A bloody war of attrition that France fought in defense of its colonial presence in Southeast Asia between 1940 and 1954, 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 was able to annex Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and it was called Indochina.
With the outbreak of World War II, the French found themselves in direct confrontation with Japan, which in 1941 decided to control Indochina, subjected the region to its influence, and eliminated French influence, which had been 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 opposed to them and the French. 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.
Tension
At the end of World War II, reclaiming Indochina was the top priority of General de Gaulle, who learned of a British-American plan to share it after the defeat of Japan, and sent General Thierry Dar-Ganlier at the head of a campaign to reclaim Indochina from Britain and China.
The general succeeded in convincing both parties to withdraw gradually, and concluded an agreement with the Viet Nam on March 6, 1946, stipulating the establishment of a unified and free Vietnamese republic that would form part of the Indochina Federation and the French Union, with the establishment of permanent French bases in Hanoi.
With General de Gaulle leaving power in 1946, pro-colonial pressure groups revived, the positions of the authorities of the Fourth Republic on the issue changed, and the number of French forces in the region was greatly doubled.
Confrontation
In November 1946, confrontations broke out between French and Vietnamese soldiers in the commercial port of Hiphong near Hanoi. The Viet Nam quickly took advantage of the opportunity to carry out operations against the French garrison, and the garrison commander responded with an artillery bombardment that destroyed the port and left six thousand Vietnamese dead, most of them civilians.
Leader Ho Chi Minh called on his citizens to resist with everything they had, and a confrontation broke out in which the French suffered heavy losses, and the Vietcom men (the military arm of the Vietmin) targeted supply routes and ports, taking advantage of their precise knowledge of the land, the weakness of transportation, and the difficulty of tracking them for the French forces.
France received the support of the United States, which established air bridges for supply, and American aviation also 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 on the French heavy losses starting in 1952.
The continuous attrition prompted Paris to try to crush the Viet Cong by luring it to the Dien Bien Phu region, but the Vietnamese commander Giap was clever in the plan and mobilized eighty thousand fighters and was able, 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 region despite the rugged roads leading to it. .
On March 13, 1954, the Vietnamese launched an attack and destroyed the French forts. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu ended in May, in which the French army suffered two thousand deaths and 11,000 of its soldiers were captured. About eight thousand of them died in captivity, while more than 25 thousand were killed. A Vietnamese person.
In July 1954, the Viet Nam and the French government reached a peace agreement in Geneva that stipulated the independence of Laos and Cambodia and a temporary division of Vietnam into two parts: the north, led by Ho Chi Minh, and the south, led by Sultan Bao Dih.
French soldiers began to withdraw from Indochina, making way for American military advisors.
The Indochina War marked the beginning of the end for French colonialism, the collapse of which accelerated in subsequent years, mostly peacefully, but the Algerian case constituted an exception whose bloody nature historians agree with the political effects of the Indochina War.
Source: Al Jazeera + websites