First Indochina War

• 1. Introduction

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  The First Indochina War began on the 19th of December 1946, when fighting erupted across Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh's government fled the capital for the forested mountains. What followed was nearly eight years of conflict that drew in France, Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and would not end until the 11th of August 1954. At its core, the war raised a question that no army could fully answer: could a colonial power hold a country against the will of its people? The war would cost between 400,000 and 842,707 soldiers their lives, along with somewhere between 125,000 and 400,000 civilians. It would end with a divided Vietnam, a shattered French empire, and the kindling already laid for the conflict that would follow.

• 2. A Century of Resistance

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  Vietnam was absorbed into French Indochina in stages between 1858 and 1887. From the start, resistance followed. Early Vietnamese nationalism found its most prominent voice in the intellectual Phan Boi Chau, who looked to Japan as a model of an Asian nation that had successfully resisted European colonization. With Prince Cuong De, Chau founded two organizations in Japan, the Duy Tan Hoi and the Vietnam Cong Hien Hoi. French diplomatic pressure eventually forced Japan to deport him to China. Inspired by Sun Yat-sen's Xinhai Revolution, Chau launched the Viet Nam Quang Phuc Hoi movement in Guangzhou. He spent time imprisoned by Yuan Shikai's government, then was captured by French agents in Shanghai in 1925 and transported back to Vietnam. His popularity spared him from execution; he lived under house arrest until his death in 1940.

  World War II cracked the colonial structure open. Japan invaded French Indochina in September 1940, only weeks after its ally Germany had conquered metropolitan France. The Japanese kept the French colonial administration in place while ruling from behind the scenes. For Vietnamese nationalists, this created what some called a double-puppet government. Emperor Bao Dai collaborated with both the Japanese and the French. In March 1945, with the war nearly lost, Japan staged a coup to remove the Vichy French, formally installing Bao Dai as head of a nominally independent Vietnam and imprisoning most French officials and soldiers remaining in the country.

  The famine of 1944 to 1945 sharpened the bitterness. In the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam, between one and two million Vietnamese starved to death. The North Vietnamese government accused both France and Japan of responsibility. In his Declaration of Independence, Ho Chi Minh would blame the double yoke of the French and the Japanese for the deaths of more than two million Vietnamese.

• 3. The Viet Minh Rises

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  In 1941, Ho Chi Minh founded the Viet Minh, the League for the Independence of Vietnam, as an umbrella organization that deliberately emphasized national liberation over class struggle. The goal was to broaden the movement beyond his own communist beliefs. That same year, Ho and the Indochinese Communist Party created a communist-led united front to oppose the Japanese. By August 1945, the Viet Minh claimed they had led a nationwide uprising alongside Meo and Muong tribesmen, taking control of six provinces.

  On the 25th of August 1945, Ho Chi Minh persuaded Emperor Bao Dai to abdicate and accept the role of supreme advisor to the new Viet Minh-led government in Hanoi. One week later, on the 2nd of September 1945, Ho stood before crowds in Hanoi and declared Vietnam's independence from France. His speech deliberately echoed the American Declaration of Independence: "We hold the truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

  The same day that speech was delivered, General Leclerc of the French Expeditionary Corps signed the armistice with Japan aboard a ship in Tokyo Bay. France had its eyes already fixed on reclaiming Indochina. The collision was inevitable. By the 23rd of September 1945, French forces had overthrown the Viet Minh government in Saigon and restored French authority south of the 16th parallel. Guerrilla warfare began around Saigon immediately.

• 4. A Fractured Occupation

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  At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff divided responsibility for Indochina at latitude 16 degrees north. British forces under Lord Mountbatten's South East Asia Command occupied the south, while 200,000 troops of the Chinese 1st Army under General Lu Han moved into the north. These were not Chiang Kai-shek's best soldiers. He deliberately withheld those for the coming struggle against the Communists inside China, sending instead undisciplined warlord troops from Yunnan.

  In the north, Lu Han occupied the French governor-general's palace, ejecting the French staff. He pressured Ho Chi Minh for rice to feed the Chinese occupation force. In October 1945, rice sent south by the French was divided by Ho with only one third going to northern Vietnamese and two thirds to the Chinese. The Chinese also postponed Vietnamese elections by fifteen days to allow rival nationalist factions to prepare. Lu Han harbored ambitions of establishing a Chinese trusteeship over Vietnam, while Chiang Kai-shek himself had no such interest. This disagreement within the Chinese occupation shaped the diplomatic maneuvering that followed.

  In February 1946, Chiang forced the French and Viet Minh toward a compromise. The French surrendered all their concessions and ports in China, including Shanghai, in exchange for Chinese troops withdrawing from northern Indochina and allowing French forces to reoccupy the region starting in March 1946. The deal left the Vietnamese Nationalist Party without Chinese support. The Viet Minh then moved to eliminate the nationalist competition, massacring thousands of their members in a large-scale purge.

• 5. The War Breaks Open

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  On the 23rd of November 1946, the French fleet bombarded the Vietnamese sections of Haiphong, killing 6,000 Vietnamese civilians in a single afternoon. The Viet Minh agreed to a ceasefire and withdrew from the cities. Three weeks later, on the 19th of December, hostilities exploded in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh and his government evacuated the capital for remote forested and mountainous areas. By January of the following year, most provincial capitals had fallen to the French; Hue fell in February after a six-week siege.

