However once the details of this arrangement got out, all hell broke lose culminating in the total abandonment of SOEs roll in Indo-China and the eventual carnage the Japanese’s would vent up it.

SOE continued to surreptitiously build up resistance forces in Indo-China but on the 9^th March 1945 the French who had remained in charge of Indo-China were told that the Japanese were taking over.

On the night of the 9^th March, marauding Japanese rampaged through Nam-Thi, and set about murdering women and children by rape, beheading and bayoneting as they had done previously in Nanking,

Then for the next few months the Japanese virtually wiped out the French military that were present in Indo-China, and with it, all of SOE.

At one stroke they had wiped out two years of planning and organisation and had ensured that French Indo-China had totally gone This  had given the Americans there first lesson in Colonialism and just what it meant.

From this moment, SOE devised its own plans and missions into Indo-China that were only to come to fruition at wars end.

Taken from Charles Cruickshank's "SOE in the Far East" and records in The National Archives. HS 7/120