Democratic Republic of Vietnam

The half of Vietnam that won, having been created by a temporary line that was never meant to be a border. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam was declared by Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi in September 1945, opening with words taken from the American Declaration of Independence; France refused to accept it and the First Indochina War ran until the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, where a besieged garrison in a valley was destroyed by artillery hauled over mountains the French had thought impassable. The Geneva accords divided the country at the seventeenth parallel pending elections in 1956 that were never held. Around a million people, mostly Catholics, moved north to south. The northern state carried out a land reform that killed tens of thousands and was publicly admitted afterwards to have been excessive. It supplied and directed the insurgency in the south through the Ho Chi Minh trail, a network of roads through Laos and Cambodia that was bombed for years without being closed. The United States bombed the north from 1965; more tonnage was dropped on Indochina than in all of the Second World War. The Tet offensive of 1968 was a military failure and a political victory. American forces withdrew in 1973. Saigon fell in April 1975. The country was formally reunified in 1976. Ho had died in 1969. The state governed the north from 1954 to 1976 with Hanoi as its capital. It held around 20 million people. Dien Bien Phu ended a siege of 56 days. Haiphong was its principal port.

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