THOMPSON : Uniforms of the Indo-China and Vietnam wars (fülszöveg)
The 'Vietnam War' started in World War II when the dedicated Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap waged guerrilla war against the Vichy-controlled French colonialists and the Japanese, who had been allowed to use Indo-China as a base for operations in Southeast Asia.
France had in the last century colonized the Indo-Chinese peninsula comprising Tonkin in the north; Annam, the mountainous, jungle territory in the centre and Cochin-China, the comparatively prosperous southern region. Laos and Cambodia also formed part of this sizeable chunk of France's colonial empire.
In September 1945, Ho Chi Minh entered Hanoi, the northern capital, as a liberator and declared a Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The French were quick to respond in February 1946 with a major expeditionary force entering northern Vietnam from the south.
During the next eight years, the French waged a bloody war against the Communist Viet Minh Forces, who fighting a guerrilla war would seldom accept a conventional battle. French strategy was based on holding hundreds of forts, which fell one-by-one to the Viet Minh until in 1954 the war was virtually over with the French disaster-at-arms at Dien Bien Phu.
Although the South Vietnamese had assisted their French masters, their nationalist aims were also strong and as a result of the French withdrawal in 1954, two separate states with widely differing ideologies were established in North and South Vietnam, the latter being non-communist and based on democratic principles learned from France if not the French colonists.
The Communists however had left their mark in South Vietnam in the form of subversive militia units of which the Viet Cong were the most formidable. The government in Saigon appealed for military aid to support their forces and in fulfilment of the SEATO treaty which followed the Geneva accords of 1954, the period 1954–65 saw the arrival in South Vietnam of American military aid and advisors.
By 1965, various incidents had led to the rapid build-up of U.S. Forces pitted with the South Vietnamese against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, supplied by Communist China and the U.S.S.R. Political constraints on the U.S. Forces never permitted them to wage total war but it is arguable that they could have ever beaten their well-armed and elusive guerrilla adversaries. By 1973, the Americans and their SEATO allies were out of Vietnam and by 1975, the whole of the peninsula was under Communist control.
'Vietnam' saw the introduction of new and devastating weaponry and both under the French and the Americans the creation and deployment of new forms of elite forces. The diversity of units meant a bewildering array of uniforms, badges and insignia, creating new traditions and now, almost ten years after the fall of Saigon focussing a new and more sympathetic interest world-wide in the organisation of the Vietnam Wars.
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