THE FAR EAST: Fever in Saigon

The trouble in Indo-China (TIME, Sept. 24) worsened last week. The fever of nationalism that broke out in Saigon spread to islands of The Netherlands East Indies, as the Allied colonial powers scrambled to pick up the pieces of their Southeast Asia empires. It was clear that the empires’ inhabitants had heard about such things as the four freedoms and the coming Philippine independence.

Britain, the strongest imperialist, had agreed to occupy southern Indo-China until the French could send forces to reclaim it. Moving into Saigon last month, Major General Douglas Gracey told the nationalist Viet Nam Party to suspend business, asked surrendering Japanese to help him keep the peace, let them keep their arms to do it.

But the native Annamites, having tasted a puppet independence, thirsted for more. In the forlorn hope of escaping renewed colonial rule, they went on a rousing rampage. In Saigon they shot up homes, burned the market, seized Frenchmen as hostages. On roads out of town, they ambushed every foreign party that came along. An American OSS officer, Lieut. Colonel A. Peter Dewey, was shot dead (the Annamites mistook his jeep for a French car), another U.S. officer was wounded in a hell-for-leather battle.

Between such outbreaks, French colonials raged that the British had botched the job. The Japanese, said Colonel H. J. Cedille, had armed the natives, incited them to riot and in some cases had joined them, posing as Annamites. General Gracey, dismayed by the whole business, talked tough to the Jap commander, Field Marshal Count Juichi Terauchi, then flew down to Singapore with Colonel Cedille, senior French officer at Saigon, for a worried conference with Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. But not until strong French forces arrived (under General Jacques Leclerc and Admiral Georges Thierry d’Ar-genlieu) would Terauchi’s men be disarmed.

Not all the trouble was in southern Indo-China. At Hanoi, noting that the French Tricolor was missing from the decorations, General Marcel Alessandri huffily refused to attend the Japanese surrender to Chinese General Lu Han. And at week’s end a protest went from Paris to Chungking: Chinese troops had “advanced” into Laos in the French zone