The Indochina War: A Connected History

Christopher E. Goscha
Source: Christopher E. Goscha, Dictionary of the Indochina War: International and
Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, paratre en
2011.
Like so many others of the 20th century, the Indochina War was not one war, but
several. It was a colonial and civil conflict, a hotspot in the Cold War, as well as a social,
cultural, intellectual, ideological, and economic battle for many. The conflict not only
divided the French and the Vietnamese, but it also affected the Lao, Cambodians, and
ethnic minorities and involved the Chinese, British, Soviets, Thais, Indians, and
Americans. The Indochina War was all of this and more.
At the outset, it was above all a clash between opposing French and Vietnamese
nationalist projects over who would control the Indochinese space left blank after the
Japanese brought down colonial house in Indochina in March 1945 and were then
defeated themselves a few months later. Would Indochina remain a part of the French
imperial nation-state which Charles de Gaulle counted on rebuilding or would it be
decolonized into one or more modern nation-states under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh
and his Lao and Cambodian partners?1 Or perhaps something in between, defined along
the lines of the British Commonwealth? Both of these mens projects had crystallized
during World War II, a global conflict that had unleashed momentous change. On the one
hand, the French empire had been crucial to the national survival of Charles de Gaulles

On the notion of the imperial nation-state, see: Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State : Ngritude and
Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Stein Tnnesson
also underscores the emergence of two opposing national projects in his Vietnam 1946 : How the War Began,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

resistance government contesting Vichys France. For de Gaulle, Algeria was French and
so was Indochina. In 1943, following the Allied liberation of North Africa, de Gaulle
established the Comit franais de la libration nationale (CFLN) in Algiers. Less than a
year later, thanks to the Allies and a remarkably multi-ethnic imperial army, de Gaulle
returned from exile to lead a newly liberated France.2 And for de Gaulle and many other
French nationalists of all political stripes, the restoration of Frances national and
international identity would turn on the liberation, maintenance, and recovery of all of the
empire, including the missing Indochinese piece. In Brazzaville in early 1944 and again
in the declaration on Indochina in late March 1945, Free French colonial officials such as
Henri Laurentie and Lon Pignon hammered out a package of seemingly liberal colonial
reforms designed to provide increased autonomy to restless colonies in order to counter
the growing tide of colonial nationalism generated by the rapid French defeat in 1940, by
World War, and the intrusion of international actors, not least of all the United States (in
North Africa and Indochina).3 The term French Union replaced the suddenly outdated
word Empire; and Indochina would serve as the litmus test for a new federal
conception of colonial renewal. Decolonization, even cast within the framework of a
commonwealth such as that proposed by the British, was unimaginable in the official
French mind of 1945, tantamount to another national humiliation, a debacle on the scale
of June 1940.4 In September 1945, de Gaulle chose an Admiral, Georges Thierry
dArgenlieu, to serve as his new high commissioner for Indochina, ordering him to retake
2
3

Indeed, the Free French Army was largely a colonial one, not an ethnic French one.

Martin Shipway, The Road to War: France and Vietnam, 1944-1947, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996).
4
Stanley Hoffmann, Le trame de 1940, in Jean-Pierre Azma and Franois Bdarida, eds., La France des annes
noires, 1. De la dfaite Vichy, (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000), p. 152. On Indochina, decolonization and the French
colonial mind, see the remarkably prescient essay signed by none other than Paul Mus, head of the Colonial Academy
between 1946 and 1950. Paul Mus, Le destin de lUnion franaise, de lIndochine lAfrique, (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1954) and David Chandler and Christopher Goscha (eds.), Lespace dun regard: Paul Mus, (Paris: Les Indes Savantes,
2006).

and to re-establish French sovereignty over all of Indochina in the form of an eventual
Indochinese Federation.5
Like de Gaulle, Ho Chi Minh had also created a nationalist front during World War
II.6 It was located just outside Japanese-controlled Indochina and was designed to prepare
the recovery of Vietnamese national sovereignty once the Allies had defeated the
Japanese as they had done for de Gaulle by defeating the Germans in Europe. In 1941, in
Pac Bo, a collection of caves located along the Sino-Vietnamese border, Ho Chi Minh
presided over the formation of the Viet Minh Doc Lap Dong Minh or the Vietnamese
Independence League (or, for short, Viet Minh). Led by the Indochinese Communist
Party, this broad-based nationalist front was designed to attract support from all segments
of Vietnamese society in favor of national independence. On 19 August 1945, a few days
after the Japanese capitulation to the Allies, but before the Gaullists could land their
troops, the communist-led Viet Minh rode a famine-driven wave of popular discontent to
power in Hanoi and then throughout the rest of the country in the following weeks. 7 On 2
September 1945, the charismatic Ho Chi Minh electrified thousands of listeners in Hanoi,
when he declared the reality of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). When Ho
Chi Minh, he who enlightens as he now styled himself, stepped up to the microphone
and asked his compatriots (dong bao) if they could hear him clearly, the crowd roared
back yes (co!). Communist though he most certainly was, Ho Chi Minh was also a
nationalist, now moving to personify Vietnamese nationalist aspirations as the father of

