First Indochina War - Ho Chi Minh

Ho Chi Minh

In 1923, Hồ Chí Minh moved to Guangzhou, China. From 1925–26, he organized the 'Youth Education Classes' and occasionally gave lectures at the famous Whampoa Military Academy on the revolutionary movement in Indochina. He stayed there in Hong Kong as a representative of the Communist International organization. In June 1931, he was arrested and incarcerated by British police until his release in 1933. He then made his way back to the Soviet Union, where he spent several years recovering from tuberculosis. In 1938, he returned to China and served as an adviser with the Chinese Communist armed forces.

In 1941, Ho Chi Minh, seeing communist revolution as the path to freedom, returned to Vietnam and formed the Việt Nam Độc Lập Đồng Minh Hội (League for the Independent of Vietnam), better known as the Việt Minh. He spent many years in Moscow and participated in the International Comintern. At the direction of Moscow, he combined the various Vietnamese communist groups into the Indochinese Communist Party in Hong Kong in 1930. Hồ Chí Minh created the Viet Minh as an umbrella organization for all the nationalist resistance movements, de-emphasizing his communist social revolutionary background.

Late in the war, the Japanese created a nominally independent government of Vietnam under the overall leadership of Bảo Đại. Around the same time, the Japanese arrested and imprisoned most of the French officials and military officers left in the country. After the French army and other officials were freed from Japanese prisons in Vietnam, they began reasserting their authority over parts of the country. At the same time, the French government began negotiations with both the Việt Minh and the Chinese for a return of the French army to Vietnam north of the 16th parallel.

The Việt Minh were willing to accept French rule to end Chinese occupation. Hồ Chí Minh and others had fears of the Chinese, based on China's historic domination and occupation of Vietnam. The French negotiated a deal with the Chinese where pre-war French concessions in Chinese ports such as Shanghai were traded for Chinese cooperation in Vietnam. The French landed a military force at Haiphong in early 1946. Negotiations then took place about the future for Vietnam as a state within the French Union. These talks eventually failed and the Việt Minh fled into the countryside to wage guerrilla war. In 1946, Vietnam created its first constitution.

The British had supported the French in fighting the Viet Minh, armed militias from the religious Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects and the Binh Xuyen organized crime groups which were all individually seeking power in the country. In 1948, as part of a post-colonial solution, the French re-installed Bảo Ðại as head of state of Vietnam under the French Union. The Viet Minh were militarily ineffective in the first few years of the war and could do little more than harass the French in remote areas of Indochina.

In 1949, the war changed with the triumph of the communists in China on Vietnam's northern border. China was able to give almost unlimited support in terms of weapons and supplies to the Việt Minh which transformed itself into a conventional army. After World War II, the United States and the USSR entered into the Cold War. The Korean War broke out in 1950 between communist North Korea (DPRK) supported by China and the Soviet Union, and South Korea (ROK) supported by the United States and its allies in the UN.

The Cold War was now turning 'hot' in East Asia, and the American government feared communist domination of the entire region would have deep implications for American interests. The US became strongly opposed to the government of Hồ Chí Minh, in part, because it was supported and supplied by China. Hồ's government gained recognition from China and the Soviet Union by January 1950 in response to Western support for the State of Vietnam that the French had proposed as an associate state within the French Union. In the French-controlled areas of Vietnam, in the same year, the government of Bảo Đại gained recognition by the United States and the United Kingdom.