This book offers the first detailed Englishlanguage examination of the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1945 which left at least a million dead and links it persuasively to the largely unexpected Viet Minh seizure of power only months later. Drawing on extensive research in French archives Geoffrey C. Gunn offers an important new interpretation of JapaneseampndashVichy French wartime economic exploitation of Vietnamamprsquos agricultural potential. Gunn asks whether the famine signaled a loss of the French administrationamprsquos ampldquomandate of heavenamprdquo or whether the overall dire human condition was the determining factor in facilitating communist victory in August 1945. In the broader sweep of Vietnamese history including the rise of the communist party the picture that emerges is not only one of local victimhood at the hands of outsiders but the enormous agency on the part of the Vietnamese themselves to achieve moral victory no matter how controversial tragic and contested the outcome. As the author clearly demonstrates colonialera development strategies and contests also had their postwar sequels in the ampldquoAmerican waramprdquo just as land land reform and subsistencesustainable development issues persist into the present.