Frdric Turpin, De Gaulle, les gaullistes et lIndochine (1940-1956), (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005).
It should be recalled that, whatever their limitations, nationalist minded governments emerged in Vietnam under Tran
Trong Kim and Emperor Bao Dai, in Cambodia under Son Ngoc Thanh and King Norodom Sihanouk, and in Laos
under Prince Phetsarath Rattavangsa and King Sisavangvong.
7
David Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and Stein
Tonnesson, The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War, (London:
Sage Publications, 1991).
6

the nation (not unlike de Gaulles attempts to embody the real France since landing at
Bayeux in June 1944).8 In this sense, two new nation-states and two new nationalist
leaders had emerged from World War II, one French, the other Vietnamese, both
charismatic and each of whom held opposing yet deeply nationalist conceptions about the
future of Indochina. This was a potentially very explosive mix.
International players also profoundly influenced the nature of the Indochina War from
beginning to end. This was particularly true because of the globalizing effects of World
War II and the Cold War on decolonization. Consider the first case for a moment. Not
only had Nazi Germany incorporated France into its European Empire, as Mark Mazower
has demonstrated, but the Japanese also incorporated Western empires in Southeast Asia
into their own Asian Empire. In Indochina, this meant that Vichys subordination to
Germany gave rise to an empire within an empire until the Japanese finally brought
down French Indochina in March 1945 as the Allies liberated Europe from Hitlers
imperial hold before rolling back the Japanese one in Asia with nuclear arms. This, in
turn, gave rise to a particularly important conjuncture in Southeast Asia, where the
combination of the Japanese overthrow of European empires and the Allied defeat of
Japan and its Asian empire set European decolonization into motion first in the postwar
international system that remained to be built. It was also in Southeast Asia where the
first wars of decolonization began as newly liberated French and Dutch states moved to
retake their own colonial states.9

On this process, see: Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh : du rvolutionnaire licne, (Paris: Payot, 2003) and Daniel
Hmery, Ho Chi Minh : Vie singulire et natioanlisation des esprits, in Christopher E. Goscha and Benot de
Trglod, eds., The Birth of a Party-State: Vietnam since 1945, (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2004), pp. 135-148.
9
Mazower, Hitlers Empire. Whatever the reservations French authorities in Indochina and Vichy leaders in France
held about the Japanese occupation of Indochina in 1940-1941, it was Vichys collaboration with Germany and
Germanys alliance with Japan that allowed the French and the Japanese to administer Indochina in a dual though

Second, having been knocked out of World War II very early on, de Gaulles France
was not privy to many major global decisions taken by the British, Americans, Soviets,
and the Chinese as the war drew to an end. On several occasions, the American President
Franklin Roosevelt spoke of taking Indochina away from the French altogether and
putting it under an international trusteeship. Nor was de Gaulle consulted about the Allied
decision taken at Potsdam in July 1945 allowing the British to occupy and accept the
Japanese surrender in Indochina below the 16th parallel while the Republic of China
would do the same above that line. To put it another way, World War II and the rise of
the Americans in the Pacific during the war strengthened Republican Chinas
international stature to the detriment of the French. The Potsdam decision allowing the
Chinese to occupy northern Indochina reflected this geopolitical reality, something that
would have been simply unthinkable a few years earlier. 10
Thus even before the Japanese capitulated in mid August 1945, the French had to take
into account the wartime internationalization of colonial matters. Neither French
Indochina (Vietnam) nor North Africa (Algeria) for that matter could be considered as
simple chasses gardes. The internationally imposed division of Indochina at the 16th
parallel remains the best example of how global events impinged on colonial and national
ones, essential to understanding the complex events of 1945-47 in Indochina if not well
beyond. For one, Chinese officers blocked the French return to northern Indochina until
the Franco-Chinese accord of 28 February 1946 allowed the French to begin replacing
Chinese troops north of the 16th parallel. In exchange, however, the French had to give up
complex and even competitive colonial condominium. Historian err conceptually, in my view, in trying to treat the
history of Indochina between 1940 and 1945 as either a Japanese or a Vichy experience.
10
Initially, given that the Potsdam meeting occurred before the Japanese capitulation, the British and Chinese received
authorization to conduct military operations in these two areas. Upon the Japanese defeat, Harry Truman issued Order
no. 1 putting the Chinese and British in charge of accepting the Japanese surrender in their respective operational
zones.

many of their colonial concessions in China and accord special privileges to the overseas
Chinese living in Indochina. The British, worried by the preservation of their own Asian
empire, allowed local French forces to execute a coup de force in Saigon on 23
September 1945, pushing the DRVs southern forces into the countryside as the arriving
Expeditionary Corps under General Philippe Leclerc began taking control of the major
cities, routes, and bridges in southern Indochina from October. British and Indian forces
were involved in this fighting and Japanese troops now under British command took the
heaviest casualties fighting the Viet Minh. Indeed, Vietnamese nationalists resisted, with
Nguyen Binh taking charge of southern forces from late 1945. In short, a thirty-year war
for Vietnam had begun in the south in September 1945 and would end there in April
1975. North of the 16th parallel, however, the presence of the Chinese occupation forces
continued to protect the DRV against immediate French attack or a coup dtat, thereby
allowing the fledgling nation-state to hang on and to strengthen itself for over a year.11 As
onerous as Chinese nationalist occupation was for the Vietnamese economy and the
society, local Chinese Republican troops not Chinese communists ones first helped
the new Vietnamese nation-state stay alive against the French.
While full-scale war was still not inevitable in early 1946, the French determination
to apply the federal project at the expense of Vietnamese independence aspirations set the
two states on a dangerous collision course. We now know, thanks to Stein Tnnesson,
that even the signing of the famous 6 March Accords in 1946 recognizing the DRV as a
free state (Etat libre) within the Indochinese Federation and the French Union was due
less to a liberal moment in the French colonial mind than to the intense pressure Chinese
commanders applied to local French negotiators to sign a preliminary agreement with the
11

