Vo Nguyen Giap

Vo Nguyen Giap

In the history of communist Vietnam, Giap is second only to Ho Chi Minh in the impact he had. Ho named Giap commander in chief of the Vietminh forces fighting the French at the end of World War II.

Giap orchestrated the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1953 and was named minister of defense of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Giap was also the chief military strategist against the U.S. led Vietnam War.

Giap was born in central Annam, just north of the 17th parallel, on August 25, 1911, to Nguyen Thi Kien and Vo Quang Nghiem. His early life was spent in one of the poorest sections of Vietnam.


However, Giap’s father was a member of the tiny middle class of his region, a rice farmer who tilled his own land and rented another small portion, in addition to being a practitioner of traditional Asian medicine.

From age five until eight, he attended school in An Xa. The school was supervised by the French but taught by Vietnamese. In 1923 he received a certificate for finishing elementary studies, which was not very common. The following year he took the entrance examination to qualify for additional education at Hue but failed.

Vo Nguyen Giap in Time Magazine

He studied diligently and passed the exam in 1925. He attended school at the Quoc Hoc, which was a known seedbed of revolution; his leadership abilities and intelligence helped him excel as a student.

Giap then became a history teacher, a profession he retained throughout the 1930s. At the same time, he was active in various revolutionary movements. He joined the Communist Party in 1934, and assisted in founding the Democratic Front in 1936.

He was a devoted scholar of military tactics and studied Napoleon and the ancient Chinese military tactician Sunzi extensively. The French outlawed communism in 1939, so Giap, along with Ho Chi Minh, fled to China, where he studied guerrilla warfare.

From 1939 until around 1947 Giap was busy developing and directing the military plan that defeated the French and eventually caused the United States to abandon its efforts in Vietnam. It was a multifaceted plan that included gathering popular support for his efforts and mobilizing the people to join the communist cause.

Old Vo Nguyen Giap (2008)

Giap’s military strategies caused millions of people to lose their lives, including millions of Vietnamese, both North and South, and over 58,000 Americans. Many American soldiers were impressed with the diligence of the Vietnamese, the skill of the North Vietnamese army, and their discipline. Much of this was due to the leadership of Giap.

When the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was established in 1975, when North Vietnam conquered the south and united the nation, Giap served as deputy prime minister and minister of defense. After his retirement, he wrote several books. In 1992, he was awarded the Golden Star Award, Vietnam’s highest decorative honor.

Vietnam War

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was America’s longest war. In total, the conflict in Vietnam lasted from 1946 to 1975. The official dates of U.S. involvement were 1964–73. The Vietnam War was extremely costly and destructive and had a profound effect on both the soldiers who fought it and the civilians who lived through it. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was signed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and gave him the power to wage war in Vietnam.

Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, the Vietminh under Ho Chi Minh were fighting the French colonial presence in Vietnam. By 1954 the United States was paying 80 percent of the cost of France’s war against the Vietminh. In July 1954 the French and the Vietminh signed an armistice in Geneva, which divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel.

Ho Chi Minh controlled the north, and Vietnam-wide elections were to be held in 1956. The United States did not sign the agreement, and plans were put in place to stop Ho Chi Minh’s plans to conquer all of Vietnam. President Dwight Eisenhower was afraid that if Vietnam fell to communism, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow.


Not wanting Vietnam to be under the control of a communist leader, the United States pushed aside the French puppet leader and replaced him with Ngo Dinh Diem, a Vietnamese nationalist. Many were confident that Diem could rally Vietnam against communism. The United States increased aid to South Vietnam, and the first U.S. advisers arrived there in early 1955. These decisions laid the groundwork for the Vietnam War.

Ho Chi Minh was frustrated that Vietnam was not yet independent and unified, so in 1957 the Vietminh in South Vietnam began to revolt against the Diem regime. In May 1959 communist North Vietnam came to the aid of the revolutionaries in the south. As a result, the United States increased its aid to South Vietnam.

In South Vietnam conditions deteriorated rapidly. Diem’s regime never gained popular support. In 1960 anti-Diem communists and Buddhists created the National Liberation Front, with the Vietcong as its military wing, and began operations against Diem’s forces.

A young soldier being sent to vietnam

The United States had pledged in the 1954 South East Asia Treaty Organization pact to defend South Vietnam against external aggression, and President John F. Kennedy lived up to that obligation.

