Word: vietminh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lederer walked from Hanoi to Haiphong with 2000 Vietnamese refugees who were going South after the Vietminh victory over the French. "They were old men and women carrying small children -- no young men," he says. He also learned from these refugees that "they were all Catholic, and their Priests told them God had moved to Saigon...
While U.S. troops and the Vietcong ambush each other in the ladrang Valley, Europe's former imperial powers view the fighting with widely divergent reactions, Sneering French cynics calmly predict another Dienbienphu--the climactic 1954 defeat of the Frech by the Vietminh. Most Germans, on the other hand, solicitously approve of America's every move. And the English are simply to preoccupied to object more than mildly...
...Overholt's other main assertions are 1) that the Viet Cong are "trained in and supplied from the North"; 2) that "the war in South Viet Nam is carefully controlled from Hanoi"; and 3) that (in the French-Indochinese War) the Vietminh engaged in "much senseless killing," "tortured brutally and killed" villagers, and, after victory, substituted worse oppression...
...Overholt's assertion that the Vietminh engaged in senseless killing and torture is not substantiated by any evidence. His claim that, after victory, the Vietminh "substituted worse oppression" is ludicrous. We refer him to a most unsympathetic observer, Joseph Alsop, who, in an article in the New Yorker Magazine, June 25, 1955, described a trip which he had taken through Vietminh controlled areas of South Vietnam. "I could hardly imagine," he wrote, "a communist government that was also a popular government and almost a democratic government." Harvard-Radcliffe May 2nd Committee
What was it like out there! Explain all that to them, to these people who have scarcely ever left their valley; explain the Chinese and the Vietminh, the tall elephant grass of the Haute Region and the paddy-fields of the deltas, the mud and the dust, the fighting, the suffering, the dying, and what he and his kind were striving to find behind all this death...