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Nguyen Ngoc Bich (1911–1966) was an engineer, a hero in the Vietnamese resistance against the French colonists, a medical doctor, an intellectual and politician, who proposed an alternative viewpoint to avoid the high-casualty, high-cost war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

The in the city of Cần Thơ, Vietnam, was named after him to honor and commemorate his feats (of sabotaging bridges to slow down the colonial French-army advances) and heroism (imprisoned, subjected to an "intensive and unpleasant interrogation" that left a mark on his forehead, and exiled) during the (French) First Indochina War.

Upon graduating from the École polytechnique (engineering military school under the Ministry of Armies) and then from the École nationale des ponts et chaussées (civil engineering) in France in 1935, Dr. Bich returned to Vietnam to work for the French colonial government. After World War II, he became a senior commander in the Vietnamese resistance movement, and insisted on fighting for Vietnam's independence, not for communism.

Suspecting being betrayed by his side and apprehended by the French forces, he was saved from execution by a campaign for amnesty by his Polytechnique classmates based in Vietnam, mostly high-level officers of the French army, and was subsequently exiled to France, where he founded with friends and managed the Vietnamese publishing house Minh Tan (in Paris), which published many important works for the Vietnamese literature. In parallel, he studied medicine and became a medical doctor. He was highly regarded in Vietnamese politics, and was considered "by many" as an alternative to Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam. His candidature for the 1961 presidential election in opposition to Diem was, however, declared invalid by the Saigon authorities at the last moment for "technical reasons".

Much of the information in this article came from the document

Nguyen Ngoc Bich (1911-1966): A Biography.

= Hero of the resistance = Ellen J. Hammer was the first American-born historian with a deep knowledge of the French colonial rule in Indochina in the early 1950s during the First Indochina War. Dr. Hammer’s highly influential book titled The Struggle for Indochina—published in 1954 well before the United States sent American troops to Vietnam in the 1960s—described the events, politics, and historic personalities leading to the First Indochina War. Her works were considered among the must-read books by respected historians on Vietnam history, as Osborne (1967) wrote: “Indeed, any serious student of Viet-Nam will have either read Devillers, Lacouture, Fall, Hammer and Lancaster's studies already, or will be better served by reading them first hand.”  To give a historical context within which Dr. Bich fought the French colonists, there is no better English source to begin than Dr. Hammer’s book. First, regarding the American dilemma (1-To help the French to re-establish its colony in Vietnam or 2-To help free the Vietnamese from the yoke of French colonialism), Hammer wrote: "The United States has entangled itself in a war in a distant corner of Asia in which it resolutely does not want to participate and from which it equally resolutely cannot abstain. It has committed itself to the cause of France [ French Indochina ] and of Bao Dai, but enough of the old spirit of anticolonialism is left to make this a somewhat unsavory commitment: it cannot bring itself wholly to ignore the fact that the free world looks less than free to a people whose country is being fought over by a foreign army. Aware that a lasting peace can be built only on satisfaction of the national aspirations of the Indochinese, the United States must at the same time conciliate a France reluctant to abandon her colonial past." The situation in Tonkin (North Vietnam) in March 1946 was as follows: "There were some 185,000 Chinese soldiers north of the sixteenth parallel and some 30,000 Japanese, many of them still in possession of their arms. All the French troops in the north were disarmed and held prisoner in the Hanoi Citadel, where the Japanese had left them; there were also some 25,000 Frenchmen living in Hanoi. Only 15,000 French troops were in Saigon and they had to travel several days to get to Haiphong before they could go to Hanoi." Yet, the French hawkish colonists in Cochinchina (South Vietnam)—led by the "warmonger" triumvirate "High Commissioner Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, Supreme Commander General Jean-Etienne Valluy, and Federal Commissioner of Political Affairs Léon Pignon"—took a "gigantic gamble in dispatching an invasion force to the port city of Haiphong," fell into the "Chinese trap," in which the Chinese with a superior army forced both the French and the Vietnamese to sign the March 6 Agreement, which "was simply an armistice that provided a transient illusion of agreement where actually no agreement existed.", p.157 Indeed, after a short period following a "modus vivendi," the First Indochina War started on 1946 December 19.

