The Success of the Viet Minh

On the 19th of December 1946, The Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh leadership launched a rebellion against the French authority governing the colonies of French Indochina. The first few years of the war were a low-level rural insurgency against French authority. However, after the Chinese communists reached the Northern border of Vietnam in 1949 the conflict became a conventional war between two armies equipped with modern weapons. These were supplied by the Chinese communist and Russian communist.

The French were highly involved with Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) due to the abundant harvesting riches that were favorable with their own economy. Historically, Vietnam first established the communist party through the influence of China after their conversion into a Communist country in 1949. Ho Chi Min, a nationalist leader, had

Before the 1900th century, various countries such as China and France dominated the country currently known today as Vietnam. Throughout the countries history the Vietnamese people were often times mistreated. The Vietnamese people had a strong craving for independence. In the early 20th century one man united the liberation cause; that man was named Ho Chi Minh.

The leader of this communist introduction and development in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh, born Nguyen Tat Thanh, grew up with a passion for freeing his country of the French. Ho Chi Minh worked hard on his French when his tutor told him, “If you want to defeat the French, you must understand them. To understand the French you must study the French language.” Ho Chi Minh’s patriotism developed mainly from his Chinese-language instructor, Hoang Thong, who was anti- French himself. Thong believed that losing one’s family was worse than losing one’s country. Ho Chi Minh’s first involvement against political action came on May 9, 1908 when he joined a peasant uprising as a translator. Attempting to translate in the front of the crowd, he was beaten and forced to hide at his friend’s house at night to prevent being arrested. In the following years, Ho Chi Minh yearned to go overseas; he said to journalist Anna Louise Strong, “The people of Vietnam, including my own father, often wondered who would help them to remove them the yoke of French control…I saw that I must go abroad to see for myself. After I had found out how they lived, I

Since the late 1800s, Vietnam has struggled with maintaining independence. Vietnam was under the French control but the Vietnamese wanted to break free of the harsh rules put in place by the French, so Ho Chi Minh created the Indochinese Communist Party in 1940. After the Japanese conquered Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh created the Vietminh in order to gain independence from all foreign rule. Although the Vietnamese defeated the Japanese in 1945, the French had no thoughts of pulling out of Vietnam. By the end of 1945 the French had already reentered into Vietnam and conquered the southern cities.

For centuries the Vietnamese people resisted being controlled by their powerful Chinese neighbors. They struggled to unify their country as an independent state. Ultimately they freed themselves from China 's claim for control of political authority and achieved national unity only to fall victim to French imperialism (Anderson 1). French ruled Vietnam and neighboring kingdoms as colonies from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia during World War II influenced the Vietminh war against the French in 1945. September 2nd, 1945, Ho Chi Minh declares independence from French rule shortly after Japans surrender from World War II (www.history.com). France 's rule over its colony was incredibly brutal and exploitative (Anderson 6). French colonialism deprived the Vietnamese of their political independence, and it impoverished many of the Vietnamese people (Anderson 7). Many villagers lost their lands and became low-paid plantation

During World War II, a Vietnamese man named Ho Chi Minh began to organize his "Viet Minh" armies to fight the French. In

Vietnam has a very rich history that often goes unnoticed and unaccounted for, this is most likely due to the war being such a big landmark in the history of Vietnam. Before the war many events transpired that would eventually lead up to the war. In the late 19th century Vietnam was considered to be a French colony. The French built their own standing infrastructure, they began to build railways and roads and bridges. All of this building meant heavy taxation on the Vietnamese. This was all good and progressive for vietnam however “Naturally the Vietnamese wanted independence.” (http://www.localhistories.org/viethist.html) From there Ho Chi Minh founded a revolution and within 20 years Vietnam came under Ho Chi Minh rule.

