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The War That Doomed America in Vietnam: The First Indochina War
The Vietnamese people had already fought this war once, and they were determined to fight it again
Heavy guns ring out from the surrounding, wooded, hills. The enemy seems like they’re everywhere and nowhere. The troops on the ground are slowly surrounded and pounded from invisible positions. Morale is sinking quickly as the jungle is torn up in explosions of mud, dirt and fire.
The year is 1954 and these are not Americans under fire, they are a mixture of French troops, French loyalists and locals who are fighting in Vietnam to uphold dwindling French control over their southeast Asian territories.
This is a scene from the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, where a combination of overconfidence and bad intelligence caused a military catastrophe that would scar the French. If that sounds familiar, it is. These are the same issues that would later plague the Americans when they went into Vietnam.
This is taking place at the tail end of the First Indochina War, a war rarely taught in American schools but one that had far reaching effects on our own Vietnam War in the following years.