To Kennedy and other politicians, Vietnam was another cold war battlefield. Signs of weakness would lead the Soviet Union to believe that the United States was weak and vulnerable. As such, South Vietnam also became a testing facility for counter-insurgency units.

The U.S. Green Berets advised the South Vietnamese army, and civilians provided medical and technical aid and economic and political reforms, all in an effort to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese.

There was a general consensus in Kennedy’s administration about the consequences of losing Vietnam to communism; there were others who feared the worst. Undersecretary of State George Ball told Kennedy that within five years there would be 300,000 U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. However, Ball was incorrect: within five years nearly 400,000 soldiers were in Vietnam.

Female soldier, Vietnam war

Even with his advisers calling for escalation, Kennedy proceeded cautiously. By the middle of 1962 he had increased the number of military advisers from 700 to 12,000. He added another 5,000 in 1963.

As the number of casualties increased, the prospects of withdrawing became increasingly difficult. In the face of so many problems, Kennedy gave the order to overthrow Diem. On November 1, South Vietnamese military officials, with the assistance of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, arrested Diem and his brother.

While in custody, both were assassinated. However, the plan backfired. A number of inexperienced military officers took command in South Vietnam with little support and were unable to govern effectively. The country sank deeper into trouble and the role of the United States increased.

After President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, the issue of Vietnam fell to President Lyndon B. Johnson; Johnson was deeply troubled over Vietnam and had been for some time. During the rest of the months leading up to the November 1964 election, Johnson tried all he could to keep the issue of Vietnam in the background, fearing it would hurt his chances of being elected.

In many of his conversations with Robert McNamara, secretary of defense, Johnson discussed doing all he could to keep the public thinking that he had made no simpulan decisions on Vietnam.

Some advisers were trying to give Johnson suggestions for getting out of Vietnam and still saving face; meanwhile, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were advising him that preventing the loss of South Vietnam was of overriding importance to the United States.

Treating the wounded soldier

Robert McNamara visited Saigon. He reported to Johnson that conditions had worsened there since General Khanh took over power in January 1964. Many officials there favored increased pressure on North Vietnam, including air strikes. McNamara, aware of Johnson’s wish to be ambiguous to the public regarding his stance, offered to take a lot of the heat.

Johnson, knowing the conditions in Vietnam, understood that in order to achieve the ambitious conditions set out in McNamara’s policy statement, an escalation of military power in the country would have to be undertaken.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in Congress on August 7, 1964. It provided the legal authority for Johnson to escalate the Vietnam War. On August 2 North Vietnamese gunboats had attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 4 the Maddox and another vessel, the USS Turner Joy, reported being under attack.

Many doubts exist about whether or not the second attack actually took place, but the Johnson administration used it as a pretext for retaliation. Johnson ordered the first U.S. air strikes against North Vietnam. The resolution was passed 88-2.

Johnson won the 1964 presidential election by a landslide. In addition to his domestic agenda, the Great Society, Vietnam was the largest issue he dealt with. Still relying on trusted advisers like Richard Russell, even though he would not take his advice, Johnson had countless discussions about Vietnam.

Johnson’s rationalization was what he considered a treaty commitment inherited from Eisenhower and Kennedy. No matter what Johnson said to him, Russell stuck to his conviction that Vietnam was not the place to invest U.S. blood and treasure. Johnson told Everett Dirksen, Senate minority leader, that communist propaganda, his advice from Eisenhower, and the domino theory informed his policies with regard to Vietnam.

Major Escalation

US Air Force First Lieutenant being held captive by a young North Vietnamese girl,
Vietnam War, 1967

After July 1965 the war escalated into a major international conflict. The North Vietnamese army numbered in the thousands, and they supported an estimated National Liberation Front force of 80,000. From 6,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam in July 1965, the number increased to over 536,000 by 1968, with an additional 800,000 South Vietnamese troops.

Both sides played to their own strengths. The United States had great wealth, modern weapons, and a highly trained military force under the command of General William Westmoreland. Using bombing raids and search-and-destroy missions, it sought to force the opponent to surrender.

