First Indochina War Vietnam

In the Indochina War the communist Viet Minh fought against French colonialism. But it should be noted that Viet Minh was fighting alone against the entire Vietnamese people. The nationalists throughout the conflict supported the French, even in the harrowing Battle of Dien Bien Phu, where they encircled the best French troops and considered it almost impossible to lift the siege.

At the beginning of that conflict the U.S helped France with approximately 20% of the costs. Upon completion they contributed 80% of the war effort and even offered to the French two nuclear weapons. Although not providing any support requested by the colonizers, President Eisenhower sent advisors and aid, especially air aid.

After the French defeat and the agreements reached at the Geneva Conference of 1954, American support for the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam continued, as did almost total opposition of the U.S administration to the union of the two nations. Meanwhile, North Vietnam continued to receive aid from China and to a much lesser extent the USSR. At first military aid lay mainly with the first nation, especially with light weapons and laptops.

Vietnam is United

The Geneva agreements approving the independence of Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam and South Vietnam included a clause by which a referendum would be held in 1958 to decide whether the two Vietnams were separately or be reunified. But before such a referendum would be held, Ngo Dinh Diem led a coup and annulled the elections.

At the same time the low level of South Vietnam as a country and the massive corruption in the government, caused the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem was to be extremely unpopular. In this situation occurred:

Top North Vietnamese pressure on the South in the form of delivery of supplies and weapons to pro-Western opponents of the regime. Slowly building a resistance movement against the dictatorial regime of President Diem called National Liberation Front of Vietnam, known as Vietcong.

The Vietcong began wrestling in 1960 to ensure the fall of Saigon and the reunification of the country. This tactic was the guerrilla war that brought them much success in the previous conflict. The Vietcong found it very easy to get volunteers to finish with an incompetent, repressive and corrupt government. A villager who joined them stated that the tax collector demanded that the villager’s taxes and when he left they virtually had nothing left.

President Diem died in 1963 in a coup sponsored by the U.S administration of John F. Kennedy who was not suited to support a Catholic General in a country with most other religious scenes like the one that went around the world about a Buddhist monk. (He was sitting on a street covered in flames by the bonzo ritual, to protest against the war). Diem, despite his strong hand was the only head of state able to control the aggression of the guerrillas. Diem was replaced by the weak-willed and lacking Nguyen Van Thieu.