First Indochina War begins

The First Indochina War began in late 1946, when talks between France and Ho Chi Minh's government broke down. In November a dispute over customs in Haiphong led French warships to bombard the city, killing a large number of civilians, and on 19 December the Viet Minh attacked French forces in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh and his forces retreated to the hills of the north to wage a guerrilla war. Over the following eight years the conflict spread across Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.¹

In August 1945 the Japanese surrender had left Indochina without a ruler, and Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh seized power and declared an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September. France wanted to take back its colony, and sent troops, while offering Vietnam only a limited autonomy within a French Union. Talks in 1946 aimed to find a compromise but failed over the status of the south, called Cochinchina. The French set up a rival government under the former emperor Bao Dai in 1949. The war's character changed that year, when Mao's communists won in China and began to supply the Viet Minh, while the United States, shaped by the Cold War and by Korea, began to pay for much of the French war effort.¹

The Viet Minh's general Vo Nguyen Giap built a regular army and wore down the French in the north. The war ended with the siege of Dien Bien Phu, which fell on 7 May 1954 after 56 days. The Geneva Accords then partitioned Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Deaths are not known exactly, but the toll was heavy, with many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, soldiers and civilians, and tens of thousands of French Union troops killed. The war began the long conflict that the United States took over in the 1960s.¹²