The National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese army, under the exceptional direction of Vo Nguyen Giap, used a different strategy altogether. They were lightly armed and knew the area. They relied on the guerrilla warfare tactics of stealth and mobility. Giap wanted to wear down the United States and its allies by harassment missions.

Between 1965 and 1967 the United States did untold amounts of damage to Vietnam. Bombing increased from 63,000 tons in 1965 to over 226,000 tons in 1967. The U.S. military strategy failed to produce clear results. The war dragged on, and opposition to the conflict in the United States intensified.

Countless protests took place in cities and on college campuses. Troops who returned home were often treated poorly, quite the opposite of the heroes’ welcome experienced by returning veterans of World War II.

The Tet Offensive of 1968 brought a new phase of the war. In late 1967 the North Vietnamese launched operations in remote areas to draw U.S. forces away from cities. On January 31, 1968, the National Liberation Front launched massive attacks on the unsecured urban areas.

F-4 bomb run Vietnam....help is on the way.

They led strikes on 36 provincial capitals, 5 major cities in the south, and 64 district capitals. They also attacked the U.S. embassy in Saigon and captured Hue for a period. Although the Tet Offensive failed overall, it had a profound psychological effect on the people of the United States.

Protests increased, and murmurs that the war was unwinnable became much more audible. As a result of developments in Vietnam and widespread unrest across the country, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection in 1968.

After the Tet Offensive, ensuing peace talks failed to produce any agreement. The dilema of Vietnam fell to the fourth U.S. president involved in the Vietnam conflict, Richard Nixon.

In 1969 he expanded the war into neighboring Cambodia, a move that he kept from the press, further increasing the gap in the people’s trust in the government when he went public about the decision in 1970. The domestic backlash led to a new wave of protests, during which four students died at Kent State University in Ohio, and two more at Jackson State University in Mississippi.

Photo by Art Greenspon/AP - Vietnam War. April 1968

Nixon’s involvement in Vietnam was marked by increased domestic opposition. After the Cambodian affair, Congress repealed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The trial of Lieutenant William Calley, commander of a unit that murdered 500 South Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, raised fundamental susila questions about the war.

Finally, the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, which deepened public distrust in the government. Polls showed that more than 70 percent of Americans felt that the United States had erred when it sent troops into Vietnam. During 1972–73 the U.S. phase of the war ended.

A peace agreement was signed in Paris on January 27, 1973. It allowed for the extraction of U.S. military forces from Vietnam and the return of U.S. prisoners of war but did not address the fundamental issues over which the war had been fought.

North Vietnam was allowed to leave 150,000 troops in the south, and the future of South Vietnam was not directly and clearly spelled out. Fighting broke out between the north and the south, and the U.S. Congress drastically cut military and economic aid to South Vietnam.

When Richard Nixon resigned because of the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War issue was passed to its fifth president, Gerald Ford. Congress rejected his request for $722 million in aid for South Vietnam, agreeing to only $300 million in emergency aid to extract the remaining U.S. personnel from the south. The climax of this came on May 1, 1975, with a harrowing rooftop helicopter evacuation.

Those who never return

The total cost of the war was extensive. South Vietnamese military casualties exceeded 350,000, and estimates of North Vietnamese losses range between 500,000 and 1 million. Civilian deaths cannot be accurately counted but ran into the millions. More than 58,000 U.S. troops were killed, and over 300,000 were injured. The total financial cost of the war exceeded $167 billion.

Many of Johnson’s Great Society reforms were cut back because of the increased military expenditures. Veterans returning home experienced long-lasting effects, which ranged from flashbacks to posttraumatic stress disorder to the effects of exposure to chemicals. Furthermore, the war saw no tangible results. Once the United States evacuated Saigon, the North overran the city, and Vietnam was united under communist rule.

Republic of Vietnam

The flag of the Republic of Vietnam Military Forces.
Used from 1955 to 1975.

The Republic of Vietnam was the portion of southern Vietnam that fought against communist North Vietnam in the Second Indochina War (Vietnam War). It was created after the defeat of previous colonial masters, the French, and ceased to exist with the seizure of its capital, Saigon, by communist forces.

Southern Vietnam was historically the home of the Cham peoples. When the French arrived in the 19th century, they made the southern part of the country, which they named Cochin-China, a full colony. It was, therefore, more firmly French-run than the rest of Indochina.

