| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The OSS and Ho Chi Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War against Japan. By Dixee R. Bartholomew- Feis. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. x, 435 pp. $34.95, ISBN 07006-143 1-1.)
In September 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam free of French colonial rule, borrowing from the opening lines of the American Declaration of Independence. Among the crowd of four hundred thousand gathered to hear Ho's address were a small group of American officers from the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) who had worked closely with Ho and other Vietnamese revolutionaries in the waning days of World War II. What the OSS was doing in Vietnam and its larger sig nificance for Vietnamese-American relations is the subject of Dixee R. Bartholomew-Feis's book, the first sustained scholarly study of the American presence in Vietnam in this early period.	1
As Bartholomew-Feis makes clear, the leadership of the OSS never imagined that the organization would play a role in the end of French empire in Vietnam. Rather, they were concerned with winning the war in the Pacific and sought intelligence on the wartime Japanese occupation of Vietnam. She traces in considerable detail the ways in which the labyrinthine American and Allied intelligence networks in China, and the often internecine conflicts between and among them, frustrated OSS efforts to penetrate Vietnam. That failure to obtain good intelligence from French and Chinese agents eventually put the OSS in contact with Ho and other Vietnamese revolutionaries.	. . .

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