain Jean Dacruz, an employee at a nearby plantation. They dismissed it as harmless and him as a “simpleton.”

On the other side, a number of anonymous threatening letters signed by the Viet-Minh were received in Dalat. Some included business cards for casket sellers, as well as the motto: “The Viet-Minh settles scores quickly, settles them well.”66 Assassinations continued: notables of the Vietnamese State were murdered on May 17 near Dalat. On May 25, a Vietnamese interpreter was killed as he left the Lang-Bian cinema. On June 14, a firefight erupted in Dalat’s hospital, killing one Viet-Minh and one policeman. On July 25, 1951, the Viet-Minh abducted a highland minority man in Fyan.

Rumors began spreading in the French community that the Viet-Minh would seek “an eye for an eye” by killing six European women and fourteen members of the French security forces—the precise gender balance of the Vietnamese victims. A June 1951 police investigation revealed this rumor to be baseless, and attributed it to ambient tensions and “psychosis.” An intercepted French letter evoked putative threats to French children, adding that as a precaution religious orders were keeping French children indoors. Vietnamese elites too, were afraid. Le Xuan wrote on May 15, 1951 that “Dalat’s atmosphere has changed. One no longer feels the calm that one did before. For a month now, one doesn’t dare venture into the Camly forests, and in town one feels an atmosphere of suspicion and worry.” Dalat, once an “oasis of peace” she wrote, “will become a terrorized and unbreathable city like the other cities.” In these conditions, guards lost their cool: in October 1952, a drunk French foreign legionnaire was accidentally shot and killed by a guard at Dalat after the former entered the villa of a member of Bao Dai’s cabinet.

Jumeau did eventually stand trial for the massacre, though the trial proved a sham. Of the twenty-two witnesses at Jumeau’s trial, seventeen were his own accomplices and colleagues, most of them his subordinates. The light sentences that ensued led one Vietnamese inhabitant of Dalat to conclude that his compatriots’ lives were worth “less than lentils.”

Ultimately, the massacre further polarized opinion. Colonials in Dalat seem to have been largely sympathetic to Jumeau. Take this intercepted letter from one Monsieur Adam in Dalat to a correspondent in Southwestern France: “The Dalat Affair is being settled, and of the twenty-two arrested, only two are still in jail, the mayor and the head of police. De Lattre finds this situation ridiculous, for we are the ones being shot at in the back, but in France they see everything upside down. Once the Russian juggernaut invades France and deportations begin, many of these hotheads will change their minds.”

Another inhabitant of Dalat, a certain Legras, wrote that the outcome of the Dalat affair confirmed that “everything done in France since Pétain is enough to make one disgusted for being French.” Taken together, these testimonies suggest a conflation of leftism with anticolonialism, a nostalgia for Vichy, a repudiation of a motherland perceived as soft and corrupt, and a solid commitment to waging a rearguard battle to reestablish the status quo ante in Indochina. There were dissonant French voices, to be sure. One intercepted letter from a Monsieur Levy in Dalat acknowledged that the Vietnamese victims were altogether innocent, many of them apolitical. Levy deemed the execution of the twenty Vietnamese hostages “sickening.” Even the French gendarmerie acknowledged that the massacre had undone overnight “several years” of police and propaganda work.

The Dalat massacre would have other long-term consequences. For one thing, it seems to have made both sides reconsider their strategies. While applauding the death of Haasz and other “harmful insects,” a May 20, 1951 DRV document recommended that patriots exercise greater secrecy and guard their optimism. Indeed, the military tide in Dalat was, for the time being, turning back against the Viet-Minh.

