324 ChaPter^6
they would explode in the next decades to create a huge crisis in American
life. Vietnam was a small country [about the size of New Mexico] in an area
called Indochina–which included Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos– and was just
south of China, with Thailand to its west and the South China Sea on its
eastern border. Vietnam had been a French colony since the 1860s, but had
been fighting for independence from the French for most of the 20th cen-
tury and thought it had become sovereign at the end of World War II when
the Japanese, who had taken control of Indochina during World War II, were
defeated, and the French, who had been replaced by the Japanese, were no
longer in control of the country. That was not to be, however.
When though the most influential leader in Vietnam, both a nationalist and
a Communist, Ho Chi Minh, declared independence on September 2d, 1945,
he quoted from a famous American document. “All men are created equal,”
he said. “They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,
among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Ho may have
invoked the 1776 Declaration of Independence, but the French decided to
return to Vietnam and reestablish control anyway, and the Americans did not
stop them. Between 1946-1954, then, the Vietnamese nationalists, known as
the Viet Minh, fought a war of liberation, mostly using guerrilla tactics [hit-
and-run maneuvers, small-scale actions, sabotage, kidnapping, assassination of
French leaders and Vietnamese collaborators, and so forth, not large-scale
warfare such as that employed in World War II with big armies] and in May,
1954 successfully defeated the French at a battle at Dienbienphu, a village in
northern Vietnam on the border of Laos. As in 1946, Ho Chi Minh and the
Viet Minh assumed they would take power over the entire country of Vietnam,
but, again, that would not be the case. The Americans would not tolerate the
Viet Minh being in charge of Vietnam because it was a nationalist and
Communist group and, like Arbenz and others who the U.S. opposed, was
committed to land reform–to taking land from the wealthy to give to the
peasants. In addition, countries like Vietnam had to be pro-American and pro-
Capitalist in order to help Japan have economic partners and expand, and of
course keep the Open Door safe. So the U.S., at a conference in Geneva,
Switzerland in 1954, divided Vietnam in half [as they had done to Korea in
1945] at the 17th parallel. The two communist powers–the Soviet Union and
China–did virtually nothing to support the Viet Minh, even though the U.S.
claimed that Ho Chi Minh was a puppet of the Russians and Chinese.