Название: The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945–1956
Автор: Shawn F. McHale
Издательство: Cambridge University Press
Год: 2021
Страниц: 318
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.1 MB

Shawn McHale explores why the communist-led resistance in Vietnam won the anticolonial war against France (1945–54), except in the south. He shows how broad swaths of Vietnamese people were uneasily united in 1945 under the Viet Minh Resistance banner, all opposing the French attempt to reclaim control of the country. By 1947, resistance unity had shattered and Khmer-Vietnamese ethnic violence had divided the Mekong delta. From this point on, the war in the south turned into an overt civil war wrapped up in a war against France. Based on extensive archival research in four countries and in three languages, this is the first substantive English-language book focused on southern Vietnam's transition from colonialism to independence.

After the Geneva Accords on Indochina were signed in 1954, Vietnam was temporarily broken into two parts, with the communist-led Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north and the non-communist State of Vietnam in the south. While many cadres and soldiers in the Resistance that fought the French regrouped to the north, Tran Bach Dang, a Resistance intellectual who covertly stayed behind in the south, set out for Saigon. Leaving the Resistance zone, he felt disoriented.

Why did the communist-led Resistance in Vietnam win their anticolonial war against France and its Vietnamese allies (1945–54) in the rest of Vietnam, but fail in the South? This book, based on extensive archival and secondary research on three continents, eventually answers that question.