Several documents vindicate the theory that Dalat had been deliberately targeted to demonstrate that there was no safe haven left for colonials and for Bao Dai’s regime. These include a Viet-Minh pamphlet found in October 1951. It reads: “The murder of Haasz, Sûreté Inspector in Dalat, which shook the world, has proven that Dalat is not a site of perfect security for the French enemy.” Another Viet-Minh pamphlet, found in Dalat on June 1, 1951, claimed that the string of Viet-Minh attacks in the city “had for the first time shattered the secure zone that the enemy has boasted about for many years.” Taken figuratively, Dalat’s reputation as a safe harbor harkened back to 1897. Here was final proof, the Viet-Minh boasted, that Dalat was tranquil and bucolic no longer.

The destabilization strategy seems to have worked, if briefly. Bao Dai’s advisors deemed the situation to be sufficiently dangerous for him to leave Dalat. On June 24, 1951, Agence France Presse reported that a conference was taking place in Dalat to determine the cause of the town’s “growing lack of security” and to find ways to stem the problem. The meeting brought together Nguyen Van Tam, minister of public security, General Cogny, the French high commissioner’s cabinet director, and Perrier, head of the French security services. The report added that Emperor Bao Dai had left his Dalat residence for Nha-Trang because of the violence in Dalat.

Yet by the time the emperor left the resort the momentum had already swung back against the Viet-Minh. On June 24, 1951, Bao Dai’s national security forces set up shop in Dalat. Nguyen-Van-Tâm, minister of security, made the resort’s pacification his top priority. He liaised closely with French forces in the highlands. Four days later, the security forces claimed to have found the Viet-Minh cell’s headquarters, at the residence of a nurse, Trân-Nhu-Mai. Two Viet-Minh members and one French security officer were killed in a bid to storm her residence. Another security official was gravely injured. On July 1, 1951, a member of a Viet-Minh cell allegedly turned himself in, and pointed authorities to two camps outside of Dalat, both of which were quickly raided. In February 1952, another former “death volunteer” (Cảm tử Quân) squad member defected. As proof of his identity, he offered up Haasz’s handgun. This turn of events allowed the French to infiltrate the local Viet-Minh movement further, and to make several arrests, including that of Tran-Van-Hoang, a secretary at the Lang-Bian Palace Hotel.

The urban counterinsurgency succeeded for the short term. Reports evoke relative calm in Dalat in 1952 and 1953. In the greater Dalat region in 1953, mobile cinema units scoured the countryside, projecting anti-Viet-Minh propaganda films.

The Viet-Minh too was waging a series of battles for public opinion. This war within the war was fought increasingly in the south-central highlands, which the DRV had established as a priority zone as early as November 1953. We have seen how in Dalat proper the Viet-Minh utilized graffiti, pamphlets, letter-poems, and the like; this should not make us lose sight of the fact that propaganda campaigns were being staged in Dalat’s hinterland as well. One Viet-Minh poster distributed in the highlands depicted a straight line of Viet-Minh flags running across Vietnam’s interior highlands, including Dalat. In the foreground, a stylized highland minority man and woman raise their fists in the Communist salute.

The ebbs and flows of war did not completely consume Dalat or its economy. In some spheres the city continued to operate under relatively normal conditions. For instance, the resort cemented its colonial-era function as Vietnam’s prime vegetable-producing zone, that is, for reputedly “French” fruits and vegetables like carrots, strawberries, or artichokes, by now fully integrated into Vietnamese cuisine. In the month of November 1951 alone, Dalat shipped some 356.5 tons of “fresh French vegetables” to Saigon. That decade, the Lang-Bian region exported in total some six thousand tons of fruits and vegetables per annum, as well as another six thousand tons of pinewood. The latter was essential for the pulp and paper industry, and relatively scarce in the rest of Vietnam.

THE DIEM YEARS

In the wider Indochina war, French forces and resources were being stretched thin. In 1950 the first major French defeat occurred at Cao Bang. By March 1954, French forces were being surrounded at Dien Bien Phu. Viet-Minh zones of control now sprawled over ever-vaster parts of Northern, Central, and Southern Vietnam. In early April 1954, the Viet-Minh again made major inroads in the south-central highlands, seizing two outposts near Blao and Djiring, on roads to Dalat. By July, two months after the resounding French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, An-Khe, some 200 kilometers north of Dalat, was under assault. On August 1, 1954 a cease-fire went into effect, in keeping with the accords signed in Geneva on June 20. Vietnam was divided along the seventeenth parallel. The French colonial era was reaching a definitive end.

