Word: viets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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. But Ho's victory...
...Three agreement at Potsdam, the Nationalist Chinese came in to occupy Hanoi and the North, the British (which meant the French, who arrived in British ships) came to liberate Saigon and the South. Ho defied them. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," Ho proclaimed, declaring his Viet Nam independent. The great deception began...
...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...
...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, Ho consented to lead his "Democratic Republic of Viet Nam" back within the French Union. The French recognized Ho as Chief of State...