Ho Chi Minh's Declaration of Independence and the First Indochina War
Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence in Hanoi on 2 September 1945, quoting the American Declaration of Independence in the first sentence. The opportunity was a vacuum. Japan had displaced the French administration in March 1945 and surrendered in August, the Viet Minh had taken the northern countryside during the famine that killed perhaps a million people that spring, and the emperor Bao Dai abdicated and handed over the seal. Some 400,000 people heard the declaration in Ba Dinh Square, and an American OSS officer stood on the platform. France had no intention of accepting it. Negotiations in 1946 produced an agreement recognising Vietnam as a free state within the French Union that neither side interpreted the same way, and the French navy shelled Haiphong in November killing several thousand. The war began in December 1946 and ran for eight years. Its shape was set by geography and by China. The Viet Minh under Giap held the mountains and the villages, France held the cities and the deltas, and after 1949 the Chinese border gave the insurgents a sanctuary and artillery. The French attempt to force a decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 put 16,000 men in a valley the Viet Minh surrounded with guns dragged over the mountains by hand. It fell on 7 May, the day before the Geneva conference took up Indochina. The country was divided at the seventeenth parallel pending elections that were never held. Ho had written to Truman several times in 1945 and 1946 asking for American support and received no reply. The letters are in the archives, and what they would have changed is one of the more substantial questions of the period.
- Year: 1945 CE
- Category: Military