Dalat lay well south of the divide, and now took on a staging role. Released French and Vietnamese prisoners congregated at Dalat, where they were cared for at the Lycée Yersin and other venues. Dalat’s role as a safe harbor endured, although this also augured the beginning of a new function: Dalat as a destination for refugees from other parts of Vietnam. The Geneva accords stipulated that refugees would have three hundred days to pick their side of the seventeeth parallel. Nearly a million Vietnamese left the North for the South during this time, two-thirds of them Catholics. Dalat’s population ballooned briefly to sixty thousand inhabitants.

In July 1954, Ngo Dinh Diem returned from exile in the United States to become premier of the Vietnamese State—a regime that Willaim Turley describes at this juncture as a “sinking ship.” In a little over a year, Diem squeezed out his rivals in government and emerged victorious on the streets as well, thanks to the backing of two influential sects in the South, the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai. In October 1955, he orchestrated a referendum on whether South Vietnam should remain a constitutional monarchy, or become a republic under his rule. Bao Dai was swept from power.

What did this mean for Dalat? Unlike his predecessor, Diem ruled from Saigon. No sooner had he come to power, than Diem moved the National Administration school from Dalat to Saigon. Also in 1955, the central highlands were absorbed into the Republic of Vietnam, marking the end of Bao Dai’s fiefdom within a state. Admittedly in 1955 a new Directorate of Economy for the Highlands of Central Vietnam was created at Dalat and in 1957 a new Highlands Bureau replaced Bao Dai’s old Ministry of Highland Affairs at Dalat. But the net effect of these many reforms was to reduce Dalat’s stature within South Vietnam.

Much has been made of Diem’s Catholicism, and it is certain that the religion thrived in Dalat under Diem, between 1955 and 1963. A Redemptorist document, dated February 1958, evoked a major religious revival. That year, Dalat became an episcopal see. Of its 51,380 inhabitants in 1958, 14,174 were Catholic. This works out to 27.6 percent of the population, when the overall proportion of Catholics for South Vietnam at large was closer to 10 percent. The Dalat figures represent a massive increase, if one considers that the town counted 6,141 Catholics in 1952. In other words, the center’s Catholic population had more than doubled with the arrival of Northern refugees in 1954. There was in any event no shortage of places to worship: Dalat now registered no fewer than twenty-nine Catholic establishments, fifteen Catholic orders, and nineteen Catholic schools. The latter, Father Parrel remarked in 1959, proved popular among many non-Catholics as well, with 80 percent of their students non-Catholic upon entry.

However, this religious wave was only part of the story. Dalat also experienced a nationalist revival in this era. The new nationalism was diffused not only in public schools, but also in Catholic ones. Witness some of the teaching resources utilized by the Redemptorists at Dalat in 1959. Among them one finds poems by Pham Dinh Chuong, glorifying god, but also the motherland. Three of these verses read: “Remembering those days when we departed/to offer one’s body to defend our fields/to offer one’s blood to color the Red River.” These recent traumas were sometimes juxtaposed with ancient triumphs, as in the “Song of the Bach Dang River,” which students were expected to memorize. It chronicled and twinned two Vietnamese victories over the Chinese in 93 and 1288 A. D. Together, they were depicted as having “opened Vietnam to the era of independence and prosperity.”

So too did the Diem years mark a turning point in minority policies. Unlike Bao Dai, who had cultivated a sense of montagnard difference, Diem’s government favored the assimilation of highland minorities. Coupled with the wave of ethnic Vietnamese migrants arriving in ever greater numbers in 1955, this assimilation attempt fuelled considerable opposition and outright resistance among minority groups.

