On 23 September 1945, the British facilitated a French coup de force, ousting forces loyal to or allied with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) from Saigon, marking the first stage of what would become a full-scale war for Vietnam on 19 December 1946 in Hanoi. On 25 August 1945, groups pledging allegiance to the DRV had taken control of Saigon following the Allied defeat of the Japanese. They did so in the absence of French forces knocked out of Indochina by the Japanese coup de force of 9 March 1945. British occupying forces under the command of General Douglas Gracey arrived in Saigon in early September to accept the Japanese surrender and maintain order. This was no easy task, however. Tensions were running extremely high between the Vietnamese and French as each side manoeuvred to take control of the city. The French population had been humiliated by Japanese internment and brutalization. They looked to the British not only to deal with the Japanese, but also to put the Vietnamese back in their colonial place. Vietnamese nationalist leaders had no intention of letting such a thing happen. The French had failed to defend Indochina; the colonial pact was over. Reaching a compromise solution in such circumstances would be no easy matter. Worse, confidence plummeted as incidents multiplied. Violence marred celebrations held in Saigon on 2 September 1945 to mark the official declaration of the DRV by Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. And it showed no signs of abating. In a bid to establish order, Douglas Gracey decided to support a French coup de force against the Vietnamese, prepared by the recently arrived French Commissioner for the Republic in Cochinchina, Jean Cédile. On the evening of 22 September, Gracey declared martial law and allowed Foreign Legion troops incarcerated by the Japanese to be re-armed and released. The next day, these unruly troops began to retake the city by force, pushing the representatives of the DRV into the countryside. Heavy-handed treatment of the Vietnamese by these troops and European settlers bent on vengeance reinforced a spiral of violence and instability, as both Cédile and Gracey conceded at the time. On the 24th, unruly Vietnamese elements kidnapped and murdered dozens of Europeans and Eurasians in a gruesome massacre in the French quarter of Saigon called the Cité Hérault. British-led Gurkhas and especially Allied-defeated Japanese troops had to be brought in to help the French establish control over the city and surrounding areas. The war for Vietnam, although limited to areas south of the 16th parallel until December 1946, had begun in the south, in Saigon, on the 23–24th of September 1945. No one knew at the time that Saigon would also be the scene of the end of the wars for Vietnam thirty years later.