Name: __________________________
Date: ________________
Section: 12.1
12.2
12.3
(circle one)
Modern World History
The First Indochina War
Do Now
Use last night’s homework, if necessary, to answer the following questions. (Phrases,
sentence fragments, or bullet-pointed lists are fine – but you must use your own words!)
1. What did Ho Chi Minh negotiate for with the French after the end of World War II?
What were his goals?
2. Why did war break out between France and Indochina?
3. What tactics did the Vietnamese use in the First Indochina War? (Hint: if you don’t
know what “guerilla” means, you should probably look it up.)
4. What did the Geneva Accords do about the future of Vietnam?
Exit Ticket
Who fought the First Indochina War, and how did it end?
8
Awesome
7
Solid
6
Getting there
5
Needs serious
work
4
Missed the point
completely
Timeline: The First Indochina War
Arrange the following events in chronological order, from earliest to latest. Include dates.
 Battle of Dien Bien Phu
 Chinese Communists begin delivering aid to the Viet Minh
 Clash between French and Vietnamese at Haiphong
 Communists take over China
 First Indochina War begins
 Geneva Conventions signed
 US begins delivering aid to France
 Vietnam and France begin negotiating over independence
 Vietnam becomes independent
 Vietnam declares independence
 Vietnam divided into North and South
 WWII ends
Supplementary Reading: Edwin E. Moise, “The First Indochina War,” The Vietnam
Wars, 1998, http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/facultypages/edmoise/viet3.html.
From 1946 to 1950, the war was essentially stalemated. The French had overwhelming
superiority in weapons; the French Army could take and hold any particular area it really
wanted. However, the French had to bring soldiers from thousands of miles away, and it
was not politically practical for France to send a really large number of French soldiers to
Vietnam. The Viet Minh [Ho Chi Minh’s army, which supported both independence and
Communism], better able to recruit soldiers locally, had a considerable edge in manpower.
There were basically three types of areas in Vietnam. 1) Some areas were firmly controlled
by the French. Although Viet Minh agents and underground organizers operated in these
areas to some extent, the Viet Minh could not afford to conduct real military operations in
these areas. 2) Some areas were firmly held by the Viet Minh. French forces could fight
their way into such areas when they were determined to do so, but this did not happen
very often, both because it was expensive, and because the French were short of manpower
for such operations. 3) The most important fighting took place in the intermediate areas-the places where both sides had troops. Viet Minh guerrillas hid, sometimes in the jungle
but usually in the villages. The French could not destroy these guerrillas because they were
so hard to find. It was very difficult to tell a guerrilla from an ordinary peasant. Most
peasants would not tell the French anything about Viet Minh activities, but would tell the
Viet Minh all about what the French were doing. The result was that the Viet Minh could
stage many surprise attacks and ambushes, while the French could not often locate the
guerrillas to make a counter-attack…
There were some Vietnamese who opposed the Viet Minh. Eventually, the French formed a
puppet government, the "State of Vietnam", and claimed to be fighting alongside this
Vietnamese organization to save Vietnam from Communism. However, the French never
got a great deal of benefit from this puppet government…
In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party won control of China. By early 1950, the new
Communist government in Beijing had established its control of the areas of China that
border on Vietnam. For the first time, the Viet Minh was able to get significant quantities of
weapons beyond what it could manufacture in the jungle or capture on the battlefield.
This changed the whole pattern of the war. The amount of weapons coming in from China
was not large. The US, which began aiding France at about the same time China began
aiding the Viet Minh, provided far more aid to France than China did to the Viet Minh. At
the end of the war the French still estimated that they had about a five-to-one advantage in
artillery. A five-to-one advantage in artillery, however, was not enough to allow the French
to win or even to hold on. The artillery advantage of sixteen to one that the French had had
in 1950 had been barely enough to compensate for the overwhelming superiority of the
Viet Minh in manpower and peasant support. As soon as the Chinese began supplying even
modest quantities of heavy weapons to the Viet Minh, the French were doomed. By 1954
the Viet Minh had won the war.
In the spring of 1954, the Viet Minh took the French outpost at Dien Bien Phu, in the
highlands at the northwest corner of Tonkin. This was an area where hardly any
Vietnamese lived, and where the Viet Minh could not therefore expect local support. The
French had put thousands of men there, far away from other French forces, assuming that
the Viet Minh would not be able to transport enough men, supplies, and equipment through
the mountains and jungle to mount an effective attack. The Viet Minh, however, mobilized
tens of thousands of civilians from distant areas to carve roads through the jungle and help
with transportation. Many peasants walked along these trails wheeling bicycles with loads
of hundreds of pounds. The Viet Minh concentrated far more artillery in the hills around
Dien Bien Phu than they had ever put into one place before. Once the Viet Minh artillery
and anti-aircraft guns had made it impossible for the French to land planes at Dien Bien
Phu to deliver supplies, the French position became almost hopeless.
