Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
added that Australia and New Zealand also had colonial possessions that they would be unwilling to remove from their supervisory jurisdiction.17
U.S. inability to work out a common policy with the U.K. also precluded meaningful discussion, let alone agreement, on the colonial issue at the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations in 1944.18 Through March, 1945, the issue was further occluded by debates within the U.S. Government over the postwar status of Pacific islands captured from the Japanese: in general, the War and Navy Departments advocated their retention under U.S. control as military bases, while State and other departments advocated an international trusteeship.
- (3) Decision on Indochina Left to France
Secretary of State Stettinius, with the approval of President Roosevelt, issued a statement on April 3, 1945, declaring that, as a result of international discussions at Yalta on the concept of trusteeship, the United States felt that the postwar trusteeship structure:
- "...should be designed to permit the placing under it of the territories mandated after the last war, and such territories taken from the enemy in this war as might be agreed upon at a later date, and also such other territories as might be voluntarily be placed under trusteeship."19
Indochina thus seemed relegated to French volition.
Nonetheless, as of President Roosevelt's death on April 12, 1945, U.S. policy toward the colonial possessions of its allies, and toward Indochina in particular, was in disarray:
— The British remained apprehensive that there might be a continued U.S. search for a trusteeship formula which might impinge on the Commonwealth.
— The French were restive over continued U.S. refusal to provide strategic transport for their forces, resentful over the paucity of U.S. support for French forces in Indochina, and deeply suspicious that the United States — possibly in concert with the Chinese — intended to block their regaining control of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
- b. Truman and the Occupation of Indochina, 1945
Within a month of President Truman's entry into office, the French raised the subject of Indochina at the United Nations Conference at San Francisco. Secretary of State Stettinius reported the following conversation to Washington:
- "...Indo-China came up in a recent conversation I had with Bidault and Bonnet. The latter remarked that although the French