See Lin Hua, Chiang Kai-Shek, De Gaulle contre H Chi Minh: Vit-Nam, 1945-1946, (Paris: LHarmattan, 1994).

Vietnamese before General Leclerc could disembark his troops in Haiphong. 12 Local
Chinese leaders had no intention of getting drawn into a chaotic Franco-Vietnamese war,
as had happened to the British a few months earlier in the south. By signing the 6 March
Accords, both the French and the Vietnamese sides nonetheless gained precious time for
strengthening their respective forces as the Chinese began to pull their troops out.
That said, the March accords offered a chance for peace, for a negotiated, peaceful
decolonization of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh clearly understood this and hoped to seize the
moment to avoid letting war engulf all of Indochina (spared from much of the destruction
of World War II thanks to Vichys collaboration with the Axis). The key dividing issue
was the unification of Cochinchina/Nam Bo with the rest of the DRV situated above the
16th parallel. French negotiators considered the DRV to be one free state (Etat libre)
among three perhaps four other free states that would constitute, together, the
pentagonal Indochinese Federation. Vietnam would have no more legal right to absorb
the French colony of Cochinchina than the Kingdom of Laos in this federal framework.
In colonial eyes, the DRV (Vietnam), Cochinchina, Laos, and Cambodia made up or
could make up the Fdration indochinoise, in its turn a part of the French Union.13 For
the French determined to restore their colonial rule after WWII, there was nothing
necessarily inevitable about decolonization.
Many Vietnamese nationalists emerging from the same war saw the tide of history
flowing countercurrent. A real problem turned upon the French colonial division of
Vietnam into three parts, considered by the majority of Vietnamese (though not all) to
12

Stein Tnnesson, La paix impose par la Chine: laccord franco-vietnamien du 6 mars 1946, Cahiers de lInstitut
dhistoire du temps prsent (1996), pp. 35-56 and Tnnesson, Vietnam 1946, pp. 39-64.
13
As long as the March accords applied, the French apparently accepted to put the question of Tonkin and Annam
on hold as separate ethnic Viet states. In other words, the DRV free state embodied Tonkin and Annam (north of the
16th parallel). It remained unclear whether Annam below the 16th parallel should eventually be reunified with north
Annam or given a new status.

constitute an historical aberration. There were not three ethnically Vietnamese regional
territories or pays or ky, but one unitary Vietnamese nation-state run by the DRV from its
national capital now located in Hanoi and with deep roots located in the pre-colonial past.
In national eyes, Cochinchina or rather Nam Bo was an integral part of Vietnam and
that Vietnam was in 1945-46 the nation-state of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
Except for the short-lived Tran Trong Kim government of mid 1945, non-communist
Vietnamese nationalists never proposed an alternative unitary one before 1947.14 While
Ho Chi Minh sought to avoid war, he could only compromise on this issue so far without
discrediting himself and his cause. Anticommunist and anti-French nationalist parties
within the coalition government, like the Vietnamese National Party (VNQDD) and the
Greater Vietnam parties (Dai Viet), were highly critical of negotiations with the French in
late 1945 and early 1946. They too believed in an independent and unified Vietnam,
without the French. Indeed, Ho gambled dangerously when he agreed in the March
Accords to place the DRV into the Indochinese Federation as a free state (minus
Cochinchina), counting on the French promise to hold a referendum on the unification of
Cochinchina with the rest of Vietnam (the DRV above the 16th parallel). Ho bet that
this would allow him to realize the unity of Vietnam as a free state via peaceful means,
even if it meant putting on hold for a few years complete national independence or doc
lap, a word which the French had refused to pronounce in signing the March accords (and
Ho Chi Minh agreed knowing perfectly well that independence was legally
incompatible with federalism). We know, too, that the Chinese pressured the strongly

14

To my knowledge, we have no cool-headed study of Cochinchinese separatism, neither its historical roots nor its
interface with French policies.

