By Patrick N. Allitt, Emory University
Vietnam was a French colony in the early 20th century. Japan invaded it in 1942, but was ousted by the victorious allies in 1945. Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese nationalist leader, issued a Declaration of Independence based on the American model, but to his dismay, the French returned, aided by America as a quid pro quo for French participation in NATO. What happened next?
America against Reunification?
Ho Chi Minh finally overpowered the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and the French Empire in Vietnam ended in 1955. American power then underwrote South Vietnam, the non-Communist southern half of the country, and prevented elections from taking place, which would have led to reunification under Ho Chi Minh. Let us see why the Americans were against this reunification.
America’s Involvement in Vietnam
Vietnam posed no immediate threat to America, but if Communism spread there, it would continue to grow worldwide. Eisenhower in his speech of 1954 coined the phrase “the domino theory”, the idea of countries as dominoes. He said, “First one domino falls, it knocks over the next one, and so on.” The “domino theory” became one of the metaphors for thinking about the Cold War situation. Most Americans didn’t know where Vietnam was, and the federal government only had about two or three employees in the 1950s that could even speak Vietnamese. Obviously, it was a tiny place, very far away.
America became involved in Vietnam after the Second World War. It was an act of assistance to the French, in the French colonial war, to regain its Southeast Asian possessions, which the Japanese had overrun in 1942. Many Americans participated in this phase of the war with very bad consciences, because America’s got a strong anti-colonial tradition: It had fought its own anti-colonial war to get away from the British Empire, and the idea of shoring up French colonialism was irksome.
On the other hand, the French knew how to bargain hard. They knew that the Americans wanted their cooperation in NATO, and this was the price they exacted for doing it.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
The Illegitimacy of Western Imperialism
The battle of Dien Bien Phu was really the last gasp of the French army in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Viet Minh, the guerilla resistance forces, besieged this fortress and overran it. The French had designed it as a set piece to destroy Viet Minh power, and it had exactly the opposite effect. The defeat demonstrated to the French that even with an enormous amount of American financial aid, more than $1 billion per year by then, they could no longer hold out and regain complete control of their colony.
Many of the peoples of Asia bitterly hated the Japanese who had invaded their countries during the Second World War. The invasions had shown that sometimes an Asian power can defeat a Western imperial power. It didn’t make them pro-Japanese, but it intensified their idea that Western imperialism was illegitimate.
The Geneva Accords and South Vietnam
The Geneva Accords brought the French era in Vietnam to an end. It was arranged that Vietnam would temporarily be divided into two zones, a north and a south, and after a period of pacification, elections would take place.
The Americans at once began to aid General Diem, who was the leader of the southern half of Vietnam. They could anticipate that Ho Chi Minh, who was a national hero, would certainly win the elections, and then Vietnam would be united as a Communist nation. It was therefore with American aid that South Vietnam remained independent.
Diem was a dictatorial, autocratic and a corrupt leader, enriching himself and his family and immediate cronies, he never developed the legitimacy that a ruler needs. Most of the people of South Vietnam were completely alienated from Diem. Many of them decided to join a new guerilla group, the Viet Cong, to fight against Diem’s government in the late 1950s inside South Vietnam. The various opponent groups coalesced in 1960 into the National Liberation Front, the NLF; working for the reunification of Vietnam as a Communist nation by overthrowing the southern regime with its American helpers.
The American Idealism in Vietnam
In the 1950s, it was still possible for Americans to be idealistic about the cause of Vietnam. A most interesting American idealist about Vietnam was a young navy doctor named Tom Dooley. When the Geneva Accords were first made and the French withdrew, people living in either part of Vietnam who wanted to move to the other part were able to do so.
Many Vietnamese Christians, Roman Catholics who had been converted by French missionaries in the preceding century, wanted to move out of the north to South Vietnam. American navy ships did it, and Dr. Dooley was the doctor on board one of the American ships that took northern Vietnamese Christian refugees to the south. He was horrified to discover that many of them had been tortured. He was convinced that America had a high moral duty as the representative of the Western Christian world to prevent the fall of Vietnam to Communism.
After leaving the navy, he began to set up low-tech medical centers in Vietnam and Laos, bringing basic medical care to the peoples of the area who previously had often had no medical help at all. He died very young, in his early 30s, of melanoma, before the American mission in Vietnam had all begun to go horribly wrong.
Common Questions about the End of French Rule in Vietnam
General Diem was a dictatorial, autocratic and a corrupt leader, enriching himself and his family and immediate cronies, he never developed the legitimacy that a ruler needs.
The Geneva Accords brought the French era in Vietnam to an end. It was arranged that Vietnam would temporarily be divided into two zones, a north and a south, and after a period of pacification, elections would take place.
Vietnam posed no immediate threat to America, but if Communism spread there, it would continue to grow worldwide.
