Word: minh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
During the war years, the Viet Minh organized a guerrilla force of 10,000 men who did so well in the jungles that they became known as "Men in Black." And Ho Chi Minh, at almost no cost, gained a position from which he could: 1) guide and control the Nationalists; 2) win prestige in the country as the only effective anti-Japanese underground; 3) earn the good will of Nationalist China and the U.S. merely because he was helping to fight the Japanese. "I was a Communist," Ho Chi Minh would later remark, "but I am no longer...
Chief of State. In the fall of 1945, after Hiroshima and the Japanese collapse, Ho Chi Minh took the decision of his life. Despite the repeated cautions of Moscow, 4,000 miles away (the Red Chinese were still isolated in their caves), Ho struck for power. "General offensive on all fronts," Viet Minh Military Order No. 1 proclaimed, and Ho's men in black, emerging in cohesion from jungle lairs, received the surrender of many Japanese and their arms. A French commissioner, parachuting down to reclaim the colony, found himself stripped seminude, and under arrest...
...Minh sent a golden opium set to the Chinese Nationalist commander and persuaded him that the Viet Minh was the right outfit to keep check on the French. "I love France and French soldiers. You are welcome. You are all heroes," Ho Chi Minh later declared, and the French decided that Ho was a useful man to watch the Chinese. "Americans are the liberators of the free world," Ho cried out, bidding for U.S. moral support, and OSS officers mingled convivially with the Viet Minh as Ho turned to more serious problems. Serious Problem No. 1 was the Nationalist element...
...Onset of War. With guards of honor and flags, Ho Chi Minh returned to Paris to settle the details. There is evidence that Ho genuinely wanted agreement at this stage: Moscow was making its postwar play for French friendship, and Ho, 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...