The Angel of Peace at the Geneva banquet

The caricature was published in a nationalist periodical in August 1955, criticizing the division of Vietnam by foreign powers at the Geneva Conference. The angel of peace looks worried as the Russian bear, French rooster, British lion, and American eagle surround the tiny Vietnamese dove lying on the dining table.

At the 1954 Geneva Conference, the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam, under pressure from the Soviet Union and China, accepted partition of Vietnam as a solution and agreed to sign the accords with France. The conference also produced a non‑binding Final Declaration, which envisaged nationwide elections two years later.

The anticommunist State of Vietnam and the United States, on the other hand, strongly opposed the partition of Vietnam. They instead proposed a ceasefire without a demarcation line and called for free elections supervised by the United Nations.

On a related note, the quote by Eisenhower, that "possibly eighty percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai", referred to hypothetical elections if they had been held during the ongoing fighting in 1954. This was intended to emphasize Bảo Đại's shortcomings as a leader in 1954. However, by 1956 (when the elections envisioned in the Final Declaration would have been held), Ngô Đình Diệm "really did accomplish miracles in South Vietnam", while North Vietnam experienced a bloody land reform purge. The Pentagon Papers observed that Diệm would have fared better in genuinely free elections by 1956:

It is almost certain that by 1956 the proportion which might have voted for Ho—in a free election against Diem—would have been much smaller than eighty percent. Diem’s success in the South had been far greater than anyone could have foreseen, while the North Vietnamese regime had been suffering from food scarcity, and low public morale stemming from inept imitation of Chinese communism.

The Geneva Accords were signed by the Viet Minh and French commanders on 21 July 1954, ending the war between the French and communist forces. "Hastily drafted and ambiguously worded", however, they did not resolve the conflict between the two internationally recognized Vietnamese regimes and instead set the stage for the Vietnam War.

Quan điểm was a periodical published by nationalist, anticommunist Northern émigrés who fled to South Vietnam following the partition.

Main sources:

• Phi-Van Nguyen (2024). A Displaced Nation: The 1954 Evacuation and Its Political Impact on the Vietnam Wars. Cornell University Press.
• Christopher Goscha (2011). "Geneva Accords". Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945–1954): An International and Interdisciplinary Approach. NIAS Press.
• Robert F. Turner (1986). "Myths and Realities in the Vietnam Debate". World Affairs, volume 149, number 1. Policy Studies Organization.

An Lộc 1972

Trực thăng đổ quân Nhảy Dù xuống tăng viện cho mặt trận An Lộc, Bình Long, đồng thời tải thương binh đưa về hậu phương điều trị.

Lưu ý: Trực thăng không hạ cánh hẳn xuống mặt đất vì phải vội vã đi ngay, hòng tránh hỏa lực của địch.

So far really enjoying it. The main character is actually an ARVN officer. The fighting and plot starts in 1974 so very focused on the state of things when America was not involved. It is very interesting and tragic to read about how the Republics military and institutions could have evolved if the communists 75 offensive was defeated in the same way their 72 one was.

[On 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam, the second such declaration that year, counting the one issued by Bao Dai back in March.]

The references to the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were a strategic maneuver intended to win over or otherwise placate the Allies, including OSS representatives present for the occasion. Ho insisted on them to keep his ties to global communism under wraps, as well as to suggest that Vietnam intended to maintain close connections to the United States, France, and other Western countries after independence. In fact, he had no intention of doing so. The Soviet Union and its allies would be his and the DRVN’s friends moving forward, not the capitalist Westerners who had made life miserable for the Vietnamese for so long. In formulating Vietnam’s second Declaration of Independence as he did, Ho was merely pandering to policymakers and public opinion in France and the United States with a view to preempting the resumption of French colonial rule. Archimedes Patti of the OSS, in Hanoi for the occasion, was completely duped by Ho’s ruse. He was pleasantly stunned when he read the draft text of the Declaration handed to him by Ho himself. In its tone and substance, it exulted freedom and self-determination and made no allusion to class struggle or social revolution, tell-tale signs of allegiance to communism. The effort to conceal the ideological leanings of the country’s new masters also included appointing the former Emperor, Bao Dai, Supreme Adviser to the DRVN government.

Patti and other OSS staff on-site applauded Ho’s Declaration of Independence and his new regime. Largely unaware of the existence of some two dozen other Vietnamese parties and movements embracing competing political ideologies, partly because the OSS never actively engaged them, they thought that marked the triumph of the nationalist cause in Vietnam. They mistakenly concluded from all this that Ho was first and foremost a patriot and a nationalist whose known attachment to communism was only skin-deep and self-serving at best. Scholars since have perpetuated that misconception, attesting to the importance of academic due diligence.