  France launched Operation Lea in October 1947 with the objective of destroying the Viet Minh leadership at their base in Bac Kan. Lea was followed by Operation Ceinture in November with similar aims. The Viet Minh suffered 7,200-9,500 killed, losing valuable resources. Nevertheless, both operations failed to capture Ho Chi Minh and his key lieutenants. The main Vietnamese battle units survived.

  The communist victory in China's civil war in October 1949 transformed the conflict. Viet Minh guerrillas now had a sanctuary to their north where new troops could be trained and supplied beyond French reach. General Giap reorganized his local forces into five full conventional infantry divisions: the 304th, 308th, 312th, 316th and 320th. Between 1950 and 1951, these divisions would challenge the French in set-piece battles across the Red River Delta.

• 6. Cold War in the Jungle

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  In January 1950, China and the Soviet Union recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Within weeks, the United States and Britain recognized Bao Dai's State of Vietnam. Starting in May 1950, the United States began providing France with weaponry and military observers. By 1952, the US was paying three million dollars per day toward France's war costs. By 1954, that figure had grown to 80 percent of the entire French war effort.

  The French strategy forbade sending metropolitan French recruits to Indochina, to prevent the war from becoming more unpopular at home. The French Far East Expeditionary Corps drew instead from across the French empire: North Africans, Laotians, Cambodians, Vietnamese ethnic minorities, Sub-Saharan Africans, professional French troops, European volunteers, and units of the Foreign Legion. About 325,000 of 500,000 French troops were Indochinese. The Viet Minh, meanwhile, recruited more than 600 former Japanese soldiers to train Vietnamese forces, and received weapons and supplies from China and the Soviet Union.

  France's political situation at home made consistent war policy nearly impossible. Between 1947 and 1954, there were 17 different governments and 14 prime ministers in succession. The French Communist Party actively opposed the war, with its members and allied unions sabotaging ammunition trains and supply lines. A young communist militant, Raymonde Dien, was jailed for a year for blocking an ammunition train in February 1950. The Piastres affair exposed financial corruption involving arms trading between French Union forces and the Viet Minh.

• 7. Dien Bien Phu

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  In May 1953, General Henri Navarre replaced Salan as supreme commander of French forces. He told the French government there was no possibility of winning the war, only the possibility of a stalemate. His plan called for fortifying the town of Dien Bien Phu to block Viet Minh connections with Laos. The town sat in a heart-shaped valley 12 miles long and 8 miles wide, ringed by heavily wooded mountains.

  On the 20th of November 1953, Operation Castor dropped 1,800 paratroopers of the French 1st and 2nd Airborne Battalions into the valley. From December 1953 to March 1954, the Viet Minh quietly concentrated more than 40,000 troops to encircle the 15,000 French troops inside. Veterans later described the coming battle as 57 Days of Hell.

  The battle began on the 13th of March 1954. Viet Minh artillery, including Soviet Katyusha rockets, damaged both airfields the French depended on for resupply. The monsoon season made parachute drops increasingly difficult. By late April, French forces held only three strong points. General Cogny in Hanoi ordered General de Castries to cease fire at 5:30 pm on May 7 and destroy all equipment. A formal order was given not to use the white flag, so the action could be called a ceasefire rather than a surrender. Fighting at the isolated southern position, Isabelle, continued until 1:00 am on the 8th of May. At least 2,200 of the 20,000-strong French forces died, 1,729 were reported missing, and 11,721 were captured. The Viet Minh suffered approximately 25,000 casualties, with as many as 10,000 killed.

• 8. Partition and Aftermath

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  Pierre Mendes France was elected French Prime Minister on the 17th of June 1954 on a promise to achieve a ceasefire within four months. At the Geneva Conference in July 1954, the 17th parallel north was recognized as a provisional military demarcation line, temporarily dividing Vietnam into two zones. Operation Passage to Freedom began in August, evacuating Vietnamese civilians from communist North Vietnam to pro-Western South Vietnam. Neither the United States government nor the State of Vietnam signed the 1954 Geneva Accords.

  The Viet Minh's victory reverberated far beyond Indochina. The Algerian War broke out on the 1st of November 1954, only six months after the Geneva Conference. Benyoucef Benkhedda, who would later lead the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, described the Viet Minh feat at Dien Bien Phu as "a powerful incentive to all who thought immediate insurrection the only possible strategy." In French news coverage, the Indochina War had been presented as a direct continuation of the Korean War. General Marcel Bigeard later argued that one of the deepest mistakes made by the French was the propaganda claiming they were fighting for freedom against communism.

  The last French troops left the Republic of Vietnam on the 28th of April 1956. The insurgency that had already developed in the south, de facto controlled by the communist North, would grow into the conflict known as the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975 with the fall of South Vietnam. The 652 non-paratrooper soldiers who volunteered to parachute into Dien Bien Phu in its final days, making the first and last jump of their lives to support their comrades, stand as a reminder of what that war cost those caught inside it.