Introduction

The war in Vietnam is undoubtedly the best-known military conflict of the post- 1945 era. This is in large part due to the extensive involvement of the United States in the war during the 1960s.

Often overlooked in discussions about Vietnam is the obvious fact that the conflict in Indochina was much more than an ‘American' war. After all, before American intervention there was a war between the Vietnamese and their French colonial masters, and after the United States withdrew in 1973, war continued to ravage Indochina for the next two decades. Thus, for the Vietnamese, the war that preoccupied them in the 1960s and 1970s was, at one level, only the latest in a series of struggles against foreign occupiers: the Americans were merely

Viet Minh

Vietnamese, communist-led organization whose forces fought against the Japanese and the French in Indochina. Headed by Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh was officially in existence from 1941 to 1951.

decolonization

The process whereby an imperial power gives up its formal authority over its colonies.

Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)

The official name of communist Vietnam, the DRV was initially proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh in 1945. Between 1954 and 1975 it comprised only the northern part of Vietnam (North Vietnam).

see Chapter 9

following in the footsteps of the Chinese, the French and the Japanese before them. The symbol of this latest Vietnamese struggle for independence, Ho Chi Minh, was to the Americans just another communist leader, but to many Vietnamese Ho and his Viet Minh movement represented their historic hopes for self-determination.

In the context of the Cold War, however, the interrelationship between the decolonization of European empires and the rise of Asian communism (most evidently seen in the success of the Chinese communist revolution in the late 1940s) almost inevitably made Indochina a subject of American interest. Such developments also invited the interest of the Soviets and the Chinese, whose aid to the Viet Minh and, after 1954, the communist North Vietnamese state played an important role in determining the final outcome of what has been called ‘America's longest war'. Yet, the single most important factor determin­ing the outcome of the war was probably the local and regional context: the North Vietnamese and their southern allies represented anti-colonialism and independence while the South Vietnamese were, not entirely incorrectly, often viewed as serving the interests of the latest ‘colonizer', the United States. Ironically, the end of the ‘American' phase of the Vietnam Wars did not produce an enduring peace: even after the unification ofVietnam in 1975, Indochina remained an area of continued civil and inter-state wars as genocide swept Cambodia and wars between Vietnam and Cambodia, and China and Vietnam erupted in the late 1970s. As a consequence, Indochina remains to the present day one of the poorest regions in Asia.