No More Vietnams Read Online Free PDF

through the 1940s.
    The Vietnamese people had divided allegiances. Some, including many who were not Communists, joined the Viet Minh because it was the only group offering military resistance to the French. Others, including many nationalists, supported the French, apparently preferring foreign rule to Communist rule. The fact that 200,000 Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese joined the French-controlled Armed Forces of the Associated States of Indochina suggested the Viet Minh Communists were even more despised than the French colonialists. But the vast majority of the Vietnamese people remained neutral. Mindful of the costs that backing a loser can carry in Asian politics, they patiently waited to see which way the prevailing winds would blow.
    The United States kept the French war at arm’s length. Truman wanted non-Communist governments in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, but he did not want to taint American policy with colonialism by cooperating with the French in their war against the Viet Minh. He understood that the Indochinese needed to be given a stake in the battle against communism; they would not fight indefinitely in order to keep Indochina for the French, but they would do so if they were defending their own governments. Still, Truman believed he had little leverage to force the French to decolonize. His priorities werein Europe, where he needed French help to ward off a bellicose Soviet Union, and therefore he was reluctant to antagonize France over Indochina.
    The fall of China to Mao’s Red Army in 1949 swept away previous assumptions. The French, who had planned to grind down their weak opponent, now had to fight an enemy who, as a result of assistance from the Chinese, was better armed and supplied. Ho, who had waged a poor man’s war, now could turn up the heat on the French. Truman, who had considered the war a colonialist misadventure, now saw it as a necessary element in his strategy to contain the expansion of communism. And when Communist Chinese troops intervened in the Korean War in late 1950, Truman came to regard the French in Indochina as the means to draw at least some Chinese forces away from the Korean peninsula.
    Chairman Mao became Uncle Ho’s godfather. He overhauled the Viet Minh’s primitive forces, training its troops at Chinese bases and providing them with combat advisers, trucks, artillery, and automatic weapons. With six 10,000-man divisions, Ho had an army that could engage the French in positional warfare. Over the next three years, the Viet Minh cleared the French out of the areas adjacent to China but failed to take any major population or agricultural centers. In 1954, Ho’s forces retreated toward Laos, but the French pursued them, establishing their principal base at Dien Bien Phu.
    The French decision to entrench their forces there was a cataclysmic strategic miscalculation. Those who supported it were defending the defense of the indefensible: Dien Bien Phu was an isolated island of French power in a sea of Viet Minh territory. The French base invited attack. Supplies could reach it only by air, and it was situated in a basin dominated by surrounding high ground held by the Viet Minh. Ho would have been a fool not to hit it with all the force he could muster. Ho was no fool.
    The battle began in March 1954. The Viet Minh captured the outlying defensive positions in the first two weeks and then used its five-to-one advantage in troops to launch massivehuman-wave attacks. They surrounded the 16,000-man French garrison and then inexorably tightened the noose. They pummeled French positions with artillery shells, expending over 350,000 rounds by the end of the siege, and encroached on the fortress with a network of trenches reminiscent of World War I. With their airstrip pockmarked with artillery craters, the French were prisoners in their own fortress. They could not evacuate the wounded. Supplies and reinforcements had to be dropped in by parachute, and