Between March 6 and December 19, in Cochinchina, the military situation did not favor the Vietnamese: "Outside Saigon the various nationalist resistance groups, weakened though they were by the months of warfare with the British and French, still controlled large sections of the Cochin Chinese countryside. Ho Chi Minh proposed to General Leclerc the sending of mixed Franco-Vietnamese commissions to establish peace in Cochin China after the signing of the March 6 accord, but the General saw no reason for this in what was supposed to be French territory. When Ho sent his own emissaries to the south, they were arrested by the French who continued to regard Cochin China as a French colony, claiming a free hand there until the referendum could be held. This led to difficult local problems, as in the case of the Vietnamese emissary sent by one Vietnamese zone commander [Nguyen Ngoc Bich] to discuss a cease-fire with the local French commanding officer. The emissary was unceremoniously informed that the French expected complete capitulation—the surrender of arms and prisoners—and that this was an ultimatum. They had until the 31st of March to comply; if they failed to do so, the fighting would begin again. Before the Vietnamese left French headquarters, the French officer took his name and it was soon public knowledge that the French had put a price on his head as well as on that of his commander, Nguyen Ngoc Bich. In this particular region of Cochin China fighting resumed by the end of the month."

Chester L. Cooper was an American diplomat and a key negotiator in many critical agreements in the 1950's and 60's, beginning with his involvement in the Geneva Conference on Indochina in 1954. In his 2005 memoir In the Shadows of History: 50 Years Behind the Scenes of Cold War Diplomacy, "he recounted his association with a constellation of historic figures that included John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Nikita S. Khrushchev and Ho Chi Minh". Dr. Cooper—who acquired a deep knowledge of Vietnam history from his years in Asia, from 1941 to 1954, first working for the Office of Strategic Services in China, then for the CIA in 1947, and subsequently became head of the Far East staff of the Office of National Estimates in 1950—devoted some three to four pages to describe Dr. Bich in his Vietnam-history book The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam, in particular some aspects of Bich's resistance activities: "As commander of the Viet Minh forces in the Delta during the late 40s, Bich became one of the most popular local heroes. During 1946 the Viet Minh hierarchy became concerned that Bich might pose a threat to the aims of the Viet Minh in the southern part of Vietnam, and by the end of that year Ho apparently decided that Bich had served his purpose in the Delta. He was “invited” to move North to become a member of the Viet Minh political and military headquarters in Hanoi. Bich was reluctant to leave his command, not only because of his desire to continue the fight against the French, but also because he felt uneasy about leaving his base of power. Nonetheless, he made his way north via the nationalist underground to Hanoi.

A day or two before Bich was to report to the Viet Minh headquarters, the French discovered his hiding place near Hanoi. Since he was on the French 'most wanted' list, he was subjected to an intensive and unpleasant interrogation."

Joseph A. Buttinger was a Nazi fighter, an ardent advocate for refugees of persecution, and a "renowned authority on Vietnam and the American war" in that country. In 1940, he helped founded the International Rescue Committee, "a nonprofit organization aiding refugees of political, religious and racial persecution," and while "working with refugees in Vietnam in the 1950s, he became immersed in the history, culture, and politics of that nation." His scholarship was in high demand during the Vietnam War. The New York Times described his his two-volume Vietnam-history book, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, as "a monumental work" that "marks a strategic breakthrough in the serious study of Vietnamese politics in America" and as "the most thorough, informative and, over all, the most impressive book on Vietnam yet published in America." Joseph Buttinger wrote in Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, Vol. 2

that Dr. Bich was "the resistance hero" whom "Diem had no success" to convince to join his cabinet:

"Diem left Paris for Saigon on June 24, accompanied by his brother Luyen, by Tran Chanh Thanh, and by Nguyen Van Thoai, a relative of the Ngo family and the only prominent exile willing to join Diem's Cabinet. With others, such as the resistance hero Nguyen Ngoc Bich, Diem had no success. He tried unsuccessfully to win Nguyen Manh Ha, a Catholic who had been Ho Chi Minh's first Minister of Economics but who had parted with the Vietminh in December, 1946. These men, and others too, rejected Diem's concept of government, which clearly aimed at a one-man rule. Nor did they share Diem's illusions about the chances of preventing a Geneva settlement favorable to the Vietminh. Diem apparently believed that the National Army, no longer fighting under the French but for an independent government, would quickly become effective and reduce the gains made by the Vietminh."