Despite these developments and shifts, and despite the escalation of war, all signs point to the fact that Dalat remained en vogue among elite circles and beyond. Indeed, the Diem regime also made conscious efforts to sell Dalat as a tourist destination. A set of posters dating from the Diem years reveal some of the ways in which Dalat was being increasingly naturalized and romanticized. Produced by the national tourism department of Vietnam, the series graced public buildings and new-stands in Saigon and beyond, enjoining Vietnamese people to vacation at Dalat. One poster in particular elides both the colonial legacy and the ethnic Vietnamese presence at Dalat altogether. Instead the visual depicts a highland minority man taking aim at a deer with his crossbow. Nature dominates. The scene is set against the backdrop of Dalat’s signature pine trees, rolling hills, and waterfalls. What had been coded during the colonial era as a site for invigorating strolls, a place to recreate the Alps in Indochina, or a destination for pseudoethnographic romps, was now repackaged in romantic terms. No doubt harkening back to Vietnamese poetry on Dalat from the 1930s, this advertizing campaign also served to contrast relatively tranquil Dalat to both hyperurban Saigon and to the parts of the South under constant military threat.

Dalat remained rife with contradictions. At precisely the time when tourists were being encouraged to climb to the resort, refugees too were thronging to the hill station. By 1956, South Vietnamese authorities calculated that some 13,368 refugees had settled in the Dalat region. By 1968, the total would reach 16,000. Many were assigned to agricultural tasks: some 500 new hectares near Dalat were cultivated by these new arrivals between 1954 and 1956. Newcomers were estimated to have produced 200 tons of cereals, fruits, and vegetables in the year after their arrival. Among the refugees were some four thousand highland minority people from Northern Vietnam. The Diem government even organized integration ceremonies to mark local solidarity with the refugees.

By the final years of Diem’s reign, as the second Indochina war escalated, Dalat became an important piece of the Kennedy administration’s “strategic hamlet policy.” This massive and sometimes forced internal migration was designed in theory to remove villagers from Viet-Cong influence, and to protect vulnerable populations. Thousands of such hamlets were set up throughout South Vietnam. Because in the Lang-Bian region highland minority people made up the majority of the rural population, they bore the brunt of relocation. In the spring and summer of 1962, thousands of minority people congregated on Dalat. In April 1962, the U.S. Committee on Province Rehabilitation in Vietnam reported: “[we have learned] of the movement of a large number of montagnards to an area close to Dalat. According to the report, the Montagnards left their villages and moved to Dalat to escape the Viet-Cong and to take advantage of the additional security provided near Dalat.” By July, the Dalat area had been singled out as a site bursting with internal refugees. A CIA memorandum noted: “With the exception of Tuyen Duc Province (Dalat), where there are 10,000 refugees, many of whom seem in need of immediate provisions, foods, and other essentials, most provinces visited to date are not considered to have emergency situations in terms of Montagnard needs.”

The strategic hamlet program, as applied around Dalat, involved more than merely protecting minority groups from the Viet-Cong. In an August 1962 telegram to the State Department, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam outlined “the definitive decision taken to encourage by all means possible the exodus of Montagnard populations from areas controlled by the Viet-Cong to areas controlled by the Government of Vietnam.” Ambassador Frederick Nolting then revealed that South Vietnamese officials had expressed concerns that the highland evacuations “had . . . left many growing crops available for Viet-Cong harvesting and use, and the current plan to encourage movement would augment this.” The ambassador’s South Vietnamese interlocutor directly called for abandoned cultivation areas to be sprayed with defoliating chemicals. Thus, around Dalat, as in other parts of South Vietnam, the strategic hamlets went hand in hand with a scorched earth policy.

