End of French Rule: Dien Bien Phu and Geneva
A Forgotten Empire
For over sixty years before 1954, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia had been French colonies known as French Indochina. Japanese occupation during the Second World War shattered French authority, and when Japan surrendered in August 1945, the Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh declared independence in Hanoi. France refused to accept the loss of its colony and returned in force. By December 1946 a full-scale colonial war was underway between the French army and the Vietminh, Ho’s nationalist coalition.
The Vietminh was founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1941 as a Vietnamese nationalist coalition led by communists. It fought first the Japanese, then the French. By 1954, the United States was paying around 80% of France’s war costs to keep Vietnam non-communist.
Why the US Funded a French War
After the 1949 communist victory in China and the 1950–53 Korean War, Washington saw Indochina through the lens of the Cold War. President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles believed in the domino theory: if Vietnam fell to communism, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma would follow. By 1954 American taxpayers were paying around 80 percent of France’s war costs. France itself was running a politically unpopular war — the ‘dirty war’ — that it could not afford to lose, but could not win.
Dien Bien Phu: The Trap that Closed
By late 1953 the new French commander, General Henri Navarre, designed an operation to lure the Vietminh into open battle where French firepower would prevail. He chose Dien Bien Phu, a remote valley in north-western Vietnam, near the Laotian border. French forces parachuted in and built a fortified base around the airstrip in November 1953. Navarre assumed Vietminh General Vo Nguyen Giap could not bring artillery to the surrounding hills. He was wrong.
Through the winter of 1953–54, tens of thousands of Vietminh porters — many on bicycles — carried Chinese-supplied artillery, anti-aircraft guns and ammunition through the jungle to the hills around Dien Bien Phu. They dug positions into the reverse slopes where French air power could not see them. On 13 March 1954 Giap opened fire. Within hours the airstrip was unusable. The 13,000-man French garrison was cut off and could only be supplied by parachute drop.
The siege lasted 56 days. Vietminh trenches crept closer to the French perimeter, in tactics borrowed from the First World War. France appealed to the United States to use atomic weapons to break the siege — Operation Vulture — but Eisenhower refused without British support, which Churchill declined. The strongpoint codenamed Eliane fell on 7 May 1954. The French garrison surrendered. Around 11,000 French and colonial troops became prisoners. Around 60% of those prisoners died in captivity.
A Conference That Was Already Convened
By a remarkable coincidence, the international conference convened to settle Korea and Indochina opened in Geneva on 26 April 1954 — eleven days before Dien Bien Phu fell. The Vietminh victory therefore landed on the conference table at exactly the moment delegates were arguing over Vietnam’s future. The Geneva Conference brought together the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Britain, France, Cambodia, Laos, the Vietminh and the State of Vietnam (the French-aligned southern administration). It was the first major international conference at which communist China, represented by Premier Zhou Enlai, was treated as a great power. The British foreign secretary Anthony Eden chaired alongside the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, signalling that the western powers were willing to negotiate rather than pursue military escalation in Asia.
The Geneva Accords, July 1954
The Geneva Accords were signed on 21 July 1954. Their key terms were: France would withdraw from Indochina; Vietnam would be temporarily divided at the 17th parallel; the Vietminh would regroup north of the line under Ho Chi Minh; non-communist forces would regroup south; Cambodia and Laos would become independent neutral kingdoms; and crucially, all of Vietnam would hold reunification elections by July 1956. The temporary division was meant to last two years. It would last twenty-one.
The United States and the State of Vietnam refused to sign the Geneva Accords. Washington feared that any nationwide election would simply hand Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh, whose Vietminh enjoyed prestige as the victors over France. Eisenhower himself later acknowledged that Ho would probably have won around 80 per cent of a free vote. The American position was therefore to issue a unilateral declaration committing to non-violent change, while quietly encouraging the new southern leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, to refuse the elections when 1956 came.
Dien Bien Phu fell on 7 May 1954 after a 56-day siege. The Geneva Accords signed on 21 July 1954 ended French rule in Indochina, partitioned Vietnam at the 17th parallel, and called for reunification elections by July 1956. The elections never happened.