anticolonialist leader of the VNQDD, Vu Hong Khanh, to sign off on the accord with Ho
Chi Minh.
Ho lost his gamble when follow-up conferences designed to take up the unresolved
issues of the 6 March accords failed, first in Dalat and then most importantly in France, at
Fontainebleau, in mid 1946. In an ominous sign, on 1 June 1946, as Ho Chi Minh left to
negotiate Vietnams future with the French government, the High Commissioner for
Indochina, Georges Thierry dArgenlieu, announced the existence of the free state of
Cochinchina as the cornerstone of the emerging Indochinese Federation of which the
DRV (minus Cochinchina) was still technically a part, along with Laos and Cambodia.
The failure of the French and the Vietnamese to find a peaceful solution at Fontainebleau
on the status of Cochinchina allowed hardliners on both sides of the divide to take
matters into their hands along national and colonial lines, making a compromise solution
increasingly difficult to achieve. In a desperate move, Ho Chi Minh pleaded with Marius
Moutet, socialist minister of overseas France, to sign a modus vivendi in September 1946
prescribing among other things a cease-fire in the south. While Moutet agreed, the lack of
political will in France, exacerbated by ever changing governments in Paris, allowed
local authorities in Indochina led by Thierry dArgenlieu to apply de Gaulles instructions
to the letter, rolling back the DRVs national sovereignty in favor of that of the colonial
Federation. Such brinkmanship led to serious clashes in Lang Son and especially in
Haiphong in November 1946 before the Vietnamese, their backs up against the wall,
lashed out in Hanoi on the evening of 19 December 1946. Long spoiling for a fight, local
French authorities were well prepared to reply with force. And they did in a two-month,
bloody street battle for Hanoi that left the northern capital largely deserted until 1948. In

short, full-scale war had now broken out in all of Indochina and would rage for almost
ten more years across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, sowing death, destruction, and
sorrow in its path before an international conference in Geneva put a temporary end to
the fighting in mid 1954.
We also know that wars of decolonization almost always spawn civil violence if not
revolution at some level as different groups vie for control over the postcolonial state and
its ideological nature. The Indochinese War was no exception. The civil war was most
prominent in eastern Indochina, where communism had divided Vietnamese nationalists
since the 1920s.15 The roots of this conflict reached back to the revolts led by the
VNQDD and the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in central and upper Vietnam in
the early 1930s. Crushed by the French, nationalists from both groups took refuge mainly
in southern China. There, violent ideological breaks occurred between leaders of both
sides, divided as to the type of political regime, economic model, and social program that
should be instituted in Vietnam upon its future liberation from French colonialism.
Vietnamese communism and anticommunism emerged in this wider historical context
and conjuncture. Mirroring the violent break between Chinese communists and
nationalists in 1927, the VNQDD and the ICP entered into something of a low-intensity,
microcosmic civil war in southern Chinese cities in Yunnan and Guangxi provinces, each
allied with its respective Chinese ideological and military partners.
Similar micro breaks among Vietnamese nationalist elites occurred behind the bars
of the colonial prison on Poulo Condor island, when nationalists and communists
suddenly found themselves arguing, even rumbling, over the future of Vietnam. After

15

Franois Guillemot, La tentation fasciste des luttes anticoloniales Dai Viet: Nationalisme et anticommunisme dans
le Vit-Nam des annes 1932-1945, Vingtime sicle, no. 104, vol. 4 (2009), pp. 45-66.

intense debate and no doubt some serious soul searching, Tran Huy Lieu crossed over to
the communist side in this prison reflection of Vietnamese politics.16 Many did not,
however; and this became a source of verbal and physical violence. As the future
communist chief of the security services for southern Vietnam recalled a nationalist
taunting him in Poulo Condor: communists are our enemy no. 1; imperialists are the
enemy no. 2.17 The matter was put on hold until the Japanese brought down French
Indochina in March 1945. Then, the question as to who would rule the new nation-state
following the Japanese defeat suddenly became very real. The low-scale political
violence confined to Poulo Condore cells and southern Chinese backstreets rapidly
transformed into a civil war when communists and nationalists exited colonial cell blocks
or returned to Vietnam from Yunnan and Guangxi in mid 1945, armed, and determined to
impose their vision of the national future, even it meant using force against fellow
Vietnamese. The colonial war breaking out between the French and the DRV in 1945-46
was thus doubled by a civil conflict with roots in the interwar period and transnational
linkages running from Poulo Condor to Kunming via the Vietnamese diaspora. In mid
1946, with the Chinese out of the way and Ho Chi Minh in Paris, Vo Nguyen Giap
successfully attacked non-communist nationalist parties hostile to the communists,
pushing most of them back into southern China and, this time, into DRV jails, from
which many never returned.
If the French army had initially supported Vo Nguyen Giaps destruction of the
nationalist forces (who had been much more hostile to the French than the communists in

16

Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 18621940, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001).
17
Cited in Pham Hung Tieu Su, (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Chinh Tri Quoc Gia, 2007), pp. 58-64. For a particularly vivid
example of the mobilization of civil violence (cell block rumbles), see Ibid., pp. 59-60.

1945-46)18, French political leaders, above all Lon Pignon, regretted that the French
now found themselves face-to-face with the DRV, increasingly dominated by
communists. With the Indochinese Federation already in trouble by late 1946, Pignon
understood that the French would have to work with non-communist Vietnamese
nationalists to hold on colonially. As early as January 1947, he had advised his superiors
secretly that the French war with the DRV had to be transposed to a Vietnamese
playing field, using the Viet Minhs adversaries to do the fighting. 19 The French turned to
the former Emperor Bao Dai, now living in exile in China and apparently unhappy with
the DRV, in order to build a counter-revolutionary state, around which non-communist
nationalists would rally. This was the third time not the first time that French
politicians turned to Bao Dai to find a solution to their political problems in Indochina.20
Vietnamese non-communists hoped that their anticommunism and the Cold War would
force Paris to accord them the independence the French had denied to the DRV and to
them in 1945-46.
They would be profoundly disappointed. Although the French convinced Bao Dai to
return eventually to Vietnam and albeit an Associated State of Vietnam emerged in 1949
under limited American pressure, the French only slowly granted non-communist
nationalists full sovereignty. And yet this did not prevent the French from pushing the
Associated State of Vietnam to increase the number of Vietnamese fighting against the
DRV. From 1950, as the Cold War bore down upon Indochina, tens of thousands of
18

Jean Crpin, Souvenirs dIndochine, box T443, Service historique de la dfense.

