The First Indochina War
In the First Indochina War, the Communist North Vietnamese, supported by the Communist powers of the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, fought to gain their independence from the French, supported by the French-loyalist Vietnamese and the United Nations. This war of independence lasted from December 1946 until July 1954, with most of the fighting taking place in areas surrounding Hanoi. It ended with the French defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and French withdrawal from Vietnam.
Read more about this topic: Indochina Wars
Famous quotes containing the words the first and/or war:
“The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.””
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus, 44:14.
The line “their name liveth for evermore” was chosen by Rudyard Kipling on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission as an epitaph to be used in Commonwealth War Cemeteries. Kipling had himself lost a son in the fighting.