So the dictatorship eventually came to depend on the presence of half a million US soldiers in the South and on the US carpet-bombing of the North.Įven that was not enough. Ho Chi Minh had the support of the peasants. The Saigon dictatorship had the backing of the landlords. What followed was one of the 20th century’s great tragedies. Instead, US funds, arms, and ‘advisors’ flowed in to sustain the dictatorship against a growing rural insurgency. The promise was that there would soon be an election to decide the future of the South. A pro-Western dictatorship was installed in the South. The Communist-led nationalists were granted the North.
When the French attempted to restore colonial rule after 1945, the Viet Minh resumed the fight for national independence against a new enemy, finally winning a decisive victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.īut Vietnam’s agony did not end. By the end of the war, they had built a national liberation movement – led by Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist Party – and, as the Viet Minh, were waging guerrilla war against the Japanese.
They had been colonised by the French in 1887 and then occupied by the Japanese in 1940. The Vietnamese are an ancient people with a long history and a rich culture. This war, once one among many, became the war – the war that divided the world’s greatest superpower, set the rest of the world afire, and shaped an entire generation of radicals. Photo: PBSīut Vietnam was in a category of its own. Mary Ann Vecchio kneels beside the body of Jeffrey Miller minutes after he was fatally wounded by the National Guard, one of four American students shot and killed by US soldiers on the campus of Kent State University, Ohio, on.
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