In Southern Indochina, the French had to deal with claims from Thailand which, backed by the Japanese, demanded territories situated to the Northwest of Cambodia's Tonle Sap and on the right bank of the Mekong River in Laos.

Self-defense forces and guerrillas which directly led by Võ Văn Tần, Phan Đăng Lưu were formed in big factories in Saigon such as Ba Son, FACI, pier, Cho Quan lamp.

[4] As the wave of discontent in the South rose, the Party's Regional Committee for Cochin China attempted to ride the crest, concentrating its propaganda on peasants and newly drafted Vietnamese troops.

Now, with almost all members of the ICP central Committee in the South in jail, regional leaders took matters in their own hands and began to plan for a general uprising in response to the decisions reached at the Sixth Plenum the previous November.

After the French surrender to Nazi Germany in June, they hastily convened an expanded Party conference in My Tho, deep in the heart of the Mekong delta and agreed to initiate preparations for the insurrection.

By autumn, half the indigenous troops in Cochin China were allegedly sympathetic to the Communists, with ICP sources estimating that up to 30 percent of the entire population of the colony was on its side.

North Vietnamese delegates had not been able to attend the Sixth Plenum in November 1939 and were thus not well informed about the Central Committee's plans to move toward a general insurrection against French colonial rule.

The meeting took place in the immediate aftermath of the abortive revolt in Bac Son, and its decisions reflected an understandable ambivalence about the possibilities of armed uprising.

So Phan Dang Luu was informed that an uprising in Cochin China should be postponed until the Central Committee could send a representative to check on the national situation and provide proper leadership.

Acting on the authority of the one remaining member, Phan Dang Luu, those in attendance named themselves a new provisional central committee with Truong Cinh serving temporarily as general secretary until new elections could be held.

[6] Immediately after the meeting, Phan Dang Luu returned to Cochin China to give his colleagues the bad news that their comrades in Tonkin did not favor a general uprising.

Attacks took place as scheduled in such delta towns as Soc Trang, Bac Lieu, Tan An, Vinh Long and Can Tho, as well as in rural areas along the edge of the Plain of Reeds.

In some areas, the masses seized power, formed revolutionary tribunals to punish class enemies, and raised flags in the name of the National United Front.

The final period from 12 to 31 December is centered on the Poulo-Obi incident in Bac Lieu[7] The revolutionary governments were existed in very short time, the longest one in My Tho was about 49 days.

Communist insurgents in that region were in disarray due to the repressive measures of the government, and were not able to rise at the same time as their comrades in other areas even though they received the insurrection order on 22 November.

Moreover, the Far West region had serious peasants problems in the second half of the 1930s which would have been an important factor if the ICP were to win over the masses should the insurrection have taken place as originally planned.

Due to bad communications between party members and the arrest of important members of the party, the provinces of Rach Gia and Bac Lieu remained calm during this period, even though Rach Gia was the first province able to form an insurrection group, in September 1940, Ben Tre also saw only small-scale fighting during this period.

As during the "Vietnam War" period, loyalty to the authority structure did not always extend to defending it to the death, and there was often an asymmetry of commitment between the followers of the opposing sides.

The social and economic dominance of a small number of large landholders and the very high percentage of the rural population who were poor and landless peasants make it easy to see why the simple rich-poor categorization of provincial society was prevalent at the time.

Rich peasants were a less distinct category but it was generally understood that they were in essence small landlords who owned less land but still more than they needed for bare survival, who farmed what they could themselves but hired laborers or rented what they could not work to tenants.

Although these class categories were more elaborately defined during the subsequent land reform period, they were simple and serviceable ways to describe the social reality of the 1930s and 1940s and were used consistently by both interviewees and written sources.

Unlike their counterparts in the Viet Bac, the rebels were unable to preserve their forces by retreating to isolated areas, and their defeat signaled the temporary collapse of the Party in Cochin China.

Much later, on the seventeenth anniversary of the uprising, the former chairman of the Viet Minh Committee of the south, Tran Van Giau, cited the November 1940 example as a warning to militants to bide their time against Diem's repressions, least a premature uprising in the south be crushed in 1957 as in 1940[12] The principal reasons for these failures were that the communists had insufficient men and arms and that the colonial police and security services had broken into the party's communications networks.

[7] The repression was directed by the governor of Indochina, Rivoal and his inspector of political and administrative affairs, Brasey, whose chief aide was Nguyen Van Tam.

The intention was to scare them but release them, recognizing that if they were badly mistreated, they-or their friends, allies and family-would later seek revenge which would not be advantageous for the revolution.

[14] Interestingly enough, he also suggests that the event was important in highlighting the need for rural reform as he credits the uprising to the "diminishing prestige of conservative pro-French patriarchs.

Despite the reports of hundreds or even thousands of participants, and the temporary immobilization of the French authority in much of My Tho province, it seems that the number of core activists was relatively small.