That Nguyen Ngoc Bich was being hunted by the French colonists was described in Joseph Buttinger's book: "[Note] 9. Miss Hammer cites the case of an emissary sent by Nguyen Ngoc Bich. The French took down his name when he came to their headquarters to negotiate a cease-fire, and 'it was soon public knowledge that the French had put a price on his head as well as on that of his commander, Nguyen Ngoc Bich' (ibid., p. 158)."

= Respected intellectual and politician =

In 1962, as an intellectual in exile in Paris, Dr. Bich published an article, among respected historians at the time such as Philippe Devillers, Bernard B. Fall, Hoang Van Chi etc., presenting an incisive analysis of the economics and politics of the two Vietnams, and proposed an alternative viewpoint to avoid the Second Indochina War; see Section Peaceful negotiation, an independent viewpoint, where a summary of his article is provided.

Chester L. Cooper described Dr. Bich as one among some "genuine nationalists" living in exile in France in the 1950s: "One such patriot was Dr. Nguyen Nhoc Bich. By profession Bich had been an engineer—a graduate of France's prestigious Ecole Polytechnique. He was a consequential and revered figure. His father was one of the founders of a branch of the Cao Dai sect, and his family had long been highly respected in the southern part of Vietnam, particularly in the area of Ben Tre Province. Bich had joined the Viet Minh because he was convinced there was a chance for non-Communist nationalists to band together with the Communists in a broad coalition to establish a genuinely free and independent Vietnam. Bich, as well as many other educated, non-Communist nationalists, was influenced by the French political tactic of alliances between moderate and Communist groups to achieve short-range objectives. The problem in Vietnam, however, was that the non-Communist nationalists had no significant political base of their own and were either swallowed up or destroyed by the Viet Minh's well-organized, politically aggressive Communist leadership."

In Paris, Dr. Bich was a "most popular oppositionst" to Ngo Dinh Diem and his regime, as described in Joseph Buttinger's book: "[Note] 92. [Robert] Scigliano mentions [Nguyen Bao Toan] and Nguyen Ngoc Bich as 'perhaps the two most popular of the Paris oppositionists (op. cit., pp. 23-24, 79-80, and 82).'"

The French suggested Dr. Bich as a serious alternative to Ngo Dinh Diem as Prime Minister of South Vietnam under Bao Dai: "Diem was not the only candidate for prime minister under Bao Dai, and the French considered him hostile to their business interests, which they expected to survive the change in government. The names the French put forward could be dismissed as collaborators, however, and the one serious alternative to Diem, Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Bich, had his own liabilities. Although not a Communist himself, Bich had fought with the Vietminh, and his father was prominent in the Cao Dai, an eclectic sect that revered Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Joan of Arc and Victor Hugo. Despite a medical degree, Bich could seem so mystical that Diem looked hard-headed and practical to the Vietnamese colony in Paris and to Foster Dulles, who saw that he would be dependably anti-Communist."

= Early life and education = Engineer and doctor Nguyen Ngoc Bich was born on 18 May 1911 in An Hoi village, Bao Huu canton, Bao An district, now in Giong Mong district, Ben Tre province. He was the son of Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Tuong (1881-1951), Cao Dai Ban Chinh Dao (Ben Tre), and Ms. Bui Thi Giau.

As a child, he stayed with his father, lived in many places such as Can Tho, Ha Tien, Can Giuoc and mainly studied in Can Giuoc. In 1926, at the age of 15, he went to Saigon to study and graduated with a Baccalaureat at Chasseloup Laubat French School with very high scores, studying abroad in France. In France, he studied and obtained engineering degrees from the École Polytechnique in Paris (he entered in 1931 and graduated in 1933) and later from the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées also in Paris. These are 2 prestigious engineering universities in France, as well as in the world so far, especially Polytechnique because the entrance exam is very difficult and is a military school under the tutelage of the French Ministry of the Army, students when graduating have the rank of a military officer and at that time had to work for the government (civil or military) for a period of time.

