Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · French Overseas Territory · The Jewel

French Indochina - September 1, 1939

French Indochina in 1939 is the jewel of France's Asian empire and, by the ledger, one of the most profitable colonial possessions on earth. Governed from Hanoi by a Governor-General, it is a union of five territories - the directly-ruled colony of Cochinchina in the south and the protectorates of Tonkin, Annam, Cambodia and Laos - stitched together under a single French administration and a single currency, the piastre. Its wealth is agricultural and mineral: rubber from the great plantations of Cochinchina, much of it Michelin's, worked by indentured coolie labour; rice from the Mekong and Red River deltas, exported in vast quantity; coal from the Tonkin fields; tin, zinc and rice alcohol. Over this sits a facade of indigenous authority - the Emperor Bảo Đại reigns in Annam without ruling, the Cambodian and Lao monarchies are preserved as ornaments - while real power runs through the French résidents. The strategic identity is the profitable colony under a lengthening shadow: a rich, tightly-held possession whose value is about to make it a target, as Japan's war in China presses down from the north.

Starting position

The starting board is a wealthy, repressive, strategically exposed colony. Economic power lies with the French planters, trading houses and the Banque de l'Indochine; the export economy in rubber and rice is booming; and the labour that produces it - plantation coolies, delta tenants, mine workers - lives under the indigénat and the tax regime that provoked revolt through the 1930s. Politically the board is more charged than the calm surface admits. The nationalist VNQDD was broken after the Yên Bái mutiny of 1930; but Hồ Chí Minh's Indochinese Communist Party has gone underground and is organising, and the memory of the Nghệ-Tĩnh soviets is fresh. The French garrison is a colonial force built for internal security, not for defending a long frontier against a great power. And that great power is now at the gate: Japan is at war in China to the north, and Indochina's rail links and its port at Haiphong are exactly the supply routes into China that Tokyo wants closed. The pieces are rubber, rice, coal, a nominal emperor, an underground revolution, and a Japanese army whose next move points south.

What turns the campaign

What Paris wants from Indochina in 1939 is the continuation of the most lucrative arrangement in the empire: the rubber and rice flowing, the piastre stable, the labour force controlled, the nationalist and communist currents suppressed, and the colony held intact as French territory. What the strategic situation is about to impose is a set of pressures the arrangement cannot absorb. With the war in Europe opening and France's attention fixed westward, the Governor-General's hand in Asia weakens; within a year France will fall, and the Vichy administration in Hanoi will be forced to grant Japan basing and transit rights, ceding the substance of control while keeping the form. The campaign turns on that squeeze from two directions - the external pressure of an expanding Japan and the internal pressure of a revolution the repression has driven underground but not destroyed. Beyond 1939 lie the Japanese occupation-by-agreement, the wartime famine, and the moment in 1945 when Japan sweeps the French aside and Hồ Chí Minh declares independence. But in this year France still holds the jewel whole - collecting its rubber and rice, and watching the shadow to the north grow longer.

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