World War II gave birth to an eclectic array of independence movements against Western imperialism in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. These revolutions—and the great powers’ response to them—transformed both world politics and military history in myriad and unexpected ways. Nowhere in the colonized world was the struggle against Western domination waged with more determination and strategic acumen than in the ancient Indochinese nation of Vietnam.
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Although dominated by their northern neighbor China for more than a thousand years, the Vietnamese people had retained a sense of common identity for more than two millennia. A country of some 30 million in 1945, Vietnam had been colonized by the French in the mid-nineteenth century in an exceptionally violent and exploitive way, and occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War. A nationalist visionary named Ho Chi Minh (“He Who Enlightens” in Vietnamese), who happened to be a communist, organized a politico-military front called the Vietnamese Independence League in 1941 in Cao Bang province in northern Vietnam to challenge both the Japanese and the inevitable return of the French.
Nowhere in the colonized world was the struggle against Western domination waged with more determination and strategic acumen than in the ancient Indochinese nation of Vietnam.
Deep in the mountains of northern Vietnam, Ho and his lieutenant Vo Nguyen Giap began to build a formidable army and a shadow political apparatus of some sophistication. The political front was known in the West as the Vietminh. The revolutionary army forged by Giap went through a number of name changes over the years. By the time of the American war in 1965, it was called the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN).
A few months after Japan’s surrender in August 1945, a French Expeditionary Force of 25,000 men did indeed return, landing in Saigon. French statesmen took the view that reclaiming their overseas empire was necessary to restore their nation’s sense of honor after its humiliating defeat at the hands of the Germans. Vietnam was the jewel in the crown of a French colonial empire that comprised a significant portion of North Africa and most of Indochina—Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The Vietminh leadership thought otherwise. By 1945, Ho, ably assisted by General Giap and senior politburo member Le Duan, had successfully mobilized several million people in a quest to challenge France’s effort to reassert dominance over the entire country.
War broke out between the French and the Vietminh in December 1946. The struggle between France and the Vietnamese revolutionaries turned out to be extraordinarily complex, brutal, and protracted. The First Indochina War lasted eight very long years. For the first four, the Vietminh built up their strength and conducted limited guerrilla strikes against French columns while Giap patiently expanded and trained the army. The French Expeditionary Force, meanwhile, expanded to about 150,000, including troops from France’s African colonies.
Between 1950 and 1953, the Vietminh launched a series of offensives in northern Vietnam and Laos that forced the French to disperse widely and suffer a number of serious military setbacks, despite a massive infusion of funds and military assistance from the United States. Washington’s primary concern in supporting the French was to ensure Paris’s continued support and participation in the defense against Soviet expansion in Europe, but the Truman administration’s commitment to defeating Ho’s forces grew steadily as time went on.
At a supposedly impregnable French fortress deep in the mountains of northwest Vietnam in early 1954, five full divisions of PAVN troops faced off against an elite French division-size force in one of the most dramatic battles in the twentieth century: Dien Bien Phu. After lugging more than 150 artillery pieces deep into the jungled mountains by hand, the Vietnamese obliterated the enemy’s strongpoints in detail, and forced the French to surrender. This was the first pivotal battle of the postwar world to end with the defeat of a Western colonial power by an Asian army. It prompted in Paris a collapse of political will to carry on the fight.
At a major international conference in Geneva, Vietnam was divided into two temporary states: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, north of the 17th parallel (DRV), governed by Ho Chi Minh’s political front; and a pro-Western South Vietnam, the Republic of Vietnam (or GVN, for Government of the Republic of Vietnam). At this point the United States firmly committed itself to the defense of South Vietnam. In effect, the Americans took over the struggle from the French. The two states committed to holding unification elections within two years, but the elections never happened.
In 1959, after peaceful efforts to unite the country under a single government had failed, the North Vietnamese politburo ordered some ten thousand clandestine soldiers and political operatives in the South to begin an armed insurgency against the American-supported regime in Saigon. Weak, corrupt, and widely unpopular with the peasantry that accounted for more than 90 percent of South Vietnam’s population, the South Vietnamese government came perilously close to collapsing in late 1964 under intense military pressure from the insurgents—by then known in the West as the Vietcong (VC).
Unwilling to see South Vietnam fall, US president Lyndon Johnson committed US Marines initially to defend a major air base at Danang, and to a strategic air campaign against North Vietnam in March 1965, on the (correct) theory that the politburo was directing the southern insurgency. By year’s end, there were 175,000 American troops in Vietnam. With very few exceptions, the key players in the formation of American foreign policy from the Truman through the Johnson administrations believed that Vietnam’s importance lay in the simple fact that it was a theater of Cold War competition. The country, in and of itself, had no strategic significance to Washington.
To put it another way: official Washington believed Vietnam needed defending because the communist giants, the Chinese and the Soviets, were giving Ho both material and moral support with a view to expanding the “communist bloc” southward. The communists had already succeeded in biting off the northern half of the country in 1954; it was thus critical for the United States to preserve South Vietnam as a pro-Western bastion in Southeast Asia. A victory for the communists in South Vietnam, so the thinking went, was sure to inspire other adventures. Communist “wars of national liberation” had to be challenged, John F. Kennedy had said in 1963. Johnson was not at all keen to have to go to war in Southeast Asia. He had a long list of domestic priorities. Yet he felt obligated to defend South Vietnam against communist encroachment.
The war shook the country’s institutional and ideological foundations, exacerbating deep cleavages in American society between liberals and conservatives, young and old, Black and white.
American policymakers took the gravely misinformed view that the French defeat in Indochina had very little to do with the wide popular appeal of Ho’s movement or the soundness of its politico-military strategy. Rather, the problem lay with France’s inability to prosecute the conflict aggressively, or to train the South Vietnamese to do so. Unlike France, the United States had the political know-how and the military power to get the job done right…or so went the conventional American thinking. How could an army of rice-farmers led by a cadre of communist fanatics frustrate the will of the greatest power on the face of the earth? It seemed impossible to the powers in Washington. It did not seem so to Ho Chi Minh or General Giap.
In retrospect, it is mind-boggling how poorly American decision makers of the 1960s understood the concrete political dynamics of revolutionary Vietnam. They failed to see Ho’s extraordinary organizational abilities, his charisma, his capacity to exploit Vietnamese nationalism to suit his own ends. The inability of American policymakers to recognize the deep and broad appeal of Ho’s revolutionary movement to ordinary Vietnamese people longing for both unity and freedom from foreign domination would have immense repercussions in the years ahead.
The American war in Vietnam lasted a full decade. An ingenious protracted war strategy that integrated irregular and conventional warfare with tireless political mobilization efforts in South Vietnam’s 2,500 villages utterly confounded the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies. Two years after the United States withdrew its ground forces in 1973, the People’s Army of Vietnam crushed the South Vietnamese army in a conventional invasion by more than twenty North Vietnamese divisions in early 1975. Hanoi’s victory in Vietnam is widely viewed as one of the greatest achievements in world military history.
In the United States, the war shook the country’s institutional and ideological foundations, exacerbating deep cleavages in American society between liberals and conservatives, young and old, Black and white. It left the country baffled and ambivalent about its role in the world and widened the credibility gap between Washington and the American people. Journalist Arnold Isaacs wrote more than twenty years ago that the American misadventure in Vietnam “lingers in the national memory, brooding over our politics, our culture, our long, unfinished debate over who we are and what we believe.” It still does.
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Excerpted from Outmaneuvered: America’s Tragic Encounter with Warfare from Vietnam to Afghanistan by James A. Warren. Copyright © 2025 by James A. Warren. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