According to the staff of History.com, Vietnam, a small Southeastern Asian nation, was controlled under French colonial rule since the 19th century. Following Japan’s defeat by the Viet Minh in World War II, there was a split in Vietnamese ideas. The nation as a whole wanted Vietnam to come together as a unified populace, but different regions had different ideas for how they wished to be governed. The northern region believed that the best idea for government would be that of one modeled after communism, but the southern region believed the exact

The Vietnam War began, because of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) being conquered by the Japanese, in 1941. This led to the creation of the Vietnamese nationalist movement, formed by Ho Chi Minh to resist the Japanese. The Vietnamese national movement also known as the Vietminh, was a communist front organization. To stop the spread of communism through Asia, the United States intervened. The war lasted for 19-20 years, and involved countries such as South Vietnam, North Vietnam, United States, South Korea, Australia, Philippines, New Zealand, Thailand, Khmer Republic, Laos and the Republic of China. The war was known as a guerrilla war, which meant the use of tactics such as ambush, sabotage and petty warfare. Guerrilla warfare is a very unconventional style of warfare. It is when small groups of soldiers use stealthy tactics to inflict damage on the target. The casualties suffered by both sides were immense however, the Communists had the upper hand throughout the majority of the war. Not only was it their home turf, they also had the support of a large percentage of the civilian population. The effective use of guerrilla tactics by the Viet Cong played a very important role on the outcome of the war, and is also the primary reason why the United States lost. The following essay will outline the reasons why the guerrilla tactics used by the Viet Cong played a very important role on the outcome of the Vietnam War. The first paragraph will

When the war started, North Vietnam took side with the communist party which includes China, Viet Cong, and supported by many other communist countries such as the USSR as the main supporter of armour vehicles, explosive, and weaponries such as Type 59, Type 62, T-55, T-54, T-34, however tanks such as those were proven inefficient due to jungled biome and the needs to cut down trees could jeopardise secret operations and ambushes. Guerrilla warfare was proposed by Viet Cong it helped the communist to attack or defend territory with repeat succession when fighting against the

From the 1880s until World War II, France governed Vietnam as part of French Indochina, which also included Cambodia and Laos. The country was under the formal control of an emperor, Bao Dai. From 1946 until 1954, the Vietnamese struggled for their independence from France during the first Indochina War. At the end of this war, the country was temporarily divided into North and South Vietnam. North Vietnam came under the control of the Vietnamese Communists who had opposed France and aimed for a unified Vietnam under Communist rule. Vietnamese who had collaborated with the French controlled the South.

The two kinds of Dau Tranh, political and armed, worked together during the war to ensure North Vietnamese and VC victory. (Pike, 224-225)

---After WWII and until 1955, France fought hard to regain their former territories in the region, but with a poorly organized army and little determination among the troops, their efforts soon collapsed. The French were finally defeated at Dien Bien Phu on the 8th of May 1954 by the communist general Vo Nguyen Giap. The French troops withdrew, leaving a buffer zone separating the North and South and set up elections in order to form a government in the South. The communist regime set up its headquarters in Hanoi under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. Many North Vietnamese left the country and fled south where the self-proclaimed president, Ngo Dinh Diem had formed the Republic of Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh Ho Chi Minh was a Communist, who had announced Vietnam independent. He was a Marxist and believed in “national Communism ". Throughout the war with the French, Ho Chi Minh took refuge in northern Vietnam and settled there with his followers. He founded the Indochina Communist Party and the Viet Minh. North Vietnam was a deprived area and was cut off from the agricultural profit of South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was forced to ask assistance from main Communist allies, the Soviet Union and China. Both aided North Vietnam before and during the war. (Dong Si Nguyen, Duong xuyen Truong son: hoi uc.  Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Quan Doi Nhan Dan, 1999). Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. This had been a tremendously significant event in world history perhaps the most important event since the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. It marked the first occasion in human history in which a radical national movement under Communist leadership had succeeded in overthrowing the influence of a colonial state and establishing and maintaining its own new, independent form of social and political system. However, Ho’s type of communism was markedly different than that of Marxist ideology that had been the metaphorical icon of the October Revolution. alike to Jose Antonio’s fascist movement, the hierarchical communist party (later renamed the Vietminh) conformed intimately to the ideas of the person at its head, but unlike Antonio’s movement, did not