Word: indo-china
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...Black. The patient Ho Chi Minh got his chance in World War II. Three months after the Germans swept into Paris, the Japanese, almost unopposed, took effective control of Indo-China. In what amounted in Asian eyes to a crowning loss of face, the Vichy-French agreed to cooperate with the Japanese. With flexibility and imagination, Ho patched together a "United Front" of Communists and Nationalists to harass both Frenchmen and Japanese. Ho called the new party the Viet Minh...
Serious Problem No. 2 was the French: there was a new determination in them, a special kind of pride born of French anxiety to wipe out the humiliations of the war and to re-emerge as a great power. As such, the French were quite definite about Indo-China: they wanted it back. With a ruthlessness and skill that matched Ho's own, the French army speedily got control of the South and could not be kept out much longer from Hanoi. So Ho negotiated: when the French army came back into the North, as the Chinese withdrew...
...with little more than guerrillas behind him, was a long way out on a limb. But the French became more and more stubborn, and Ho saw his conquest fading. Ho made the mistake of relying for support upon French Communists, which further stiffened the French negotiators. Meanwhile, in Indo-China, French-Viet Minh relations were disintegrating: lives were taken on both sides...
Toward the end of 1946, events moved decisively toward war. The talks in France broke down and Ho returned to Indo-China. There was a sharp, unexpected encounter at Haiphong, where French naval units, claiming that they had been attacked, bombarded the city. Ho prepared with guile for the onset of war. On Dec. 15 he congratulated the new French Premier Leon Blum (an old Socialist friend), and Ho's Interior Minister expressed a "sincere desire for fraternal cooperation." On Dec. 19 Ho ordered the Viet Minh army to attack the unsuspecting French army and civilian population in Hanoi...
...Winning!" With victory, Ho Chi Minh's prestige reached a new high in Asia. Nationalists of many lands, for all their objection to Communism, could not help taking pride in the exploits of an Asian army against their old masters from Europe. Indo-China's wait-and-seeists no longer needed to wait and see. "We are winning! Why stay with the losers?" cried Viet Minh women, urging Vietnamese soldiers to desert. "Do you want your sons to curse your names...