Lon Pignon wrote on 4 January 1947, as war raged in Hanoi: Notre objectif est clairement dtermin: transporter
sur le plan intrieur annamite la querelle que nous avons avec le parti Viet Minh et nous engager nous-mmes le moins
possible dans des campagnes et des reprsailles qui doivent tre le fait des adversaires autochtones de ce parti [].
Cited by Philippe Devillers, Paris, Saigon, Hanoi : Les archives de la guerre, 1944-1947, (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p.
334.
20
See my Un cul de plomb et un fou gnial : La mobilisation corporelle des rois coloniaux Bao Dai et
Sihanouk en Indochine (1919-1945), forthcoming in Agathe Larcher-Goscha and Franois Guillemot (ds.), Le Corps
au Vietnam, Lyon, Editions des lEcole normale suprieure.
19

Vietnamese began fighting in the French Union forces against the Vietnamese forces of
the DRV. Indeed, more Vietnamese from the Associated State of Vietnam than French
nationals ended up dying in the Indochina War. By Vietnamizing the war from 1950
(what the French called jaunissement, or yellowing), the French exacerbated an already
intense civil war among the Vietnamese. The DRV countered by implementing the draft
and wartime mobilization. In short, colonialism, communism, nationalism, and
anticommunism made for a deadly combination in Indochina from the mid 1940s.
On top of this, the Indochina War was also one of the hottest and deadliest
battlegrounds of the Cold War and this well into the 1980s. While the onset of the Cold
War in Europe may have made itself felt in Indochina shortly after World War II, it was
the Chinese communist victory of October 1949 in Asia and the outbreak of the Korean
War in June 1950 that firmly shifted the Cold War along that Eurasian axis into East
Asia, creating a communist bloc stretching from the Elbe to the Sino-Vietnamese border
of Southeast Asia, as Truong Chinh himself approvingly put it. If Stalin handed over the
Asian side of the world revolution to Mao Zedong21, who supported his longtime
communist allies in Korea and Vietnam, the Americans were determined to hold the line
in Indochina against the further spread of Sino-Soviet communism into the region, even if
it meant prolonging the French colonial presence in Indochina to the national detriment
of the Associated States of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. By the end of the war, the
Americans were financing almost 80% of the cost of the Indochina War while the
Chinese communists were heavily backing the DRV. Unprecedented Sino-American
intervention in Indochina began in 1950 and put its stamp on the nature of the war well
into the 1960s. As the negotiations entered their decisive stage at Geneva in early July
21

Chen Jian, Maos China and the Cold War, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

1954, Zhou Enlai put it nicely when he emphasized to Ho Chi Minh in a crucial meeting
in the southern Chinese city of Liuzhou that in terms of scope and degree of
internationalization, the Indochina issue even surpasses the Korea issue, before adding:
the war in Indochina not only has involved the three (Indochina) countries, but has also
influenced all of Southeast Asia, and has influenced Europe and the whole world as
well.22
Like World War II, the arrival of the Cold War to Indochina offered both
opportunities as well as dangers. For example, as a number of historians have argued, the
Cold War allowed the French to prolong their colonial foothold in Indochina by recasting
their neo-colonial war and the Bao Dai solution as an integral part of the global fight
against communist expansion.23 Unlike the Dutch in Indonesia, fighting an
anticommunist nationalist movement, the French in Indochina effectively used the Cold
War to secure greater American support of their fight against the communist-led DRV,
especially as Mao Zedong lined up the communist bloc, including Stalin, behind Ho Chi
Minh in January 1950. Or consider it from another vantage point: Whereas noncommunist nationalists in Indonesia like Sukarno were able to attract American sympathy
and international support for their war of independence against the Dutch, achieving a
negotiated international settlement in 1949, Vietnamese non-communists, now allied with
the French against the communists, had less leverage with which to play the Americans
against the French. For the Americans in 1950, the need to counter communism now took
precedence over supporting anticolonialism. The Franco-American Cold War partnership
22

Cited in Chen Jian, China and the Indochina Settlement, in Mark Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First
Vietnam War, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 254-255.
23
Devillers, Histoire du Vit-Nam; Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American
Commitment to War in Vietnam, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Pierre Grosser, La France et
lIndochine (1953-1956). Une carte de visite en peau de chagrin , (Paris: Institut dtudes politiques de Paris,
PhD thesis, 2002).

in Indochina effectively marginalized non-communist anticolonialist nationalists, like the

