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At the beginning of 1954 the United States had fewer than 350 military personnel in Vietnam, acting as advisors to the French army. Ten years later, in August 1964, the US Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorising President Lyndon Johnson to use "all necessary measures" to defend US forces in Southeast Asia. The next year Johnson began sustained bombing of North Vietnam and deployed the first US combat troops. The decade between Dien Bien Phu and the Gulf of Tonkin is the subject of this lesson. It matters because it explains how the United States inherited, rather than inherited a war it had invented — and because the commitments and assumptions it accumulated in this period set the pattern for the disastrous escalation of 1965–68 that you will study in the next lesson.
The lesson begins with Vietnam before 1954 — French colonial rule and the First Indochina War — and traces the transition from French defeat to American commitment. It examines the division of Vietnam at the Geneva Conference, the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in the South, the American doctrine of the domino theory, the build-up of advisors under Eisenhower and Kennedy, the Buddhist crisis of 1963 that ended Diem's government, and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of August 1964.
Vietnam had been part of French Indochina since the 1880s, along with Laos and Cambodia. France governed it as a colony, extracting rubber, rice and tin while using Vietnamese labour under harsh conditions. An educated Vietnamese middle class developed in the coastal cities, exposed to French language, law and, for some, political ideas of national self-determination.
During the Second World War, Japan occupied Indochina from 1940, initially ruling through the Vichy French administration and then taking direct control in March 1945. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, the colony was briefly without a ruling power.
A Vietnamese nationalist and communist movement — the Viet Minh (League for the Independence of Vietnam) — had been founded in 1941 by Ho Chi Minh, who had spent much of his earlier life in France, the USSR and China. The Viet Minh had cooperated loosely with the American OSS (forerunner of the CIA) against Japan during the war. On 2 September 1945 Ho declared Vietnamese independence in Hanoi, quoting the opening of the American Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal". His new Democratic Republic of Vietnam controlled much of the country's north.
France, however, intended to restore its empire. In late 1945 French troops returned, backed in the first instance by British occupation forces. Negotiations between France and the Viet Minh broke down, and in December 1946 open war began.
The First Indochina War lasted nearly eight years. Viet Minh forces led by the general Vo Nguyen Giap fought a protracted guerrilla war against a better-equipped but increasingly demoralised French army. From 1950 onwards the conflict was drawn into the Cold War: Mao Zedong's newly established People's Republic of China began supplying the Viet Minh with arms and training, while the United States began paying a growing share of France's war costs. By 1954 the United States was footing roughly 80% of the French military bill in Indochina.
The war ended at Dien Bien Phu, a valley in the far northwest of Vietnam close to the Laotian border. In late 1953 the French commander, General Henri Navarre, occupied Dien Bien Phu as a fortified airhead from which to disrupt Viet Minh supply lines. The Viet Minh, to French astonishment, hauled heavy artillery up into the surrounding hills, encircled the garrison, and opened a siege on 13 March 1954.
The siege lasted 55 days. On 7 May 1954 the French garrison surrendered. More than 2,200 French troops had been killed and 11,000 more were taken prisoner. The defeat broke French political will to continue the war.
Even as Dien Bien Phu fell, representatives of France, the Viet Minh, the USA, the USSR, China and Britain were meeting at the Geneva Conference (April–July 1954) to discuss the futures of Korea and Indochina. The Geneva Accords on Indochina, signed on 20 July 1954, had four main provisions:
| Provision | Detail |
|---|---|
| Ceasefire | An immediate ceasefire between French and Viet Minh forces |
| Partition | Vietnam divided temporarily at the 17th parallel into North (Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh) and South (State of Vietnam, Saigon) |
| Movement | A 300-day period during which civilians could move between the two zones; around 900,000 Catholics moved south, around 100,000 Viet Minh supporters moved north |
| Elections | Nationwide elections to reunify the country to be held by July 1956, supervised by an International Control Commission |
The division at the 17th parallel was explicitly described as temporary — a "military demarcation line", not a political boundary. The elections of 1956 were the mechanism intended to resolve the political question.
The United States refused to sign the Accords. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, suspicious of any arrangement that might allow a communist government to come to power through an election, distanced the US from Geneva but promised not to "disturb" the settlement by force. The new southern government, the State of Vietnam under the former emperor Bao Dai, also refused to sign. In practice this left the 1956 elections dependent on the willingness of governments in Saigon and Washington that did not want them to happen.
In June 1954 Bao Dai appointed Ngo Dinh Diem as Prime Minister of the State of Vietnam. Diem was a devout Roman Catholic and a nationalist with a reputation for incorruptibility, but he had no significant political base in Vietnam. He had spent the late 1940s and early 1950s abroad, including in the United States, where he had cultivated useful political and religious contacts.
In October 1955, Diem staged a referendum on whether Vietnam should remain a monarchy under Bao Dai or become a republic under him. He received 98.2% of the vote, with in some districts more votes recorded than there were registered voters. He proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam and became its first President. In July 1956 the reunification elections set by the Geneva Accords did not take place; Diem, with American support, simply declined to hold them. North Vietnam's population was larger than the South's, and Ho Chi Minh would almost certainly have won.
Diem's government had problems that would shape the next decade.
| Problem | Detail |
|---|---|
| Narrow political base | Catholic (about 10% of population) in a predominantly Buddhist country; relied heavily on family appointments (brother Ngo Dinh Nhu ran the security apparatus; sister-in-law Madame Nhu played a prominent public role) |
| Authoritarianism | Banned political opposition, jailed critics, censored press; used "re-education camps" against suspected communists |
| Land reform | Reversed some of the land reform carried out by the Viet Minh in the 1940s, alienating peasants |
| Corruption | Government positions, contracts and army promotions routinely sold |
| Strategic Hamlet Program (from 1962) | Relocated rural Vietnamese into fortified villages to separate them from Viet Minh guerrillas; destroyed ancestral villages and generated hostility |
| Viet Cong | From 1960 the National Liberation Front (NLF), known to its enemies as the Viet Cong (Vietnamese Communists), organised insurgency in the South with support from Hanoi |
By the early 1960s the Viet Cong controlled large areas of the rural South and was assassinating an estimated 2,000 village officials a year. Diem's authority outside Saigon was crumbling.
On 7 April 1954, a month before Dien Bien Phu fell, President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained the strategic importance of Indochina to a press conference:
"You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences."
The domino theory framed the next twenty years of American policy in Southeast Asia. If South Vietnam fell to communism, it argued, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia and perhaps the Philippines would follow. The Soviet Union and China would then dominate the region, threatening Japan and Australia and undermining the whole of the Western position in Asia.
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