Saigon was more thoroughly internationalized than the remainder of the country, and the people were more familiar with the capitalist system and French culture. The French created the state of Vietnam in 1949, which centered on the Cochin-China colony and had the emperor as head of state.


The defeat of the French and the Geneva Conference of 1954 established the state as occupying the territory south of the 17th parallel. In the following year the Republic of Vietnam was announced after Emperor Bao Dai was deposed.

The first president of the republic was Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been involved in the ousting of the emperor and who adopted an authoritarian approach to ruling the country. When Diem was deposed and killed, a brief interlude under Nguyen Cao Ky was succeeded by military rule, which began in 1965.

In 1967 Nguyen Van Thieu was elected president and then was reelected unopposed four years later. Despite the massive outlay of lives and materiél to resist the North Vietnamese, after the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 1973 as a result of the Paris Accord, the capture of Saigon in 1975 seems to have been inevitable.

Ngo Dinh Diem

Although the Republic of Vietnam had developed a sophisticated bicameral parliamentary system, its existence was tainted more or less throughout by corruption and by the authoritarian rule of its presidents and rulers.

A number of people have characterized the state as little more than a puppet U.S. state, and certainly it would not have lasted so long without large scale U.S. military support.

However, it would be scarcely fair to consider the presidents of the republic, notably Nguyen Van Thieu, as mere puppets. Indeed Nguyen Van Thieu was often trenchant in his criticisms of U.S. leaders and intransigent in pursuing policies of his own devising.

Democratic Republic of Vietnam

Democratic Republic of Vietnam flag

The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), or North Vietnam, as it became commonly known after the 1954 Geneva Accords, came into existence on September 2, 1945. Following the Japanese surrender in World War II, Vietnamese Communist Party (Vietminh) leader Ho Chi Minh seized the opportunity and declared Vietnamese independence.

Vietminh strength was centered in the north. The French, however, were disinclined to accept this, and moved to reimpose their colonial rule over the entire region. They quickly established control in the south, although they could not effectively control the countryside.

Since the French and the Vietminh hoped to avoid a full-scale war, both sides entered into intermittent negotiations. In March 1946 the French provisionally recognized the DRV in exchange for Ho’s agreement to include the north in a proposed French Union.


Final agreement remained elusive, however, and the relationship between the two sides continued to deteriorate. In November 1946 the French shelled the port of Haiphong. Ho and his supporters escaped into the mountains in the north and began a war of nation-wide resistance.

The war against the French unfolded against the backdrop of the emerging cold war. On the battlefield, the Vietminh relied on the military genius of General Vo Nguyen Giap. They also seized land belonging to French landowners and alleged traitors and redistributed it to peasants, winning popular support.

The French were decisively defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. At the Geneva Conference that followed, Ho was pressured by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China to accept a compromise.

The result was the partitioning of Vietnam, with the promise of nationwide elections in 1956. Those elections never took place. Although he had envisioned the establishment of an independent government over all of Vietnam, Ho had to accept a truncated Democratic Republic of Vietnam north of the 17th parallel.

With the official formation of the DRV, North Vietnam became the first communist state in Southeast Asia, with Ho Chi Minh as president and Hanoi as its capital. Political power rested in the Communist Party, or the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), as it had been renamed in 1951. The power nucleus of the VWP was the Politburo, which was responsible for day-to-day decision making.

The primary task that confronted Ho and his colleagues was the need to consolidate their rule. At Geneva the DRV leadership had issued a directive that indicated its intention to proceed cautiously and take gradual steps toward establishing a socialist economy.

In order to reassure the population, the government announced that the country would operate with a mixed economy, indicating acceptance of private wealth and property. At the same time, the government also stated its intention to respect the freedom of religion.

These pronouncements failed to reassure many in the north, and after the partition some 800,000 refugees made the trek south. An official policy of fair treatment for Catholics notwithstanding, many leaders in the VWP and others in local party and government structures continued to nurture suspicion of them, and harsh treatment of Catholics bred resentment in some areas.

The economy, which had been devastated by years of war, posed a tremendous challenge to the government. Moreover, fleeing refugees left many businesses abandoned. The DRV government moved to nationalize certain sectors of the economy such as utilities, banking, and some large enterprises. Prices and wages also came under government regulation.

