Archimedes Leonidas Attilio Patti (July 21, 1913 – April 23, 1998) was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army and an Office of Strategic Services officer who headed operations in Kunming and Hanoi in 1945 when he was a Major. Patti is known for having worked closely with Hồ Chí Minh and the Việt Minh, this before and after Ho became President of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945.

Early life Patti was born in The Bronx, New York City, on July 21, 1913, to Sicilian immigrants. His father worked as a tailor, his mother as dress maker.

He was married to Margaret Telford. They had two daughters.

Career The 1940 U.S. census lists Patti's profession as "Special Agent, U.S. War Department." In 1941, he joined the United States Army and served in Europe, where he was in contact with various anti-Axis resistance organizations including groups in North Africa, Italy, and Yugoslavia.

He was later transferred to the Office of Strategic Services in China after he had unknowingly volunteered for the mission in January 1944 on an assignment at Anzio with OSS Director William J. Donovan.

Vietnam

During his career in China and Southeast Asia, Patti met Hồ Chí Minh, leader of the Việt Minh. In later interviews, Patti explained that his mission in Vietnam was to establish an intelligence network but not to assist the French in any way in their attempt to regain control over their former colony, a policy choice that he believed to be linked to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's belief in the self-determination of all peoples.

However, Patti, from a distance, helped to organize, train, and equip the fledgling Vietnamese forces that Ho was uniting and marshaling against the Japanese and later became known as the People's Army of Vietnam. Patti worked closely with Ho and indeed commented on his early drafts of a Vietnamese constitution.

Patti stated that when he arrived in Kunming in March 1945, the French colonials were either unwilling or unable to assist him in establishing an American intelligence network in Indochina and so he turned to "the only source [available]," the Viet Minh.

Patti was introduced to Ho Chi Minh by Colonel Austin Glass, the OSS expert in Indochina. Patti met Ho Chi Minh on the Indochinese-Chinese border in late April 1945. Ho agreed to provide intelligence to the allies if he could have "a line of communication with the allies."

Patti later helped to co-ordinate some small attacks against the Japanese Imperial Army by using a small group of operatives known as the OSS Deer Team under the command of Major Allison K. Thomas, who worked directly with Ho Chi Minh in August 1945.

Patti arrived in Hanoi on a mercy mission with an OSS agent, Carleton B. Swift, and a French government official, Jean Sainteny. His primary mission was to assist in the repatriation of allied prisoners-of-war, as the US government feared reprisals against them by the Japanese after the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His secondary mission was to gather intelligence.

Patti met with Ho Chi Minh on August 26, 1945, over lunch at his residence in Hanoi. Several days later, Ho read a draft of the Vietnamese Declaration of independence to him. Patti offered some corrections to the wording of the opening sentence, which Ho quoted from the United States Declaration of Independence. Ho also quoted the 1791 Declaration of the French Revolution and the motto "liberty, equality, and fraternity." which "first appeared during the French Revolution."

On September 2, Ho declared independence, and some hours later, Patti had dinner with him. According to historian Pierre Asselin, these references were a strategic move to win Allied support, but behind this façade, Ho Chi Minh had no genuine intention of seeking an alliance with the United States and instead sought an alliance with the Soviet Union, thereby outsmarting Patti.

In the fall of 1945, French colonial forces had returned to Indochina on US-manned Liberty ships. Patti left Hanoi in late September 1945 after French allegations that the Americans had been fomenting a revolution.

Later life and death Patti retired from the military in 1957. For 13 years, he was a crisis management specialist in the Office of Emergency Planning in Washington, DC.

In 1981, Patti stated that Julia Child, who had worked at the OSS in 1945, had allegedly submitted his position papers on Vietnam to appropriate authorities, but the way in which he had found them upon his retirement was exactly as she had sent them, and they had never been opened or read:

In retirement, he wrote several articles and completed his book on Vietnam. In 1980, he finally published his book Why Vietnam? Prelude to America's Albatross, which described his OSS-assigned activities with Ho Chi Minh, the nationalist and communist Viet Minh leader in 1946. His book grew out of his much shorter 1946 memoir, which was completed in the 1950s but had an injunction put by the Department of the Army to prevent its publication because of the anticommunist fervor of the McCarthy era and out of concern for perceived adverse criticism of US foreign policy by military members.

He died on April 23, 1998, at the age of 84, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Publications .

See also First Indochina War Vietnam during World War II

Notes

Citations

References

– ANC Explorer. . .. , May 24.. . See also Philippe Devillers (1920–2016), un secret nommé Viêt-Nam, Mémoires d'Indochine, Internet archived 2022.06.29. , 864 pp.

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