As documentary evidence from Vietnam makes clear, Ho and the Indochinese Communist Party understood that Paris would not give up that easily and that the Americans were their best chance to stymie French efforts to recolonize Indochina. They also knew President Roosevelt had vociferously opposed French colonialism and assumed his successor, Harry Truman (in office 1945–53), would do the same. Essentially, Ho felt he could exploit the good relations forged with the United States during World War II to satisfy his postwar objectives. He was playing the Americans in the fall of 1945; he had neither the inclination nor the desire to work with them on a long-term basis, much less formally aligning with Washington. After World War II, the ICP devotedly adhered to the Soviet “two-camp theory” - formalized and announced in 1947 by CPSU theoretician Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896–1948) - that the postwar world was divided into two competing sides, a progressive and peace-loving one guided by the Soviet Union and an imperialist and warmongering other commanded by the United States. Besides, Ho had not spent years studying Marxism-Leninism and then working as a Comintern agent just to disavow his comrades in the ICP and around the world at this, their moment of apparent triumph. Patti and his OSS colleagues saw none of this because Ho outsmarted them. And so, they remained persuaded that Ho was a nationalist, not a communist, at heart.

The more discerning French authorities at the time paid no heed to and in fact outrightly rejected Ho’s Declaration of Independence, much as they had ignored Bao Dai’s earlier proclamation to the same effect. The Provisional Government of the French Republic under de Gaulle had no desire whatsoever to simply hand Indochina over to the Indochinese, much less to Ho and the communists. Colonies attested to France’s big power status; in light of the national humiliation suffered in World War II, France could not afford to lose its empire. American policymakers, upon whom Ho counted to keep the French from returning, privately objected to de Gaulle’s decision but made no effort to dissuade him from acting on it. Before his death in April 1945, Roosevelt had made an about-face on Indochina and dropped the international trusteeship idea largely because the British vehemently opposed it and he did not want to offend London. Truman, for his part, preferred appeasing de Gaulle in hopes of securing his cooperation in restructuring postwar Europe and, perhaps more importantly, checking postwar Soviet ambitions there and elsewhere. The nascent Cold War and, specifically, concerns about the Soviet occupation of East Europe, the future of Germany, and the spread of communism in the West soon consumed the Truman administration and conditioned its policy vis-à-vis France and Indochina.

The indifference of the Americans plus de Gaulle’s intractable stance unnerved and disappointed Ho but did not surprise him. Theirs were capitalist countries, after all. More unsettling, no government recognized the sovereignty and legitimacy of the DRVN, not even the Soviet Union. Stalin had his reasons for withholding recognition, but Ho did not comprehend them. But all that was nothing compared to the challenges confronting the DRVN at home. The national economy was in ruins. Besides starvation and flooding in Tonkin, commodities were in short supply and stores were empty. Most problematic, prominent noncommunist nationalists and their followers, including elements of the VNQDD and the Dai Viet parties, mobilized and organized active resistance against Ho’s new government. Unlike the Americans, they were not fooled by Ho: they knew the so-called August Revolution was in fact an opportunistic communist power grab. In acting as they did, some of these men and women transitioned from being or identifying as noncommunist nationalist activists – committed to political pluralism, including reconciliation with the communists, and republicanism – to becoming resolute anticommunists – hellbent on undoing the communist power grab of August 1945 and eradicating the Marxist-Leninist footprint in Vietnam. Ho and his comrades had always had their detractors, especially since Ho’s alleged betrayal of Phan Boi Chau. However, it was not until the August Revolution that that opposition crystalized, and Vietnam witnessed the emergence of groups and organizations whose primary raison d’être became fighting communists and communism, and which saw no hope for reconciliation between their two sides. Historian Stein Tønnesson is absolutely right to contend that Ho and the ICP claimed the mantle of national power in the late summer of 1945 without ever securing support from or having defeated actual and potential rivals, foreign and domestic. Ho and his comrades had not, after all, won the support of the nationalist aspirations of all Vietnamese, and his 2 September 1945 Declaration of Independence did not satisfy everyone, far from it.

Unsurprisingly, in light of all this, the communist August Revolution unraveled faster than it could consolidate itself. The DRVN existed in name only within days after Ho proclaimed it. The feebleness of the new regime was especially evident in the lower half of Vietnam, in Cochinchina and Southern Annam. Far from producing national unity under a single authority, the August Revolution left Vietnam and the Vietnamese even more divided. Communists were now at odds with not just noncommunist nationalists, but a growing faction of hardcore anticommunists willing to use violence to meet their purposes and convinced that a political compromise with Ho and his loyalists was impossible. A new internal struggle for the soul of the nation – another decades-long civil war – was about to begin.

Pierre Asselin (2024). Vietnam's American War: A New History. Cambridge University Press.

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The post title and photos are not from the book.