War did not break out immediately between the
French and the Vietminh in the north. By the
spring of 1946, the French had taken control of
the south and had negotiated the withdrawal of
the Chinese from the north. Chiang Kai-shek
complied, because he needed his troops in China;
Ho Chi-minh, who was not ready at this juncture
to start fighting, agreed to allow a small French
force to enter the north in return for French
recognition of the Vietnamese Republic he had
proclaimed. The French further stipulated that
the Vietnamese Republic should remain within
the French Union. This was a compromise that
could never last. The French had excluded the
southernmost part of Vietnam from their recog-
nition of independence in the north, which in any
case was so circumscribed that it would not have
amounted to true independence. Ho Chi-minh
travelled to Paris, where negotiations for a firm
settlement broke down. He then returned to
Hanoi and claimed independence for a united
Vietnam. In November 1946 the French opened
hostilities, by shelling the northern port of
Haiphong and killing 6,000 Vietnamese civilians.
In December full-scale fighting broke out.
The French sent growing numbers of troops
from Europe to reinforce the southern Vietnamese
levies. Bao Dai had escaped from Ho Chi-minh’s
group and took refuge first in Hong Kong, then
on the Côte d’Azur, where he enjoyed a life of lux-
ury. In March 1949 the president of France and
Emperor Bao Dai signed a treaty granting Vietnam
independence though reserving all eventual rights
to the French, but Bao Dai’s government was too
obviously subordinated to France to gain respect in
the West. Nonetheless, the French appeared to be
well in control during the first five years of the con-
flict. From 1946 to 1950, with Giap building up
his hopelessly outnumbered Vietminh in the Red
River valley of fertile rice fields in the north, there
was relatively little fighting. But the skill, discipline
and fighting spirit of his force, which by 1954 had
grown to 117,000, proved more than a match for
the 100,000 French Foreign Legion soldiers sup-
ported by 300,000 Vietnamese.
The victory of the Chinese Communists in
1949 transformed Giap’s prospects, as large mil-
itary supplies including heavy artillery were soon
speeding south to support him. Mao’s victory and
the outbreak of the Korean War also transformed
Washington’s attitude: between 1950 and 1954
the US provided France with about $3 billion to
enable it to carry on the war. But, despite their
early successes, the French discovered they could
not crush the Vietminh. Their own casualties,
90,000 dead and wounded by the close of 1952,
were arousing increasing criticism at home. In
Vietnam the death of France’s one brilliant tacti-
cian, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, left its
strategy in the hands of generals who were not
the equals of General Giap, with little idea how
to combat peasants being politically indoctrinated
and militarily trained to fight a revolutionary war.
In 1953 Giap lured the French into defending
Dien Bien Phu. When his forces eventually out-
numbered the French garrison of 13,000 men by
almost four to one and his artillery commanded
the heights surrounding the French emplace-
ment, Giap destroyed the garrison and took Dien
Bien Phu on 7 May 1954. Like the fall of
Singapore to the Japanese, this was a great Asian
victory over a European-led colonial army, and
one that changed history. The communist
Vietnamese had won, not only a battle, but the
war against the French – yet complete political
victory was still denied to them.
The news reached the Geneva Conference,
which had been in session since 26 April. The US
would not fully participate. But Zhou Enlai repre-
sented China, a China determined to demonstrate
reasonableness in the hope of removing America’s
principal European allies, Britain and France, from
the Cold War in Asia. Eden presided and to the
bitter disappointment of the Vietnamese – both
the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam
and the Republic of Vietnam in the south – it
suited China to maintain the partition of Vietnam,
thus keeping it too weak to resume its traditional
hostility to China. With the communists sustained
in the north, moreover, the Americans, who had
supported the French and the Republic of
Vietnam in the south, would be kept at arms
length from China’s southern frontier. Elections
were planned for the summer of 1956 which were
intended to unify the country: Zhou Enlai was
shrewd enough to realise that, given the hostility