Vietnamese famine of 1944–1945

• 1. Introduction

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  The Vietnamese famine of 1944-45 is known in Vietnamese as Nạn đói Ất Dậu, the famine of the Ất Dậu Year, or simply as "the '45" because the worst deaths fell in that final year. Between 400,000 and 2 million people starved to death in northern Vietnam while two occupying powers, France and Japan, competed for control of the same territory and the same food supply. The scale of the dying was so vast that Vietnamese corpses filled the streets of Hanoi and had to be cleaned up by students. How did a famine of this magnitude happen? What decisions, policies, and military calculations turned a wartime food shortage into one of the deadliest disasters in Vietnamese history? And who, in the end, bore the blame?

• 2. Competing Occupiers

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  Japan entered French Indochina in September 1940, viewing it as a bridge into Southeast Asia and a way to isolate and weaken Nationalist China. By 1941, there were 140,000 Japanese troops in French Indochina alongside the Vichy French forces. Vietnam was pulled into a wartime economy where France and Japan competed in administration, often with Japan gaining the advantages.

  The diplomat Bui Minh Dung argued that the Japanese occupation was, in the final analysis, the direct cause of several other factors that drove the famine, and that Japanese military efforts and economic policy for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere played a role considerably greater than any other single factor in the Vietnamese starvation.

  Japanese troops forced farmers to grow jute instead of rice, directly depriving the population of food. France had already started a similar policy on a smaller scale. The land set aside for staple crops such as maize and potatoes was reduced to make room for cotton, jute, and other industrial plants, and crops were also exported to Japan.

  Both militaries forcibly seized food from farmers to feed their troops. Allied air strikes hammered roads, warehouses, and transportation facilities, making the movement of rice from the south to the north extremely difficult. The Vichy civilian administration, meanwhile, was highly corrupt and dysfunctional, unable to distribute whatever food stocks remained to the areas where they were needed.

• 3. Rice as Fuel

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  In 1944, US bombing cut off coal supplies from the north to Saigon. The French and Japanese response to this shortage became one of the most direct causes of mass hunger: they began burning rice and maize as fuel for power stations.

  The French colonial administration had already reshaped the economy to serve wartime administration and the needs of occupation. They imposed a compulsory government rice-purchase system with a price ceiling of 1.40 piastres for every 10 kilograms. As market rates climbed from 2.50 to 3 piastres in 1943 and then to 6 to 7 piastres in June 1944, the government continued paying farmers that fixed, artificially low rate.

  The following year, rice prices ballooned tenfold to 60-70 piastres. Farmers found themselves locked into selling at a price set years earlier while their own costs for repurchasing rice for new harvests soared beyond reach. They could no longer afford to feed themselves.

  Natural disasters compounded the policy failures. Droughts and floods destroyed northern crops in 1943-1945. The catastrophic rainfall of August-September 1944 caused flooding that destroyed rice plants across the region, and a lack of dike maintenance after the US bombing of the north left the land more vulnerable than ever.

• 4. The Death Toll Debated

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  In May 1945, the envoy at Hanoi asked the northern provinces to report their casualties. Twenty provinces reported a combined total of 380,000 people starved to death, with 20,000 more killed by disease. That provincial count was almost certainly incomplete.

  By October, a report from a French military official put the estimate at half a million deaths. Governor General Jean Decoux, writing later in his memoirs A la barre de l'Indochine, stated that about one million northerners had starved.

  Ho Chi Minh cited the famine directly in his Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on the 2nd of September 1945, using a figure of 2 million deaths. The North Vietnamese government accused both France and Japan and cited that same range of 1 to 2 million dead.

  Photographer Võ An Ninh documented the scale of the disaster directly, taking photographs of dead and dying Vietnamese throughout the famine. By early 1945, survivors were walking from town to town in search of food. In Phat Diem, a Vietnamese farmer named Di Ho was among the few survivors who witnessed Japanese troops seizing grain. Vietnamese corpses lay throughout the streets of Hanoi when Chinese forces arrived to disarm the Japanese at the end of the war.

• 5. A Last-Ditch Government

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  In March 1945, the Japanese ousted the Vichy administration entirely and replaced it with the Japanese-backed government of the Empire of Vietnam, headed by Trần Trọng Kim. This new government immediately confronted the famine it had inherited.

  Because all ships over 30 tons had been requisitioned by the Japanese, moving rice from the south to the north by sea was nearly impossible. American and Allied attacks constantly targeted important ports and transit routes. The government sent Minister of Supply Nguyen Huu Thi to Saigon specifically to arrange the transportation of rice northward. Seaports far from Saigon were chosen as departure points to reduce the risk of American bombing. Private individuals were permitted to transport and trade rice freely.

  To prevent hoarding and price manipulation, the government imposed price and inventory controls on rice. Violators could be sentenced to death or have their property confiscated. The Northern Economic Intelligence Service, headed by Nguyen Duy Que, was established to prevent smuggling.

  At the end of March, all the relief associations in the north merged into a single General Relief Association led by Nguyen Van To. From March to May, this body raised 783,403 dong. In the south, more than 20 relief associations formed in May alone, raising 1,677,886 dong within a month, including 481,570 dong used to buy and transport 1,592 tons of rice to famine victims. A good harvest in May and June 1945, combined with the grim arithmetic that more than a million deaths had sharply reduced consumption demand, allowed the food crisis to ease significantly by June 1945.

• 6. Viet Minh and Political Aftermath

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  The Viet Minh, led by communists, turned the famine into a political opening. They directed popular resentment toward the occupation powers and encouraged peasants to seize rice granaries held by the Japanese and French.

  The Japanese imposed harsh punishment on those who raided the granaries and sometimes mutilated them physically. That response further inflamed popular anger rather than suppressing it. Through this confrontation, the Viet Minh transformed itself from a guerrilla organization into a mass movement, broadening its base precisely because it had acted while people were starving.

  Ho Chi Minh's citation of the famine in the Proclamation of Independence on the 2nd of September 1945 was not incidental. It placed the mass death at the center of the founding narrative of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, framing the 2 million figure as evidence of colonial and occupying power criminality. The question of exactly how many died, and who bore primary responsibility, remained contested for decades, with the North Vietnamese government naming both France and Japan while scholars continued to weigh the respective roles of Japanese policy, French administration, Allied bombing, and natural disaster.