Dai Viet, VNQDD and others, hoping to follow the Indonesian lead.
Things looked differently for communist nationalists closely tracking the Cold Wars
shift towards East Asia. Contrary to orthodox accounts, Vietnamese communists
welcomed Sino-Soviet recognition and the internationalization of the war with the
French.24 For one, it ended their international isolation and provided them with essential
aid needed to take the battle to the French in order to win independence on the diplomatic
and military battlefields. Alignment with the communist bloc in 1950 also allowed the
Vietnamese communists to push through revolutionary social, cultural, agricultural,
economic, political, and military change. For example, Vietnamese communists
welcomed Sino-Soviet ideas, methods, and assistance to help them implement
rectification and emulation campaigns, an integral part of the social and communist
remodeling of the state and society. Land reform was also essential to mobilizing and
transforming hundreds of thousands of peasants into soldiers and porters (dan cong)
needed to knock out the French.25 Thus both the Vietnamese and the French found
opportunities in the arrival of the Cold War. And by choosing to rely on the Chinese and
the Americans, both willingly contributed to the wars internationalization. Neither was a
victim; both were actors.
However, the internationalization of the conflagration rapidly made Indochina, like
Korea, the theatre of an increasingly deadly conflict. The increased military assistance
24

See chapters by Christopher Goscha and Tuong Vu in Christopher E. Goscha and Christian Ostermann, eds.,
Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia (1945-1962), (Stanford: Stanford University
Press/Woodrow Wilson Center, 2009) and Christopher E. Goscha, Courting Diplomatic Disaster? The Difficult
Integration of Vietnam into the Internationalist Communist Movement (19451950), Journal of Vietnamese Studies,
Vol. I, nos. 1-2 (February/August 2006), pp. 59-103.
25
See: Benot de Trglod, Hros et rvolution au Vit Nam, (Paris: LHarmattan, 2001); Greg Lockhart, Nation in
Arms: The Origins of the People's Army of Vietnam, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989); and Bertrand de Hartingh, Entre
le peuple et la nation : La Rpublique dmocratique du Viet Nam de 1953 1957, (Paris: Ecole franaise dExtrme
Orient, 2003).

provided to the belligerents by the Chinese and the Americans augmented its intensity,
degree of violence, and the number of casualties, including those of Indochinese
civilians.26 Set piece battles at Cao Bang, Vinh Yen, Dong Trieu, Na San, and Dien Bien
Phu cost tens of thousands of lives. Vietnamese statistics confirm that from 1950 artillery
and machine gun fire tore up young DRV bodies in frightening numbers and terrible
ways, leaving many of those who survived the face of battle scarred for life, something
that had been relatively rare during the guerilla phase of the war before 1950.27 Napalm
was used with devastating effect, while the French air force began bombing campaigns of
an unprecedented kind, thanks in part to increased American military assistance. Ngo
Van Chieu commanded a Viet Minh platoon in northern Vietnam during the battle of
Vinh Yen in early 1951. He confided to his diary his units first mind-numbing encounter
with napalm:
Be on watch for planes. They will drop bombs and machine gun. Cover
yourselves, hide yourselves under bamboo. The planes dived. Then hell opened
up before my eyes. It was hell in the form of a big clumsy egg, falling from the
first plane An immense ball of fire, spreading over hundreds of meters, it
seemed to me, sowing terror in the ranks of the soldiers. Napalm. Fire that falls
from the sky . My men ran for cover, and I could not stop them. There is no
way you can stay put under this rain of fire that spreads out and burns everything
in its path. From everywhere the flames leap up. Joining them was the burst of
French machine gun fire, mortars and artillery, transforming into a burning tomb
what was only ten minutes earlier a small forest His eyes were locked wide
open by the horror of the scene he had just witnessed. What was that (the soldier
asked)? The atomic bomb? No, napalm.28

26

While the Americans did not provide combat training to the Associated State of Vietnam before 1955, the Chinese
most certainly did train thousands of DRV officers and troops, including those of its most important combat divisions.
27
See Christopher Goscha, Hell in a Very Small Place: Cold War, Decolonizatin and the Assault on the Vietnamese
Body at Dien Bien Phu, special issue, European Journal of East Asian Studies, forthcoming, and 30 nam phuc vu va
xay dung cua nganh quan y quan doi nahn dan Viet Nam, 1945-54, Hanoi : Quan Doi Nhan Dan Viet Nam, Cuc Quan
Y, 1976, chapters 5-6.
28
Ngo van Chieu, Journal dun combattant, (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1955), (translated by Jacques Despeuch), pp.
154-155.