American officials soon debated the wisdom of broadcasting news of montagnard relocation worldwide. Their concerns had not so much to do with the unrelenting napalming of evacuated highland areas, but rather with the fate of the refugees themselves. The American committee in charge of the hamlet program ultimately decided in September 1962 that broadcasting would be a poor idea, given that the United States had no guarantee that the Vietnamese government “would carry out its announced decision to support and care for the refugees.”The risk was clear: unwittingly generating international outrage at seeing highland minority people uprooted from their villages, only to find their new accommodations wanting, and their lives upended.

In contrast, South Vietnamese authorities showed little such compunction in their public relations. In August, 1962, General Truong Vinh Le asserted at the close of a meeting at the Saigon Municipal Hall: “The fact that montagnards have abandoned their homes is a historic event telling everyone Communism is a mortal danger. . . . This is a great victory for a just cause.” Truong Vinh Le’s had managed to reinvent flight into victory. He accomplished this feat by leaning on popular representations of montagnard immutability and sedentarism. If the montagnards had been willing to move, the logic went, the threat they were escaping must have been terrible indeed.

By the time Diem was assassinated in 1963, Dalat had undergone some drastic transformations. Its population had exploded following two distinct refugee flows: the first from Northern Vietnam in 1954; the second, a massive internal migration of highland minorities towards Dalat as part of the strategic hamlet policy starting in 1962.

DALAT, 1963–1975

Ngo Dinh Diem and John F. Kennedy’s assassinations in November 1963 would have two long-term consequences in Southeast Asia at large: an increased U.S. involvement in the war, and decreased stability in South Vietnam. An aide of Lyndon B. Johnson famously pronounced that the post-Diem South Vietnamese government should make a turnstile its emblem.103 Another major escalation in the war arrived in 1965, with the onset of the U.S. Operation Rolling Thunder, the systematic bombing of the DRV, as well as stepped-up American involvement in the South. In the Dalat region, that year marked the arrival of American combat troops, who would soon use the city as a base and, unsurprisingly, as a site for rest and relaxation.

At Dalat the years 1963 to 1975 featured both continuities and ruptures. Among the former, the tourism sector once again stands out. Despite Dalat’s transformation into a refugee center, it continued to attract tourists from across Southern Vietnam and beyond. In December 1971, 41,794 visitors made their way to the hill station. In March 1972, Dalat broke a record: 45,733 tourists braved the war to visit the resort that month alone.

South Vietnam tourism officials were not content with targeting Vietnamese tourists. A glossy English-language pamphlet, featuring on its cover a highland minority woman, an ao-dai clad ethnic Vietnamese woman, a deer, colonial architectural elements, and the Lang-Bian summit, served to vaunt Dalat’s romance to a potential Anglophone market: “Lying out against a backdrop of undulating hills and mountains, [Dalat’s Xuan Huong Lake] makes a scenery for which superlatives are wholly inadequate.” The Lake of Sighs received similar praise: “beautiful and romantic lake reflecting in its water the graceful pine-trees and the renchanging [sic] outline of massive hills. It is . . . peaceful and enjoyable.” Less romantically, the pamphlet enjoined travelers to take in the brand new U.S.-built Atomic Center (opened in 1962), as well as the South’s military academy. Souvenir suggestions included “animals stuffed by taxidermists.” Here was a sign that colonial-era hunting remained de rigueur, or perhaps that its fruits could now be consumed as souvenirs without having to expend the time, energy, and money required to actually hunt in person.

However, Dalat’s relative tranquility would be abruptly shattered once more, this time by the 1968 Tet Offensive. Historians and contemporaries alike have debated the degree to which the Tet Offensive caught American and South Vietnamese forces by surprise. What seems pertinent here is the postattack excuse invoked for not anticipating that Dalat in particular would have been targeted in the first place. According to one U.S. report: “It must be noted that during the twenty-two years of war in Vietnam, Dalat had never been under any kind of attack.” This, of course, completely elided the events of 1951, seemingly unknown to the U.S. army. Once again, Dalat’s defenders had been caught flat-footed, persuaded of the resort’s safety—or perhaps, this time around, of its diminished strategic and symbolic importance.

