Colonial Vietnam: The History of the Division Between North and South Vietnam

The French were a major imperial power with a great deal to lose from the monumental change of decolonization during World War II, but their view of the global chessboard was somewhat different. France lay under German occupation, and an armistice had been signed on behalf of the French nation by Marshall Philippe Pétain, commencing the era of Vichy France. In London, meanwhile, the firebrand French General Charles de Gaulle urged a continuation of the resistance, believing the French mainland to be only a small part of the picture. France was much more than just France. De Gaulle established the Free French movement in Britain, based on the loyalty and the ongoing Free French control of a majority of her overseas territories. The Free French movement and the Free French army based themselves in Francophone Africa. The saga of the Free French movement would impact the war in both North Africa and Europe, but most specifically, it would serve to radically redefine the French view of itself and her relationship with her overseas territories. Most importantly, it would set the tone for a style of decolonization very different from the British, and perhaps not surprisingly, things would not go smoothly, especially with the geopolitics of the Cold War affecting matters.

Before the Vietnam War, most Americans would have been hard pressed to locate Vietnam on a map. South Vietnamese President Diệm’s regime was extremely unpopular, and war broke out between Communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam around the end of the 1950s. Kennedy’s administration tried to prop up the South Vietnamese with training and assistance, but the South Vietnamese military was feeble. A month before his death, Kennedy signed a presidential directive withdrawing 1,000 American personnel, and shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson reversed course, instead opting to expand American assistance to South Vietnam.

The post-analysis of war is a complicated and process that benefits from hindsight, and the involvement of the United States in Vietnam over about a decade was no exception. Never formally declared as a “war,” the Vietnam War was not fought in clean lines or with clear missions. Viewers of the evening news listening to the “box score” of killed and wounded each night had at best a hazy notion of what was happening a world away in Southeast Asia. If anything, their leaders were both attentive to reelection and on a certain level were themselves unsure of what was truly taking place. A military draft that sent over 50,000 American soldiers to their deaths was triggered by a resolution sought by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a decision to contain communism in a distant Asian land.