* Less than a mile from the Chinese border.
† A veteran cadre, now a member of the Political Bureau and deputy chairman of the National Assembly of the D.R.V.
* In autumn-winter 1947, the Central Committee decided to launch widespread guerrilla warfare in all French-occupied areas. One part of the regular army was scattered in independent companies, whose task was to penetrate deep into the enemy rear to carry out propaganda and armed activities.
The War of Liberation, 1945-1954
I. A Few Historical and Geographical Considerations
Vietnam is one of the oldest countries in Southeast Asia.
Stretching like an immense S along the edge of the Pacific, it includes Bac Bo, or North Vietnam, which, with the Red River delta, is a region rich in agricultural and industrial possibilities; Nam Bo, or South Vietnam, a vast alluvial plain furrowed by the arms of the Mekong and especially favorable to agriculture; and Trung Bo, or Central Vietnam, a long narrow belt of land joining them. To describe the shape of their country, the Vietnamese like to recall an image familiar to them: that of a shoulder pole carrying a basket of paddy at each end.
Vietnam extends over nearly three hundred and thirty thousand square miles and has a population of approximately thirty million inhabitants. During its thousands of years of history, the Vietnamese have always maintained a heroic tradition of struggle against foreign aggression. During the thirteenth century in particular, they succeeded in thwarting attempts at invasion by the Mongols who had extended their domination over the whole of feudal China.
From the middle of the nineteenth century, the French imperialists began the conquest of the country. Despite resistance lasting dozens of years, Vietnam was progressively reduced to colonial status, thereafter to be integrated in “French Indochina” with Cambodia and Laos. But from the first day of French aggression, the national liberation movement of the Vietnamese people developed unceasingly. The repression used to stifle this movement only increased it the more; so much so, that after the First World War, it began to take on a powerful mass character. It had already won over wide circles of the intellectual and petty bourgeois levels, while penetrating deeply into the peasant masses and the newly forming working class. The year 1930 saw another step forward with the founding of the Indochinese Communist Party, now the Vietnam Workers Party, which took up the leadership of the national democratic revolution of the Vietnamese people against the imperialists and the feudal landlord class.
Just after the start of the Second World War in 1939, France was occupied by the Nazis, while Vietnam was progressively becoming a colony of the Japanese fascists. The Party appreciated in good time the situation created by this new development. Estimating that a new cycle of war and revolution had begun, it set the task for the whole nation to widen the anti-imperialist National United Front, the preparation of armed insurrection, and the overthrow of the French and Japanese imperialists in order to reconquer national independence. The Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh (League for the Independence of Vietnam, abbreviated to Vietminh) was founded and drew in all patriotic classes and social strata. Guerrilla warfare was launched in the high region of Bac Bo, and a free zone was formed.
In August 1945, the capitulation of the Japanese forces before the Soviet army and the Allied forces put an end to the world war. The defeat of the German and Japanese fascists was the beginning of a great weakening in the capitalist system. After the great victory of the Soviet Union, many people’s democracies came into existence. The socialist system was no longer confined within the frontiers of a single country. A new historic era was beginning throughout the world.
In view of these changes, in Vietnam the Indochinese Communist Party and the Vietminh called the whole Vietnamese nation to general insurrection. Everywhere the people rose up together. Demonstrations and shows of force followed each other uninterruptedly. In August, the revolution broke out, neutralizing the bewildered Japanese troops, overthrowing the pro-Japanese feudal authorities, and installing people’s power in Hanoi and throughout the country; in the towns as well as in the countryside, in Bac Bo as well as in Nam Bo. In Hanoi, the capital, on September 2, the provisional government was formed around President Ho Chi Minh; it presented itself to the nation, proclaimed the independence of Vietnam, and called on the nation to unite, to hold itself in readiness to defend the country, and to oppose all attempts at imperialist aggression. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam was born, the first people’s democracy in Southeast Asia.
But the imperialists intended to extinguish the republican regime at its first breath and once again transform Vietnam into a colony. Three weeks had hardly passed when, on September 23, 1945, the French Expeditionary Corps opened fire in Saigon. The whole Vietnamese nation then rose to resist foreign aggression. From that day began a war of national liberation which was to be carried on for nine years at the cost of unprecedented heroism and amidst unimaginable difficulties, to end with the shining victory of our people and the crushing defeat of the aggressive imperialists at Dien Bien Phu.
But while the Vietnamese people were closing their ranks around the provisional government in the amazing enthusiasm aroused by the August revolution, a new factor intervened which was to make the political situation more difficult and more complex. According to the terms of an agreement between the Allies, in order to receive the Japanese surrender, the Chinese Kuomintang forces entered Vietnam north of the sixteenth parallel en masse, while the British forces landed in the South. The Chiang Kai-shek troops took advantage of the opportunity to pillage the population and sack the country, while using every means to help the most reactionary elements among the Vietnamese bourgeois and landlords—the members of the Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang (the Vietnamese Kuomintang) and the pro-Japanese Phuc Quoc (Vietnamese National Restoration Party)—to stir up trouble throughout the country. After occupying the five frontier provinces, they provoked incidents even in the capital and feverishly prepared to overthrow people’s power. In the South, the British actively exerted themselves to hasten the return of the French imperialists. Never before had there been so many foreign troops on the soil of Vietnam. But never before either had the Vietnamese people been so determined to rise up in combat to defend their country.
II. Summary of the Progress of the War of National Liberation
At the outset of the war, the French imperialists’ scheme was to rely upon the British troops to reconquer Nam Bo and afterward to use it as a springboard for preparing their return to the North. They had shamefully capitulated before the Japanese fascists, but after the end of the world war, they considered the resumption of their place at the head of their former colony as an indisputable right. They refused to admit that in the meantime the situation had changed radically.
In September 1945, French colonial troops armed by the British and soon strengthened by the French Expeditionary Corps under the command of General Leclerc,* launched their aggression in Saigon, with the direct support of the British army. The population of Nam Bo immediately rose up to fight. In view of the extreme weakness of its forces at the beginning, people’s power had to withdraw to the countryside after waging heroic street fights in Saigon and in the large towns. Almost all the towns and important lines of communication in Nam Bo and the south of Trung Bo gradually fell into the hands of the adversary.
The colonialists thought they were on the point of achieving the reconquest of Nam Bo, and General Leclerc declared that occupation and pacification would be completed in ten weeks. But events took quite a different turn. Confident of the support of the whole country, the southern population continued the fight. In all the campaigns of Nam Bo the guerrilla forces went from strength