Although the Viet-Cong controlled central Dalat only from February 1 to February 6, 1968, the fact that the resort fell briefly during the Tet Offensive undoubtedly contributed to the sentiment that the Viet-Minh could strike at will. Dalat’s cadets at its vaunted military academy struggled to retake the city’s central market from the guerillas. The attack and counterattacks left considerable wreckage in their wake. The city had been badly damaged, reduced to “a smoking ruin” according to Gerald Hickey.108 Some twenty thousand people were left homeless, roughly one thousand homes were destroyed and a further two thousand damaged in the fighting.

One more aspect of Dalat during these years seems worth noting. The resort saw a return to some of the contestation it had experienced in the 1930s and 1940s. In November and December 1964, residents of Dalat demonstrated in the streets to demand the removal of Tran Van Huong’s government. Later, Dalat seems to have served to stage internal opposition to Nguyen Van Thieu’s increasingly authoritarian regime. William Turley points to the importance of Redemptorist Catholic opposition to Thieu; Dalat’s studentat and noviciat training centers remained the chief Redemptorist training centers in all of Vietnam.

In 1975, the year South Vietnam collapsed, Dalat counted 105,072 inhabitants.112 The South’s fate was decided partly in the central highlands. Ban Me Thuot fell surprisingly rapidly in March 1975. Coupled with Communist victories in Phuoc Long in January, and on the coast at Da-Nang in March, these sealed the South’s defeat. In a mere two weeks, the South lost 40 percent of its weapons and some twelve provinces counting roughly eight million people. Viet-Minh staff members complained of not being able to draw maps quickly enough to keep up with advancing troops.

Xuan Phuong, who had grown up Dalat in colonial times, now returned in the tracks of the triumphant Northern army. As Dalat fell on April 4, 1975 she observed with regret some of the acts of retribution that almost invariably accompany the end of a civil war. For one thing, local Viet-Cong forces imprisoned her, convinced that her companion had worked for the South. Xuan Phuong also relates in detail how the city was ransacked. Many of Dalat’s foreign language books were amassed into pyres and burned. It seems the troops had not heeded their officers’ purported warnings about leaving the city’s cultural and intellectual resources intact. Xuan Phuong also points out that she initially found it hard to find her bearings in the city, so different was it from her childhood days. Thirty-five years of rapid growth, and the damage incurred during the Tet Offensive, had made the French colonial hill station in some ways unrecognizable.

Proof soon came that the South would be treated as a vanquished land in need of punishment for having collaborated with two enemies. This was made plain at the 1975 twenty-fourth plenum of the Vietnamese Communist party’s central committee. The plenum, the first for reunited Vietnam, was held at Dalat in the summer of 1975. Though it was called in principle to exchange Northern and Southern perspectives on reunification, the South was represented by none other than Pham Hung, the North’s deputy Prime Minister. The net result, as Truong Nhu Tang has implied, was a dialogue amongst Northerners about the South’s fate. With little suspense, the meeting consecrated and cemented national unification.

Current research conditions, not to mention the scope of this study, make important aspects of Dalat between 1975 and the present day impossible to track here. They include the experiences of highland minority people in and around Dalat, the question of how Dalat’s many learning academies fared after 1975, and the local economy’s struggles during the era of restrictions that lasted until the advent of Doi Moi in 1986.

However, a rapid shift to present-day Dalat can yield some rewards. Recent attempts to both commemorate and reinvent the colonial era reveal a number of grey zones, amnesias, reformulations, appropriations, and to borrow Ann Stoler’s concept, aphasias, concerning the recent and the deeper past. Dalat’s colonial legacies have been sometimes retooled, sometimes erected into totems, and sometimes targeted or erased.
 

Jennings, Eric T. (2011-04-08). Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (From Indochina to Vietnam: Revolution and War in a Global Perspective) (Kindle Locations 5696-6196). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.