The French were not the only ones to rely on their colonies to fight their wars and occupy large swaths of Asia following the defeat of imperial Japan in mid-1945. In September 1945, in accordance with agreements reached during the Potsdam conference, Sir Douglas Gracey led 20,000 troops of his 20th (mainly) Indian division to accept the Japanese surrender below the 16th parallel in former French Indochina, while Chinese nationalist troops occupied northern Indochina above that line. These Indian troops helped disarm all Japanese forces in lower Indochina, maintain law and order, locate and evacuate Allied prisoners of war, and, following the outbreak of war in southern Vietnam on 23 September 1945, engage Viet Minh forces in battle. The outbreak of violence that day led to a strange Euro-Asian coalition operating against the Viet Minh comprised of Indian colonial troops and Japanese imperial ones. Vietnamese resentment, as Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper have noted, bubbled up, resulting in the killing of half a dozen local Indians living in Saigon in 1945. Similar things happened in Hanoi during the outbreak of full-scale war on 19 December 1946. Vietnamese nationalists were not the only ones to decry the British use of Indian troops. Nehru also condemned the use of Asian troops against other Asians fighting for their national independence. In late October 1945, Lord Wavell, the British Viceroy of India, urged the rapid withdrawal of Indian forces from Indochina. However, the damage was done. No longer would the British dare to use their colonial Asian troops in operations against other nationalist movements in Asia. Indians, however, were no strangers to Vietnam or Southeast Asia, having lived, worked, and traded there long before the arrival of the French and the British. While the Indian community in Indochina, numbering some 2,000 individuals, never matched that of the overseas Chinese, they occupied positions in local banking and trading networks and worked in garment businesses and in the colonial administration in Hanoi, Phnom Penh, and Saigon. However, many of these Indians returned to India because of the unrest generated during the Indochina War. See also CROSSOVERS; MINORITY ETHNIC GROUPS; JAPANESE TROOPS, INDOCHINA WAR; REPATRIATION, JAPANESE TROOPS.