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Published: June 15th 2010
By the time I got a nice break in weather in Sapa, my Vietnam visa was just a day away from expiring. My natural exit point was Dien Bien Phu, a small city that looks like little more than a town in a field ringed by mountains. Historically though, this town was the scene of an event, a battle actually, that perhaps shaped more recent world history in this region than any other. And since you're more or less at my mercy by reading this, I'm going to tell you
all about it.
The First Indochina War was fought between the French Expeditionary Corps and the Viet Minh in mostly northern Vietnam, but also a little in Laos and Cambodia. Basically, when France tried to re-establish its presence in its colonies which had been overrun by the now-receding WWII Japanese, they met with resistance from nationals who for the first time had experienced a break in foreign control.
Their leader, Ho Chi Minh, gathered support by speaking against foreign oppression and the negative impact of colonization. In one speech he claimed independence against France with the following words: "We hold the truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Sound familiar?
This conflict bore several other similarities to the American Revolution. Perhaps two key factors were "home-field advantage" of the native forces and overconfidence, or at least an underestimation of the native forces by the French.
From 1946 to 1954 the war ebbed and flowed until the Battle of Dien Bien Phu from March - May 1954. In the end, the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh managed to setup and quickly move heavy artillery through thick jungles to form a rotating firing platform in the hills high above the French positions. Additionally, they possessed powerful anti-air guns that the French weren't prepared for that plagued the resupply of French lines.
Due to their constant movement and ingenious "dummy" techniques: hiding artillery in bomb-proof bunkers, placing wooden mock-ups of artillery batteries to confuse lookouts, when the shooting started the Viet Minh knew where every French artillery battery was and the French had no idea how many or where the Viet Minh batteries were placed.
Both sides took heavy losses, yet the Viet Minh prevailed. It marked "the first time that a non-European colonial independence movement had evolved through all the stages from guerrilla bands to a conventionally organized and equipped army able to defeat a modern Western occupier in pitched battle" according to one historian.
The day after the French surrender the Geneva Conference began, which ultimately led to the complete French withdrawl and the division of Vietnam into a northern state backed by China and the USSR and a southern state backed by France and the US. Even at this juncture, the 17th parallel was a point of tension, and as history has demonstrated, this tension would only increase in the following years.
Ironically, the US supplied a few planes and carried out some bombing sorties in the battle, but would not openly participate. President Dwight D. Eisenhower stated, "Nobody is more opposed to intervention than I". Yet it didn't take much (or anything depending on whom you believe) for President Johnson to change the US position a few years later in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964.
So in short, had we stepped up involvement earlier and more intensively, the US could possibly have avoided the conflict we were drawn into ten years later.
I'm climbing down off my history soapbox, but still think it was cool to see the place that it all went down.
Next stop - the border.
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