The level of violence and terror the two sides could generate was real but uneven.
The DRV had no planes, no napalm and could not bomb France or French civilians. The
internationalization of the war might have allowed the DRV to produce an army and
deploy artillery, mortars, and machine gun fire, but it also put their men at the mercy of
some of the deadliest industrial weapons produced during the first half of the 20th
century, unleashed that evening, Ngo Van Chieu wrote, when darkness never set in.
The Viet Minh would only be able to inflict something of this modern destruction on its
adversary in the final days of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, when Soviet supplied multiple
rocket launchers finally arrived on the scene.29 In all, some 400,000 people died in nine
years of war, at least three thirds of them Vietnamese. Of the over 100,000 killed in the
French Union forces in the Indochina War, the majority were soldiers of the Associated
State of Vietnam, the empire, and the Foreign Legion.
Violence also spilled into Laos, the non-Vietnamese highlands and eventually into
eastern Cambodia as Chinese aid allowed the DRVs armed forces to move battalions and
even entire divisions across the Indochinese battlefield within a remarkably short period
of time. The military expansion of the Vietnamese in western Indochina allowed the
DRV/ICP to install associated resistance governments (chinh phu khang chien) in Laos
and Cambodia, the Pathet Lao and the Khmer Issarak. In so doing, Vietnamese
communists, thanks to the new international conjuncture and aid, ensured that civil war
would come to western Indochina and with it all its destabilizing effects. By creating
national armies for their revolutionary Lao and Cambodian partners, the Vietnamese also
29

Ngoc An, Tieu doan hoa tien 224, Tap chi lich su quan su, no. 4 (July August 1997), p. 58. The Soviet delivered 12
rocket launchers to the Vietnamese, meaning that the DRV could have technically launched 72 rockets at one time.
Each launcher could project six rockets. The Chinese had used them in Korea and had adapted them to the rough terrain
of that country, similar to that of northern Vietnam. The Chinese helped the Vietnamese man some of these rocket
launchers just as American pilots flew private supply missions over Dien Bien Phu in the Civil Air Transport (better
known during the Vietnam War as Air America).

contributed to the widening of the deadly consequences of the war to an Indochinese

dimension. And DRV Vietnamese, like the French and the Americans, were actors in the
development of civil conflicts in Laos and Cambodia (It is no accident that the DRV
signed the two Geneva armistices with the French for Laos and Cambodia in July 1954
not the Lao or Cambodians). In the northern and central highlands, the French, prodded
by the Americans, organized autonomous zones for ethnic minorities and manipulated
anti-Vietnamese sentiments to recruit for their commando operations against the Viet
Minh. Indeed, the Americans were the driving force behind the creation of the famous
Groupement de commandos mixtes aroports among the minority ethnic groups in the
highlands of central and northern Indochina. Such policies contributed to creating new
ethno-nationalist identities and, in doing, put the ethnic minorities on a collision course
with the countervailing Vietnamese ones (both communist and non-communist). In 195354, during powerful northern DRV thrusts southwards and westwards, Cambodians and
especially Lao and upland minorities began to die in greater numbers as the war for all of
Indochina entered its most decisive phase.
The internationalization of the Indochina War also linked France, Vietnam, Laos,
Cambodia, and their ethnic minorities to events occurring around the world. This was
particularly the case for the French, who found it increasingly hard to balance the
growing costs of the intensifying war in Indochina and concomitant demands for more
manpower stemming from their commitments to rearming Europe, partaking in the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, and controlling the course of West German rearmament.
How could the French contribute to the European Defense Community an idea Ren
Pleven had himself largely devised to check (West) German power when the French

army and its officers remained bogged down in Indochina? As Hugues Tertrais has
shown, the final blow to the French did not necessarily occur on the battlefield at Dien
Bien Phu in 1954, but rather on the economic front in Europe a year earlier. In 1953, the
government finally accepted that it could no longer afford the Indochina War in light of
its commitments in Europe and, increasingly, in North Africa.30 The war in Indochina had
to be stopped. The French may have welcomed the internationalization of the Indochina
war in 1949-1950 and recast it as a Cold War imperative in order to obtain American
financial backing. However, by 1953 one could also argue that the internationalization of
the war, especially in light of Frances Atlantic linkages and financial commitments to
European security (including nervousness about West German rearmament), finally
forced the French colonial hand in Indochina. From September 1953, not unlike the
Vietnamese working with their Chinese advisors, the French had to inform the Americans
of their operational plans on the Indochina battlefield in exchange for vital assistance.31
The French also had to make major political concessions to the Associated States of
Indochina from 1953. Indeed, before talks opened on ending the war in Geneva in May
1954, these three states had already obtained something very close to full independence.
In short, internationalization cut both ways; it never remained static during the Indochina
conflict. While the Cold War and trans Atlantic support may have helped the French hang
on colonially in Indochina since 1948, as Mark Lawrence argues, the picture looked very
different in 1953. Pierre Mends France seems to have understood this point well when
he decided to stake his premiership on reaching a negotiated end of the conflict.

30

Hugues Tertrais, La piastre et le fusil: Le cot de la guerre d'Indochine, 1945-1954, (Paris: Comit pour l'Histoire
conomique et Financire de la France, 2002).
31
The Americans were deeply involved in the crafting of the Navarre Plan, just as the Chinese expected to have a say
in Viet Minh operational plans leading up to Dien Bien Phu. Both the French and Viet Minh operational plans for
1953-54 had the stamp of approval from their larger backers.

