British and Japanese remain in Vietnam 1946

What if Britain had remained in command in Vietnam with trained and experienced British, Indian and Japanese troops in 1946?

Instead IOTL it was handed back to French control with ill trained and inexperienced French troops. Ironically the small British led forces had militarily beaten the Viet Minh, much as the French eventually militarily defeated the Algerian rebels (although there they had no political end game).

Could the whole saga of ongoing wars in Vietnam have been averted and a gradual hand over to a democratic independent government achieved if Britain had reinforced it's presence?. Perhaps remaining in the Francophone sphere rather than the Communist one?

Just as a minor (and unlikely) POD. Could the British have recruited the Japanese and Indian troops into the British Army? There are many precedents for such an action.
 
You got this from watching Mark Felton, didn't you? Not criticizing. Just asking.

I don't see the British controlling the entire peninsula by itself. A occupation would have to be co-ordinated with the French, since they were the 'original owners' of the territory, resulting in Indochina being divided between the French and the British, with France retaking Vietnam and Laos and Britain probably controlling Cambodia due to it's strategic location near Malaysia, where the Malaysian Emergency was still happening.

While I doubt we would see a full-blown war on the scale of the First Indochina War, we could see flare-ups of insurgent activity, courtesy of encouragement from Communist China. The scale of insurgent activity depends on the competency of the French occupiers, who in OTL, consisted of troops with no experience in colonial warfare. Maybe the British could lend a few dozen Japanese soldiers to the French to show them how to put down a colonial uprising? One advantage the French would have over these neo-Viet Minh is that these are just rebels who were trained and sent over the border by China in small disconnected cells. The real Viet Minh was a proper army, consisting of several nationalist parties united with the same goal, who had spent World War II fighting the Japanese occupation. They were a military force, not a group of insurgents with nothing but a dream.

Ho Chi Minh is likely alive, since in 1946, he was in Paris. Upon hearing of the destruction of the Viet Minh, he would probably flee to China and become a symbol for the Vietnamese independence movement to rally around. But assuming the French and the British can co-operate (assuming the Malaysian Emergency ends the same way as in our timeline), I think the Communists would be bottled up in Vietnam.

I don't see the French leaving in this timeline, at least not of the military's volition. A French presence in Indochina would be seen by the United States as integral to the Truman Doctrine. The United States could even send a few troops to help reinforce the European colonial presence, but what really matters in this scenario is the stability of the French government. Like the OP said, the French militarily won in Algeria, but they lost when it came to politics. That was because when the French seemed likely to win in Algeria, the French government completely collapsed, leading to fears of a military junta which were soothed by the return of Charles De Gaulle. If something like that were to occur, maybe the French people getting sick of their troops trying to maintain a long lost colonial empire, then France could pull it's troops out of Indochina, leading to a power vacuum which the Chinese, the British and the Americans would be struggling to fill.
 
Britain inducting ex-Imperial Japanese forces into His Majesty's armed forces is about as likely as letting Gestapo murderers into Scotland Yard.
You got this from watching Mark Felton, didn't you? Not criticizing. Just asking.
If this Mark Felton sincerely believes "Britain'(s limited Saigon-based occupation) beat the VietMinh" then he would be better off wanking about, I dunno, Hitler selling Greenland to FDR.

I don't see the British controlling the entire peninsula by itself. A occupation would have to be co-ordinated with the French, since they were the 'original owners' of the territory, resulting in Indochina being divided between the French and the British, with France retaking Vietnam and Laos and Britain probably controlling Cambodia due to it's strategic location near Malaysia, where the Malaysian Emergency was still happening.

Huge ask for UK capabilities under Attlee, or even under any realistic Conservative government that could have existed at the time.

Technically not impossible I guess, but it most likely entails things like a much quicker withdrawal/redeployment of forces from Palestine and India in this alt'46/'48 timeframe. And those disengagements are about existing core UK objectives, not a new commitment like this permanent investment in Indochina.

Even then, I think any attempt at a unified Anglo-French strategy for the Mekong-adjacent territories simply falls apart, thanks to a combination of London deciding on its operational priorities in the Malayan Emergency that look nothing like a dominant French COIN doctrine in Indochina, not to mention basic disagreements about whether or not to negotiate with Ho, or to create a Bao Dai client govt.

You know, there would seem to be a very good reason that, the disastrous Suez adventure aside, none of the European imperial powers coordinated major military operations in their post-war colonial actions.
 
The thread was inspired by Mark Felton's video but I wanted to have the concept explored further. It looks at Vietnam from a different POD than usual although it conflates South Vietnam with French Indo China.
 
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