The United States considered intervening by air to save the French garrison at Dien Bien
Phu, but eventually decided not to do so. President Eisenhower did not think a small
increase in US aid to the French would do any good, and he was not willing to commit the
US to a really massive increase in its role in Indochina.
Some people talk about the Battle of Dien Bien Phu as if it were the main reason the French
lost the war, but this is a serious exaggeration. Dien Bien Phu was the biggest single battle
the Viet Minh won, but to understand the real nature of the Viet Minh victory, it is more
useful to look at the way they took over most of the Red River Delta--the area near Hanoi-without any such grand battle. The French had concentrated much of their strength in the
Red River Delta. They had far more artillery there than the Viet Minh. They had air support
while the Viet Minh had none. In the Red River Delta (unlike most areas) the French even
had more soldiers than the Viet Minh. But most of the peasants sided with the Viet Minh, so
small groups of Viet Minh could move about the countryside, even operate in villages in
which French troops were stationed, without the French being able to locate and destroy
these Viet Minh units. The French troops spent most of their time huddled in their outposts,
wondering when the next surprise attack was going to come. The Viet Minh in fact ruled the
Delta by 1954 even though they had fewer troops there than the French.
In the areas that it ruled, the Viet Minh had to decide between two policy goals. On the one
hand, Communist ideals required supporting the poor against the rich, which in the
Vietnamese countryside meant supporting the poor peasants, especially tenants, against
wealthy landlords. On the other hand, many landlords supported the Viet Minh in its
struggle against the French, and the Viet Minh leadership was reluctant to weaken the
struggle for independence by alienating such landlords. In the early years of the war, the
Viet Minh stressed nationalist struggle, and did not pay much attention to organizing class
struggle pitting the poor against the rich. After 1949, and especially after 1953, the Viet
Minh paid more attention to the particular interests of the poor. The amount that landlords
could charge for rented land were reduced; in some cases rents were abolished completely,
and the land simply became the property of the peasants who farmed it. Some debts that
the peasants owed to landlords were cancelled. The Viet Minh established a tax system that
placed most of the burden of taxation on the well-to-do.
Edwin E. Moise, “The Geneva Accords,” The Vietnam Wars, 1998,
http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/facultypages/edmoise/viet4.html.
By the middle of 1954, the French realized that they had lost. The US, which by this time
was paying most of France's war expenses, was unable to persuade the French to fight on.
An international conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland to discuss the problems of
Indochina. On July 20 and 21, 1954, this conference produced a number of agreements that
were supposed to settle the war.
The Geneva Accords stated that Vietnam was to become an independent nation. Elections
were to be held in July 1956, under international supervision, to choose a government for
Vietnam. During the two-year interval until the elections, the country would be split into
two parts; the North and the South. The dividing line chosen, at the seventeenth parallel a
little north of the city of Hue, was quite close to the line that had separated the two halves
of Vietnam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but this was purely a coincidence.
This line no longer corresponded to any natural division in Vietnamese society, in
economy, political structure, religion, or dialect. It was an arbitrary compromise between
French proposals for a line further north and Viet Minh proposals for a line further south.
All Viet Minh soldiers were to go to the North; all soldiers who had fought for the French
were to go to the South. Civilians would also be able to move if they wished to do so.
(Hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese, mostly Catholics, did move from North to
South Vietnam in 1954 and 1955. A smaller number of Viet Minh sympathisers moved from
South to North.)
For the Viet Minh the Geneva Accords were a gamble. The Viet Minh controlled much more
than half of Vietnam in 1954; when it allowed the country to be divided approximately in
half, it was giving up a great deal of territory south of the seventeenth parallel that had
been under Viet Minh control for years, exchanging this for only a small area under French
control north of the seventeenth parallel. On the other hand, if the elections were actually
held as promised in 1956, the Viet Minh appeared certain to win; it had far more political
strength than all other political groups in Vietnam put together.
Under considerable pressure from China and the Soviet Union, both of which wanted to
reduce international tension at this time, the Viet Minh decided to accept the Geneva
Accords, and gamble by giving up territory in the short run in order to win control of all of
Vietnam in 1956. The division of Vietnam was supposed to be purely temporary… The
United States and the State of Vietnam had made it clear at the Geneva Conference that they
did not like the results of the conference, which recognized Communist control of North
Vietnam immediately, and created a likelihood that the Communists would take the South
in two years. Both the US and the State of Vietnam conspicuously refused to promise that
they would obey the Geneva Accords.
Name: __________________________
Date: ________________
Section: 12.1
12.2
12.3
(circle one)
Modern World History
HW 2.11: The US at Dien Bien Phu
Source: Julian Jackson, “Dien Bien Phu: Did the US Offer France an A-Bomb?”, BBC News
Magazine, May 4, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27243803.
