President Franklin D. Roosevelt opposed continued French rule of Vietnam following World War II. In this memo he wrote: “France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.”
But FDR died before the Potsdam Conference, where President Harry S Truman and the other Allied leaders planned the disarming of the occupying Japanese troops. They decided China would oversee the evacuation of the Japanese in the North and Britain in the South. Against orders, the British commander in charge helped the French to reestablish control of Vietnam.
