07-24-2017, 09:24 AM
(07-24-2017, 02:34 AM)Dill Wrote: Dien Bien Phu (1954) comes to mind--the most important battle in the long war to free Vietnam of foreign control. Winning there enabled the Vietminh to leverage the French out of Indochina.
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam signed the Geneva Accords with France and the Peoples Republic of China shortly thereafter, drawing a PROVISIONAL border at the 17th parallel to allow the French and the remnant of their colonial government under Bao Dai to disengage from the Vietminh and begin the withdrawal. In 1956, per the Accords, a nationwide election, monitored by the UN, was to be held for a unified government--one Vietnam.
The French withdrawal was completed by 1955, but in 1956, Bao Dai's prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, took over in a coup, declared the Republic of Vietnam, and refused to hold elections. The US, though it had previously agreed to the unification, promptly recognized the government of what they called "South Vietnam."
Outside of the Catholic, French-speaking minority which had administrated the colonial government for France, the people of Vietnam, North and South, did not recognize the Diem regime. As Diem sought to impose control on the largely Buddhist population, protests, riots and armed resistance followed (as B-zona noted above). In 1959, the National Liberation Front was formed. The US began sending advisors, then larger contingents of troops, a whole Marine division in 1965, until, by 1968, 500,000 Americans were propping up the unstable, coup-plagued government.
As you say, there are different "opinions" about the war. If the views of the majority of the Vietnamese count, then the North Vietnamese were not "invaders," since they were fighting for their own country in their own country. If anything, they were driving out invaders--the foreign soldiers propping up an RVN that did not have popular support. What people in the US call the Vietnam War was a civil war in which the people of both the North and South defeated a weak, illegitimate regime to accomplish what should have been settled in 1956.
After all your research I'll give you partial credit here only because of SSF's word choice.
True, the North didn't actually "invade" the South. Rather the North Vietnam armies "infiltrated" the South beginning in 1964.
The word "invade" implies conducting an assault on another sovereign country in which South Vietnam was not.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/north-vietnamese-army-begins-infiltration
Although the war in Vietnam didn't transpire from the same set of circumstances, I've always likened that war to Americas Civil War. Two regions of a nation at odds with each other.
South Vietnams Ngo Dinh Diem was the South's Jefferson Davis.
The Union army of the North infiltrated (invaded!) the Confederate South.