"Would you like two atomic bombs?" These are the words that
a senior French diplomat remembered US Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles asking the French Foreign Minister,
Georges Bidault, in April 1954. The context of this
extraordinary offer was the critical plight of the French army
fighting the nationalist forces of Ho Chi Minh at Dien Bien Phu
in the highlands of north-west Vietnam.
The battle of Dien Bien Phu is today overshadowed by the later
involvement of the Americans in Vietnam in the 1960s. But for
eight years between 1946 and 1954 the French had fought
their own bloody war to hold on to their Empire in the Far
East. After the seizure of power by the Communists in China in
1949, this colonial conflict had become a key battleground of
the Cold War. The Chinese provided the Vietnamese with arms
and supplies while most of the costs of the French war effort were borne by America. But it
was French soldiers who were fighting and dying. By 1954, French forces in Indochina
totalled over 55,000.
At the end of 1953, French commander in chief Gen Navarre had decided to set up a
fortified garrison in the valley of Dien Bien Phu, in the highlands about 280 miles from the
northern capital of Hanoi. The valley was surrounded by rings of forested hills and
mountains. The position was defensible providing the French could hold on to the inner
hills and keep their position supplied through the airstrip. What they underestimated was
the capacity of the Vietnamese to amass artillery behind the hills. This equipment was
transported by tens of thousands of labourers - many of them women and children carrying material hundreds of miles through the jungle day and night. On 13 March the
Vietnamese unleashed a massive barrage of artillery and within two days two of the
surrounding hills had been taken, and the airstrip was no longer usable. The French
defenders were now cut off and the noose tightened around them.
It was this critical situation which led the French to appeal in desperation for US help. The
most hawkish on the American aide were Vice-President Richard Nixon, who had no
political power, and Admiral Radford, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Also quite hawkish
was the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was obsessed by the crusade against
Communism. More reserved was President Eisenhower who nonetheless gave a press
conference in early April where he proclaimed the infamous "domino theory" about the
possible spread of Communism from one country to another.
"You have a row of dominoes set up,
you knock over the first one, and what
will happen to the last one is the
certainty that it will go over very
quickly," he said. "So you could have a
beginning of a disintegration that
would have the most profound
influences."
Saturday 3 April 1954 has gone down
in American history as "the day we didn't go to war". On that day Dulles met Congressional
leaders who were adamant they would not support any military intervention unless Britain
was also involved. Eisenhower sent a letter to the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
warning of the consequences for the West if Dien Bien Phu fell. It was around this time, at a
meeting in Paris, that Dulles supposedly made his astonishing offer to the French of tactical
nuclear weapons.
In fact, Dulles was never authorised to make such an offer and there is no hard evidence
that he did so. It seems possible that in the febrile atmosphere of those days the panicstricken French may simply have misunderstood him. Or his words may have got lost in
translation.
"He didn't really offer. He made a suggestion and asked a question. He uttered the two fatal
words 'nuclear bomb'," Maurice Schumann, a former foreign minister, said before his death
in 1998. "Bidault immediately reacted as if he didn't take this offer seriously."
According to Professor Fred Logevall of Cornell University, Dulles "at least talked in very
general terms about the possibility, what did the French think about potentially using two
or three tactical nuclear weapons against these enemy positions".
Bidault declined, he says, "because he knew… that if this killed a lot of Viet Minh troops
then it would also basically destroy the garrison itself".
In the end, there was no American intervention of any kind, as the British refused to go
along with it.
The last weeks of the battle of Dien Bien Phu were atrociously gruelling. The ground turned
to mud once the monsoon began, and men clung to craters and ditches in conditions
reminiscent of the battle of Verdun in 1916. On 7 May 1954, after a 56-day siege, the
French army surrendered. Overall on the French side there were 1,142 dead, 1,606
disappeared, 4,500 more or less badly wounded. Vietnamese casualties ran to 22,000.
In this year marked by two other major anniversaries - the centenary of the outbreak of
World War One and the 70th anniversary of D-Day - we should not forget this other battle
that took place 60 years ago. In the history of decolonisation it was the only time a
professional European army was decisively defeated in a pitched battle. It marked the end
of the French Empire in the Far East, and provided an inspiration to other anti-colonial
fighters. It was no coincidence also that a few weeks later a violent rebellion broke out in
French Algeria - the beginning of another bloody and traumatic war that was to last eight
years. The French army held so desperately on to Algeria partly to redeem the honour it
felt had been lost at Dien Bien Phu. So obsessed did the army become by this idea that in
1958 it backed a putsch against the government, which it believed was preparing what the
generals condemned as a "diplomatic Dien Bien Phu". This putsch brought back to power
Gen de Gaulle who set up the new presidential regime that exists in France today. So the
ripples of Dien Bien Phu are still being felt.
It was also in 1954 that France began working on its own independent nuclear deterrent.
For the Vietnamese, however, Dien Bien Phu, was only the first round. The Americans, who
had refused to become directly involved in 1954, were gradually sucked into war - the
second Vietnam War - during the 1960s.
Key Terms: “domino theory” (date: 1954)