The industrial sector had remained underdeveloped under French rule. In 1961 the government launched the first Five-Year Plan to develop heavy industry. By the middle of the decade war with the United States diverted resources from industrial development and stalled these efforts.

The agricultural sector required immediate attention since food was in chronically short supply. This, as well as the need to win over the rural population, seemed to demand land reform. In 1955 the government launched a agenda to confiscate land from wealthy landlords for redistribution.

The land reform program, however, produced mixed results. On the positive side it increased the rates of landownership, increased rice production, reduced the influence of wealthy landlords, and won the support of numerous poor peasants who reaped the benefits.

On the negative side, overzealous cadres and poor peasants often denounced those who owned only medium-sized holdings, and local tribunals executed many. In 1956 the hostility eventually erupted in a peasant uprising in the province of Nghe An.

Ho Chi Minh publicly admitted that errors had been made and slowed the pace of land reform. But within two years the government initiated a large-scale collectivization effort that brought most of the rural population into some form of state-controlled cooperative farming.

The VWP also created party-run organizations that recruited different segments of Vietnamese society, including veterans, workers, farmers, youths, and women. By mobilizing the population into various communist-led organizations, the VWP realized its domination of Vietnamese society.

The consolidation and nation-building efforts in the north also included increasingly harsh efforts to silence criticism and dissent. Freedom of expression was curbed. Authors of protest literature came under increasing public attack from 1958 onward. Culprits were sent to work in agricultural cooperatives or work camps to be reeducated.

The South Vietnamese government’s decision to boycott the elections planned for 1956 compelled the North Vietnamese leadership to decide the priority it would give to reunification. By and large the DRV leadership decided to adhere to the decision to build socialism in the north while searching for some means to reunify the country. Debates in the VWP Central Committee in the mid-1950s, however, suggested that the leadership anticipated reunification to be realizable only after a military struggle.

In 1959 the VWP shifted to a more activist approach and began to approve efforts to increase pressure on Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime in the south. By this point a broad-based resistance movement against Diem had gained strength. In late 1960, largely at the behest of southern cadres, the National Liberation Front was created as an umbrella organization that rallied a broad range of anti-Diem resistance.

The road to the reunification of Vietnam led the DRV to war against the United States, whose commitment to a noncommunist South Vietnam had grown steadily. Between 1965 and 1973 U.S. combat troops fought in the Vietnam War. Some evidence suggests that Hanoi had begun infiltrating troops into the south in late 1964. Supplies and men flowed south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia.

In January 1973, after several rounds of peace talks, the Paris Peace Accords ended U.S. involvement. The cease-fire between north and south broke down, and the war resumed. On April 30, 1975, victorious North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon and achieved Ho’s dream of a unified Vietnam. In his honor Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976, in a country now renamed the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Nguyen Van Thieu - South Vietnamese Leader

Nguyen Van Thieu

Nguyen Van Thieu was president of South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) from 1967 until it fell to the Communist North Vietnamese forces in 1975. He played a major part in the U.S. war in Vietnam and lived the remainder of his life in exile.

Nguyen Van Thieu was the son of a small landowning family in a Vietnam colonized by the French. He aspired to freedom for his country and joined Ho Chi Minh’s liberation struggle in 1945.

However, he subsequently defected to fight on the side of the French against his former allies. His ability as a military leader was soon recognized and, from 1954, he took command of the Vietnamese Military Academy of South Vietnam after it won independence from France.

He served under Ngo Dinh Diem but also took part in Ngo’s assassination in 1963, with the tacit support of U.S. authorities. He subsequently took a leading role in Nguyen Cao Ky’s military government, and was elected president of the Republic of Vietnam in 1967 and then reelected unopposed in 1971.


Nguyen Van Theiu’s administration tended toward authoritarianism, with U.S. support possibly because the United States had no alternatives. Nguyen Van Thieu was nevertheless critical of U.S. policies and politicians.

He resented their lack of interest in Vietnamese culture and history, refusal to learn the Vietnamese language, and demands for democracy. Even as he was airlifted out of Saigon in 1975 just before it fell to communism, he accused the United States of running away and abandoning his country.

He was as an ally of U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson and then Richard Nixon, as he led the South Vietnamese state against the Communist forces. He worked with U.S. military advisers and then with the large-scale deployment of U.S. and allied forces. As the Communists gained ground, he agreed to participate in negotiations that resulted in the peace agreement of 1973.