The internationalization of the war also forced the Vietnamese communist hand. And
here again the year 1953 was a watershed. While international communist support may
well have saved Vietnamese from diplomatic defeat in 1950 and allowed Vietnamese
communists to implement radical social revolution, the shift towards peaceful coexistence in Moscow and Beijing after Stalins death in 1953 put the Vietnamese in a
very difficult position when a very international conference opened in Geneva in 1954 to
deal with the two hot wars in Asia: Korea and Indochina (in Korea a cease-fire had been
in effect since mid 1953). While the Vietnamese may have handed the French an historic
military defeat at Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954, when the ink dried on the Geneva
Accords signed on 21 July 1954, communist nationalists could only claim half of the
Vietnam that Ho Chi Minh had declared independent on 2 September 1945. Big power
politics had once again effectively divided Vietnam, this time at the 17th parallel.
Although Vietnamese communists signed on at Geneva hoping to prevent the Americans
from replacing the French, the Geneva conference was anything but a diplomatic victory.
The Americans had every intention of holding the line in Indochina against the expansion
of communism further into Asia, something Vietnamese communists had indeed
advocated in 1950.
And non-communist Vietnamese nationalists in the State of Vietnam were still
players in the making of Vietnam, no less determined to use the international dynamics of
the Cold War than their communist adversaries allied with Moscow and Beijing. Ngo
Dinh Diem, like Mends France, understood that the French no longer had the
international leverage of 1948-1950, nor the unflinching support of the Americans. As
new research shows, he sought to use the Americans as much as the latter sought to use

him.32 The fact that the French had lost their international marge de manoeuvre at the
conjuncture of 1953 was an unprecedented opportunity for Ngo Dinh Diem in particular
and non-communist nationalists more generally. Having failed to ratify the European
Defence Community, so dear to the Americans during the Geneva Conference, we now
know that Mends France felt obligated to turn over the reins to the Americans in lower
Vietnam and even backed away from recognizing communist China as the British had
been able to do. Whatever the turf wars between the American and French intelligence
services in the transitional phase following the Geneva Accords, the French could do
little really as Ngo Dinh Diem consolidated his power and his control over the
postcolonial state and eventually pushed the Expeditionary Corps out of Vietnam in
1956. And as Pierre Brocheux reminds us, if Ho Chi Minh had masterminded the exit of
the French colonialists in the north, Ngo Dinh Diem did the job in the south. Colonial
Indochina was dead in 1956. The French government and its army focused on another
colonial war designed to keep Algeria French. This time, however, a number of ranking
veterans of the Indochina war would not accept another Dien Bien Phu, even if it meant
taking civil war to the French mainland itself. The fall of the 4th Republic in 1958 cannot
be fully understood without situating it within this wider context of which the Indochina
War was an essential part.
War certainly influenced the nature of postcolonial Vietnam, communist or noncommunist. Like its Chinese counterpart, the DRV was conceived and forged in war.
Many of its economic, monetary, judicial, intelligence and police structures were formed
32

See among others Philip E. Catton, Diems Final Failure: Prelude to Americas War in Vietnam, (Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press, 2002); Edward Miller, Vision, Power, and Agency: The Ascent of Ngo Dinh Diem, 19451954, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (October 2004), pp. 433-458; Jessica M. Chapman, Staging Democracy:
South Vietnam's 1955 Referendum to Depose Bao Dai, Diplomatic History, vol. 30, no. 4, (September 2006), 671703; and Kathryn Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam, (Lexington: University
of Kentucky Press, 2007).

during the conflict, defined by it, configured to fight it and continue to influence Vietnam
to this day. Similar things could be said about the Republic of Vietnam; however, the
regrettable lack of scholarship on the birth and evolution of the State of Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia between 1945 and 1954 prevents one from saying much more at this
point.33 The DRV government ministries and resistance bureaucracy expanded across the
country during the Indochina conflict. Although the war states administration certainly
drew upon the colonial states elites and structures at the outset, by the end of the conflict
the DRV had created a new set of civil servants (can bo) and a bureaucracy that was
increasingly subordinate to the communist partys structures and leadership.34 And while
it is not sure that any conflict can technically be labeled a total war35, the Indochina
War came close in the non-Western context.36 The conflict allowed the party, as in
communist China, to increase its control over the state, army, and civilian populations
living in its territories. Mass mobilization drives, rectification campaigns, and land
reform are but a few of the revolutionary social changes and ways by which the
Vietnamese communists impacted upon civilians and the state in unprecedented ways.
And all of these revolutionary structures and techniques would serve the DRV well
when war, both civil and international, resumed only a few years after the signing of the
Geneva Accords. In short, war destroys but it also creates. It closes certain historical
venues and opens new ones. The Indochina War was no exception.

33

Daniel Varga, La politique franaise en Indochine (194750): Histoire dune dcolonisation manqu, (Aix-enProvence: Universit Aix-Marseille I, 2004, PhD thesis). However, a truly international history of the Bao Dai
solution still awaits its historian. The same could be said of the Associated States of Laos and Cambodia.
34
See Stein Tonnessons chapter in Kjeld Erik Brdsgaard and Susan Young, eds, State Capacity in East Asia: China,
Taiwan, Vietnam, and Japan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 236268.
35
On the problems associated with the idea of total war, see Roger Chickering, et. al., A World at Total War: Global
Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945, (Washington: Global Historical Institute, 2005).
36
For a particularly penetrating essay on how violence plays itself out in wars of decolonization in the non-Western
world, without ever losing sight of the bigger picture, see: Mark Mazower, Violence and the State in the Twentieth
Century, The American Historical Review, vol. 107,no. 4 (October 2002), pp. 1158-1178.