On September 23, 1945, French forces, aided by recently freed and rearmed colonial troops, seized key buildings in Saigon from the Viet Minh-aligned Committee of the South, effectively reasserting French control over southern Vietnam barely three weeks after Ho Chi Minh had declared independence in Hanoi. The action, backed by British occupation forces who had accepted the Japanese surrender in the south, triggered widespread strikes and guerrilla resistance and is often marked as the opening clash of the First Indochina War.
Japan's surrender in August 1945 left a power vacuum across Southeast Asia. In Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh had proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2, quoting the American Declaration of Independence to a crowd of half a million. In Saigon, a fragile administration calling itself the Committee of the South tried to govern amid chaos, while British troops arrived under Southeast Asia Command to oversee the Japanese surrender south of the 16th parallel.
French officials, determined to restore their colonial empire, saw an opening. With British acquiescence, and using French soldiers freed from Japanese internment camps and hastily rearmed, French commander Jean Cédile organized a coup on September 23, 1945. French troops stormed the Saigon city hall, police headquarters, and other government buildings, arresting Vietnamese officials and hoisting the French tricolor.
The coup provoked immediate general strikes and armed retaliation from Vietnamese militias, and Saigon descended into arson, sniper fire, and reprisal killings within days. Historians widely regard this single day's action as the spark of the First Indochina War, a conflict that would grind on for nine years, end French colonial rule at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and set the stage for America's own war in Vietnam.
Key people: Ho Chi Minh, Jean Cédile