As U.S. forces withdrew from South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese advanced, he ordered all South Vietnamese forces to protect Saigon, but was unsuccessful. As the city fell he resigned as president and fled to exile, first in London and then in the United States.

Ngo Dinh Diem - South Vietnamese Leader

Ngo Dinh Diem - South Vietnamese Leader

Ngo Dinh Diem was president of South Vietnam from 1955 until his death in 1963. He was born into a privileged family from the Vietnamese elite. Ngo Dinh Diem’s ancestors were among the first to convert Vietnamese to Catholicism in the 17th century. As a Catholic, he was closely aligned with the French colonial rule in Vietnam.

In 1933 Ngo Dinh Diem was appointed to the Ministry of the Interior under the emperor Bao Dai, who ruled under French tutelage. However, he was soon forced to resign since the French opposed his proposed reforms. For 12 years he resided in Hue without holding public office. He did not return to power until 1954, when Bao Dai invited him to join his new government.

Nevertheless, within a year he had engineered the ousting of the emperor and established himself as president of South Vietnam with dictatorial powers. He had been able to achieve this because of the support of the United States, which believed that his opposition to communism would make him the best candidate to lead a pro-Western united Vietnam.


The United States was soon frustrated by Ngo Dinh Diem’s intransigence and refusal to accede to the terms under which the United States had backed him. These included most notably the implementation of the Geneva Accords, which required general elections throughout the country in 1956. Instead he appointed members of his family to senior positions within the administration.

When it became clear that he had no intention of following U.S. policies, U.S. authorities withdrew their support and permitted Vietnamese army officers to assassinate him in November 1963.

Indochina War (First and Second)

Indochina War

The French colonization of Indochina—consisting of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—was completed when Laos became a French protectorate in 1893. World War II opened new avenues for anticolonial movements in Southeast Asia.

In the wake of the Japanese occupation of Indochina, the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) set up the Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi (League for the Independence of Vietnam), or Vietminh.

He gave the call in August 1945 to liberate Vietnam. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), or North Vietnam, was established on September 2, 1945, after the formal Japanese surrender on the same day.

Laos and Cambodia did likewise. But the French were in no mood to give up Indochina. The Vietminh was ordered by the French to lay down arms, but they attacked the French troops in Hanoi on December 19, 1946. Thus the First Indochina War began.

The Khmer Issarack, the Free Khmers of Son Ngoc Thanh (1907–76), were aligned with the Vietminh. In Laos, the Pathet Lao under Souphanouvong (1901–95) also fought against the French. The three communist factions formally formed the Viet-KhmerLao alliance on March 11, 1951.

In the cold war period, the United States followed a containment strategy and helped France by giving it military aid. It amounted to 85 percent of the French Indochinese budget, and it provided up to 40 percent of the military budget of France during the First Indo-china War by 1952.

In March 1949 the southern part of Vietnam became an associate state within the French Union, along with Laos and Cambodia. By 1950 South Vietnam had been recognized by the United States and Great Britain.

Vietnamese army

The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 was very favorable to the DRV. China recognized the government of Hanoi and supplied military matériel according to an agreement of April 1, 1950. The Soviet Union and its East European allies also recognized the DRV.

The actual combatants in the First Indochina War were the Vietminh, the Pathet Lao, and the Khmer Issarack fighting against the French. The Vietminh resorted to guerrilla warfare. By 1950 the Vietminh had established complete control over the northern free zone, and the communists had strengthened their position in Laos and Cambodia.

The commander in chief of the Vietminh, Vo Nguyen Giap (1911– ), was an expert on modern guerrilla warfare and led the army of Vietnam from its inception. His strategy of dispersing French troops and capturing weak outposts had paid off well.

By 1952 half of the villages of the Red River Delta were under his control. The war was becoming unpopular in France, with a heavy loss of men from the French Expeditionary Corps and matériel. General Henri Navarre (1898–1983), the commander of the French forces, had captured the town of Dien Bien Phu, 16 kilometers from the Lao border, in November 1953.

Navarre established a fortified camp and was convinced of a North Vietnamese attack so as to open the road to Laos. Giap did not make any assault and instead surrounded the camp with about 50,000 soldiers of the Vietnamese People’s Army. The siege of Dien Bien Phu began on March 13, 1954, and 11,000 French troops were entrapped. The Vietminh artillery cut off the supply by air to the French troops.

