PBS Vietnam documentary, worth the watch.
pbs.org/video/deja-vu-1858-1961-7tmfea/Posted Sep 18, 2017, 4:27 AM UTC
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I just finished the first episode. 100,000 Frenchmen died trying to keep control of a sinking ship, thats nearly twice that of the Americans who died in Vietnam yet I barely hear about it. Why were they so intent in keeping Vietnam as a colony? France was not in good state during and directly after WW2.
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Yeah, never heard of that or the ultimatum that they gave us saying they'd fall in the Soviet influence if we said anything about the colonies.
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Looking up on it I think it was done by the film makers to sound like the French were taking tons of losses since a 100,000 dead soldiers in such a short amount of time just for an occupation is just ludicrous. It seems like that total number of French soldiers dead includes the attempt at colonising Vietnam, all the dead soldiers that died from regular uprisings during the extremely long occupation and Vietnamese soldiers and mercenaries directly under the French during that period.
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20,000 french died fighting in the Indochina war. As with the vietnam war, that was not french soldiers against vietnamese, there was a french-vietnamese army fighting alongside the french.
It started as a colonial war but it quickly become a fight against communism, with the help of the US. But the objectives were never clear and the war was not very popular in France.
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Why were they so intent in keeping Vietnam as a colony?
Money (raw resources and cheap near-slave labor) and the competition between european countries for overseas colonies.
Few of these european gave up on their colonies easily - look at england and India.
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Or the Netherlands and Indonesia, or Portugal and its colonies.
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I began watching this documentary after finding out that it was free to watch online on PBS. I was unaware of the prior correspondence between the United States and Ho Chi Minh back in the 50's. Seems like we could have easily stopped the entire war from happening if the CIA (OSS at the time) had actually given the letters from Ho Chi Minh to the president. Anyway, great documentary!
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Seems like we could have easily stopped the entire war from happening if the CIA (OSS at the time) had actually given the letters from Ho Chi Minh to the president. Anyway, great documentary!
It's more complicated than that - Truman was only President up to a certain point in time, and the point the documentary was driving too was that the Korean War changed the American mindset entirely.
Sure, Stalin had ordered the Berlin blockade (and subsequent Berlin Airlift happened), but the US had mostly tried staying out of the post-WW2 internal conflicts going on in the world. Hell, the US even sent envoys to China to ask the Nationalist leader - Chiang Kai Shek - to demobilize a large part of his military as a sign of good faith to Mao Zedong. That backfired horribly as Mao took advantage of this change of fortune.
Thus when the Korean War happened, Truman and most leaders in the West saw outright naked communist aggression as something that must be contained at last. They didn't do enough in Eastern Europe, they were struggling in Greece and Turkey, and they saw advances all across Asia. The US was in a tough situation too - how do you keep the French involved in helping Western Europe counter the Soviet Union, if you undermine their desire to preserve their colonial empire (which between Vietnam and Algeria which happened around the same time, they finally realized they were no longer a colonial power)?
The other part to note is that while Ho was probably a nationalist before a communist, he was working closely with very ardent communists that the documentary points out was being driven largely by the Soviet Union and China's support. More than a few of the Vietnamese interviewed in the show pointed out that the communist brutality was well known to many, so there were many factions at play in who would actually rule Vietnam and the US wasn't all that enamored with any of them.
That's also why the first episode ends on the note about JFK and most other US leadership seeing the newly formed South Vietnam as their own baby that they could not let fall. They finally had a viable alternative to Ho's North Vietnam and now became invested in trying to prop up South Vietnam
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Yeah, I knew all about the struggle the US government had regarding Vietnam, it was just interesting that had we given Ho Chi Minh a little bit of attention, he may not have fallen into the communist influence.
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I have been saying this for years - when various people argue for what military strategy could have won the war for the US, I say the solution was political and for the US to have reached out to Ho and his circle and competed with the communists to smother him with kindness, flattery, bribes or what have you. Think of all the lives and money that could have been saved!
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Which we could have easily done, because the amount of money we were dumping into S. Vietnam was insane.
The 2nd part to the solution was to win over the hearts/minds of the people. There's a line in the 2nd episode of that documentary, I'm paraphrasing, but basically "You saw all the people in the city and thought they were friendly, you saw the people in the village and thought they were Vietcong". That's, no good.
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he was working closely with very ardent communists
During the Japanese occupation of Vietnam Ho was working with the United States - later on he at least partially worked with communists because they were the only ones doing outreach to the non-white peoples of third world countries.
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During the Japanese occupation of Vietnam Ho was working with the United States
And any other force that helped counter the Japanese. I mean, Mao Zedong worked with the Americans and even the Nationalists to fight the Japanese during WW2 - didn't mean he owed the US or Nationalists a damn thing in the end
later on he at least partially worked with communists because they were the only ones doing outreach to the non-white peoples of third world countries.
Yes, because they could take advantage of the situation to push their ideology by taking advantage of the chaos that came with decolonialism. They couldn't make inroads in stable first world countries, so they went elsewhere
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didn't mean he owed the US or Nationalists a damn thing in the end
It absolutely does mean a 'damn thing' - it means the US had diplomatic clout and should have made every effort to go that route before resorting to instigating violence. And Ho had a history of reaching out to the west that Mao did not.
Yes, because they could take advantage of the situation
I am not saying USSR and China had noble intentions, but that from the point of view of the vietnamese, there were not really any other options.
And jumping ahead, lets not forget that after the "American war" in vietnam, they had a war with China to kick them out.
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Thought it was a good watch. I liked that they gave background into the Vietnam War that most people don't realize: the intense nationalism of the Vietnamese people, the brutal treatment the French had towards its colonies, and the shift in perspective on Vietnam from being a colonial civil war to one being viewed through the lens of the Cold War. Also fascinating to see interviews of Vietnamese that fought on both sides, and why they did
Yeah, getting to hear from combatants on all sides really humanized the war even more. Especially when they explain their why, I started to realize that in their circumstances, I might have gone with N. Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh too.
That Nationalism due to Imperialism was the biggest eye opener for me.
A CRITICAL part of understanding the US war in vietnam is understanding that a large section of our hand-picked 'allies' in South Vietnam had been collaborators with the French.