= Resistance fighter and prison time = After graduating from the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, a civil engineering school, he returned home to work as a civil engineer for the colonial government at the Soc Trang Irrigation Department until the Japanese coup d'état in Viet Nam (09/03/1945). He joined the Resistance in the Soc Trang base area and was appointed deputy of the 9th Zone and a Member of Parliament for Rach Gia in the first National Assembly (term 1945-1960) of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He destroyed many bridges that were notoriously difficult to break such as Cai Rang Bridge in Can Tho, where a street was named after him, Nhu Gia Bridge in Soc Trang, etc., blocking the French advance of General Leclerc's Generals Valluy and Nyo.

In 1946, a French army patrol arrested him in An Phu Dong near Saigon in a house where he was waiting for a guide to escort him to Da Lat for the Viet Nam-France Preliminary Conference (April and May 1946) in preparation for the Fontainebleau Conference to take place in France (July to September 1946). He was tortured but still hid his real name and profession, until a French colonel who was inspecting the area where he was captured, hearing that he seemed to be more than just a teacher, revealed to him that he graduated from Polytechnique and was looking for a man named Nguyen Ngoc Bich who graduated from the same school. That colonel took him back to be locked up in Saigon, less dangerous. He was sentenced to death by the Military Court because he graduated from École Polytechnique and was a French army officer. Hoang Xuan Han, minister of education and fine arts in Tran Trong Kim's cabinet (17-04-1945), also a graduate of Polytechnique (he entered in 1930), wrote a letter to the alumni of this engineering school urging them to understand Nguyen Ngoc Bich's patriotism and help him in his difficult times. French military officers in Vietnam graduated from Polytechnique, based on the Franco-Vietnamese agreement of March 9, 1946, to put Nguyen Ngoc Bich's name on a prisoner exchange list and organize his exile in France.

= Life in exile in France = Back in France, he lived with Dr Henriette Bui Quang Chieu, Vietnam's first female doctor, but the two did not marry because they were relatives (his mother, Bui Thi Giau, was a cousin of Bui Quang Chieu, Henriette Bui's father). Back in France, he founded in Paris Minh Tan publishing house ((agents in Vietnam were the two bookstores Truong Thi (Hanoi) and Bich Van Thu Xa (Saigon)) with some friends to publish works of Vietnamese intellectuals to help improve people’s knowledge living in Vietnam.

Published books include such as Dao Duy Anh's “Hán-Việt Tự Điển” (Chinese-Vietnamese dictionary) and “Pháp-Việt Tự Điển” (French-Vietnamese dictionary), "French-Vietnamese Scientific Nouns", Hoang Xuan Han's “Danh từ khoa học Pháp-Việt” (Scientific vocabulary French-Vietnamese), “Chinh Phụ ngăm bị khảo” and “La sơn Phu tử”, Tran Duc Thao's "Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique" (Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism), doctors Pham Khac Quan and Le Khac Thien’s “Danh tử Pháp Việt về thuật ngữ kỹ thuật trong y tế” (French Vietnamese vocabulary on technical terminology in medicine), etc. After graduating from medicine and receiving a doctor's degree, he studied cancer and taught Medical Physics at the Paris Medical School until his death. After he finished composing his Agrégation thesis ("agrégation" (translated into Thạc Sĩ in Vietnamese) is a degree higher than PHD), he could not take the exam because foreigners who want to be enrolled in the exam, must provide a letter of recommendation from their Embassy, at that time the Embassy of the State of Viet Nam with which he refused to have any link. During the French colonial period, French citizenship was given with parsimony to the ones who rendered great service to France and who applied for it. He did not render any service to France, he just had to work as a civil engineer for the colonial government, which was mandatory because he graduated from Ecole Polytechnique.

= Engagement in politics in South Vietnam = In 1954, before Diem was selected by Bao Dai, according to the books Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975 by Arthur John Langguth and The Lost Crusade – America in Vietnam by Chester L. Cooper, he was widely regarded as a possible prime minister of the State of Vietnam.