French Surrender

On May 7 Dien Bien Phu fell, and the next day the Geneva Conference on Indochina began. The Geneva Conference divided Vietnam temporarily along the 17th parallel into two states, North and South Vietnam. Elections would be held two years afterward to decide unification of the two Vietnams.

On November 7, 1953, Cambodia became independent, two days later; Norodom Sihanouk (1922– ) returned to form a government. The conference recognized the Pathet Lao as a political party with control over the Phong Saly and Sam Neua Provinces.

Although there is no disagreement over the Second Indochina War ending in 1975, there is controversy about the year of its beginning. The years 1954, 1957, 1959, and 1960 have been named as the starting point.

Most authorities agree on 1959, when the central committee of the Lao Dong Party in January called for armed struggle in South Vietnam to achieve the goal of unification. Gradually the whole of Indochina would be involved in war because the Geneva Conference of 1954 did not resolve the Vietnamese problem, and all the signatories violated its provisions.

The United States provided military and economic assistance to Ngo Dinh Diem (1901–63), the president of South Vietnam. Diem refused to hold the elections called for in the Geneva Conference to decide about unification.

Compared to the weakness of Diem’s regime, Hanoi under Ho was politically stable and increased support to the communist factions in Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. In September 1960 Le Duan (1908–86), the secretary of the Lao Dong Party, called for the overthrow of Diem’s government to achieve the goal of unification.

Le Duan had earlier led the independence struggle against France in the south. The Ho Chi Minh Trail passing through Laos and Cambodia was the main supply route for North Vietnam to send convoys carrying supplies to the Vietcong in South Vietnam.

The U.S. commitment to South Vietnam strengthened during President John F. Kennedy’s administration (1961–63), when the dispatch of American Green Beret “special advisers” to South Vietnam began. In August 1964 the USS Maddox was attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats, creating the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Although the veracity of the incident was questioned afterward, the U.S. Congress gave full authority to President Lyndon B. Johnson to retaliate. The Vietnam War escalated, with the survival of South Vietnam a primary consideration for Johnson, who had reaffirmed the policy of Kennedy.

The United States aimed at eliminating the Vietcong by bombing, chemical warfare, and counterinsurgency operations. Combat troops were sent in 1965, and their number reached 500,000 three years later.

During the Tet (Vietnamese New Year) Offensive of January 1968, the communists attacked major cities of South Vietnam. Meanwhile, domestic dissent in the United States regarding the Vietnam War was gathering momentum.

The coup by General Lon Nol (1913–85) in Cambodia on March 18, 1970, added a new dimension to the Second Indochina War. On April 21 the United Indochinese Front was established.

The summit conference three days afterward in southern China was attended by Pham Van Dong representing North Vietnam, Norodom Sihanouk as head of the National United Front of Cambodia, Souphanouvong from the Pathet Lao, and Nguyen Huu Tho as a representative of the provisional government of South Vietnam. The delegates called for unity in fighting against the United States.

The objectives of the 1971 U.S. attack on Laos were to cut the trail and prevent North Vietnam from attacking northern areas of South Vietnam. With 9,000 U.S. and 20,000 South Vietnamese troops, the campaign lasted for 45 days and resulted in a disastrous defeat of South Vietnam.

US army in vietnam war

The objective of cutting off the trail could not be achieved. The failure of South Vietnamese ground troops in spite of air support showed that it was not ready to take over a ground combat role from the United States.

The lessening of tension in the international arena had its impact on the Paris Peace Talks, which had started on January 23, 1969. The Sino-U.S. rapprochement, growing domestic opposition to the war, increasing success of communists in battlefields, the mounting cost of the war, and the loss of life of U.S. soldiers compelled the United States to disengage from Vietnam.

The Paris Peace Agreements on Vietnam were signed on January 27, 1973. It was only a matter of time before the communists would score the simpulan victory. On April 30, 1975, communist forces entered the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. The two Vietnams were reunited officially in January 1976.

On December 2, 1975, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) was formed. The government of Lon Nol in Cambodia was ousted by the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975. By 1975 the whole of Indochina was communist, and the Second Indochina War was over.