A bloody war of attrition fought by France in defense of its colonial presence in Southeast Asia between 1940 and 1954, which ended with the independence of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and inspired liberation movements in the French colonies, especially in North Africa.

Context


The French colonial presence in East Asia dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, and by 1905 France had annexed Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and named it Indochina.

With the outbreak of World War II, the French found themselves in a direct confrontation with Japan, which decided in 1941 to control Indochina, subjected the region to its influence and abolished the French influence, shaken by the defeat by Nazi Germany, then Japan invaded the region militarily and took control of it in the spring of 1945.

The Japanese persecution of the inhabitants of the areas they invaded led to the emergence of local resistance movements against them and the French, and the "Vietmen Front" formed a political association that brought together communist forces and its leader "Ho Chi Minh" and formed the most prominent component of the Vietnamese revolutionary movement.

Tensions


With the end of World War II, the restoration of Indochina was a top priority for General de Gaulle, who was informed of a British-American plan to share it after the defeat of Japan, and General Thierry Dar Janlier was sent at the head of a campaign to restore Indochina from Britain and China.

The general succeeded in persuading the two sides to withdraw gradually, and concluded an agreement with the Vietmen on March 6, 1946, providing for the establishment of a united and free Vietnamese republic that would form part of the Indochina Federation and the French Confederation, with permanent French bases in Hanoi.

With the departure of General de Gaulle from power in 1946, the pro-colonial pressure groups revived, the positions of the authorities of the Fourth Republic changed on the file, and the number of French forces in the region was significantly doubled.

The confrontation


In November 1946, confrontations erupted between French and Vietnamese soldiers in the commercial port of Haiphong near Hanoi, and the Vietnamese quickly took advantage of the opportunity to carry out operations against the French garrison, to respond to the garrison commander with artillery bombardment that destroyed the port and left six thousand Vietnamese dead, most of them civilians.

The leader, "Ho Chi Minh", called on his citizens to resist with all they had, and a confrontation erupted in which the French incurred heavy losses, and the Vietcoms (the military arm of the Vietmen) targeted the supply routes and ports, taking advantage of their accurate knowledge of the land, poor transportation, and the difficulty of tracking them for the French forces.

France obtained the support of the United States, which established air bridges for supply, and the American aviation participated in the confrontation, while the Vietnamese obtained the support of China and the Soviet Union, which enabled it to develop the capabilities of its fighters and arm them, and the Vietnamese army inflicted the French with heavy losses starting in 1952.

The continuous attrition prompted Paris to attempt to crush the Viet Cong by luring the Dien Bien Phu area, but the Vietnamese commander Giab was clever about the plan and mobilized eighty thousand fighters and managed with the effort and patience of his fighters to deliver a large number of artillery pieces to the peaks overlooking the French camp in that area despite the bumpy roads leading to it .



On March 13, 1954, the Vietnamese launched the attack, razing the French fortresses, and the Battle of Dien Bien Phu ended in May, in which the French army suffered two thousand dead and 11,000 of its soldiers captured, about eight thousand of them died in captivity, while more than 25 thousand were killed. Someone from the Vietnamese.

In July 1954, the Vietmen and the French government reached a peace agreement in Geneva that provided for the independence of Laos and Cambodia and a temporary division of Vietnam into northern parts led by Ho Chi Minh, and southern led by Sultan Bao Deh.

French soldiers began withdrawing from Indochina, making way for American military advisors.

The Indochina War marked the beginning of the end of French colonialism, whose collapse in subsequent years accelerated mostly peacefully, but the Algerian case constituted an exception. Historians agree to link its bloody character to the political effects of the Indochina War.