Along with some Vietnamese in France, he wanted to give the country another way than the one of war: cooperation between North and South that help each other develop to catch up with neighbouring countries and avoid dependence on foreign states: negotiations and economic and trade cooperation while waiting for favourable conditions for the two sides to unite the country. That idea was echoed by him in an article he wrote in the quarterly magazine China Quarterly, March 3-5, 1962. Later, the same idea was proposed by Ho Chi Minh (in 1958 and 1962) and Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu (in 1963) but without success. A member of his group went to Geneva (Geneva Conference in 1954) to meet Phan Van Dong. He was invited by Georges Bidault, French Foreign Minister (until June 16, 1954) to meet and an American professor from Washington came to Paris to see him. But at that time the U.S. policy was to eliminate communism, and Pham Van Dong's side paid attention to the planned reunification elections in 1956. That group of Vietnamese intellectuals—most of whom were professionals trained and residing in France—kept to be discreet at that time and often met at the headquarters of Minh Tan publishing house, which made them called by some the Minh Tan group. The publisher's logo is a pigeon sandwiched in the beak of an olive branch, symbolizing "Peace".

He sent his candidacy for the 1961 South Viet Nam presidential election, with his partner Nguyễn Văn Thoại, a professor at Collège de France in Paris and a former minister of Ngô Đình Diệm. But his file was dismissed by the Ngo Dinh Diem government because of "technical problems".

= Cancer and end of life, return to Vietnam = Suffering from throat cancer, he returned to Vietnam in 1966 when he was very severe and died in Thu Duc on 4 Dec 1966. He was buried in Ben Tre, near the grave of his father Nguyen Ngoc Tuong and his brothers, including his brother martyr Nguyen Ngoc Nhut, who was a member of the Southern Administrative Resistance Committee. But the grave is open because Nhut's remains have been moved by the government to a martyr's graveyard in Ben Tre. <!--

Vietnam-War casualties
How many people died in the Vietnam War? Britannica (accessed on 2023.02.18)

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

The China Quarterly, Vol. 9, Mar 1962
The China Quarterly | Cambridge Core

The China Quarterly: Volume 9 - | Cambridge Core  (Mar 1962)

Contributors
Contributors

Vietnam—An Independent Viewpoint
Nguyen-Ngoc-Bich (1962), Vietnam—An Independent Viewpoint The China Quarterly, Volume 9, March, pp. 105-111. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S030574100002525X

Summary of main points
In 1962, Dr. Bich laid out an argument to avoid the subversion war by North Vietnam to conquer rice from South Vietnam to solve its famine problem due to low yields in agricultural production using archaic methods and due to the failed agrarian reform. His main points were (1) South Vietnam should have a truly liberal democratic government, (2) the South should establish commercial relations with the North to help solve the said famine problem, (3) the South should maintain a non-aligned neutrality that would prevent interference from the North, (4) the South would peacefully negotiate with the North toward a progressive reunification. Below is a more detailed summary of his article, looking back from more than 60 years later. As a result, past tense is used in this summary to describe long-past events, instead of the sometimes present tense used in the original article. The full article translated into French is available in the document Nguyen Ngoc Bich (1911-1966): A Biography.

= Notes =

= Citations =

= References =


 * . Internet archived 2022.11.15.


 * . Internet archived 2023.02.10.










 * , Nov 7.


 * , Assistant Professor of History, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, with the assistance of Sanford L. Silverman, Liberal Arts Bibliographer. The Libraries, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, Oct 19. Internet archived 2022.01.01




 * . Volume 9 contained the articles written by several well-known intellectuals on Vietnam history and politics such as Bernard B. Fall, Hoang Van Chi, Phillipe Devillers (see French Cochinchina, Ref. 40),  P. J. Honey, William Kaye (see e.g., A Bowl of Rice Divided: The Economy of North Vietnam, 1962),  Gerard Tongas, among others.  See the Editorial and the brief introduction of the contributors.


 * , Mar 8.








 * , pp. 105-111. See also the contents of Volume 9, which included the articles of many well-known experts on Vietnam history and politics.


 * . Preface by historian Pierre Brocheux.




 * , Internet Archive, CC-BY-SA 4.0. (Backup copy.) Much of the information in the present article came from this biography, which also contains many relevant and informative photos not displayed here.  The version on the Internet Archive will be frequently updated.     The older version on Commons remains fixed.




 * , Mar 26.




 * , Feb 21. Internet archived on 2023.02.22.





Nguyen Ngoc Bich
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First Indochina War
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Second Indochina War
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Category:1911 births Category:1966 deaths Category:Vietnamese engineers Category:Vietnamese nationalists Category:Vietnamese physicians Category:Vietnamese politicians

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