Only the Americans have been defeated. The Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular foreign war in U. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. In order to combat better-supplied American and South Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam War, Communist guerrilla troops known as Viet Cong VC dug tens of thousands of miles of tunnels, including an extensive network running underneath the Cu Chi district northwest of The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.
The Vietnam War started in the s, according to most historians, though the conflict in Southeast Asia had its roots in the French colonial period of the s. Over the next four years, the general directed much of U.
The Tet Offensive was a coordinated series of North Vietnamese attacks on more than cities and outposts in South Vietnam. The offensive was an attempt to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the United States to scale back its involvement in For the next 77 days, U.
It was passed on August 7, , From air power to infantry to chemicals, the weapons used in the Vietnam War were more devastating than those of any previous conflict. United States and South Vietnamese forces relied heavily on their superior air power, including B bombers and other aircraft that dropped Live TV.
This Day In History. He lived in London and Paris, and was a founding member of the French communist party. In , he visited Moscow for training at Comintern, an organisation created by Lenin to promote worldwide revolution. He spent the s in the Soviet Union and China. After the Japanese invasion of Indo-China in , Ho returned home and founded the Viet Minh, a communist-dominated independence movement, to fight the Japanese.
The French refused to relinquish their colony and in , war broke out. After eight years of war, the French were forced to agree to peace talks in Geneva. The country was split into a communist north and non-communist south and Ho became president of North Vietnam. He was determined to reunite Vietnam under communist rule.
By the early s, North Vietnamese-backed guerrillas, the Vietcong, were attacking the South Vietnamese government. Ho attended all of the early Comintern conferences, and became acquainted with the great figures of the Russian Communist Party, meeting Lenin probably in Despite its limitations, the tract became the handbook for Vietnamese nationalists and was widely distributed in Indochina. If, at the completion of training, any of the men had second thoughts or displayed an unwillingness to obey Communist instructions, Ho simply leaked their names to the French officials in Indochina.
The French promptly arrested the defecting cadres and probably paid their informant a reward. Ho was then killing two birds with one stone; he rid himself of undependable nationalists and gained funds for his movement.
Over the next few years, his wanderings are not well-documented. It is likely he returned to Europe as an agent of the Third International, some sources claiming that he lived in Berlin for a time. By , he was living in Thailand, working within a large community of Vietnamese emigres.
He traveled to Hong Kong in , where he pulled the various Indochinese Communist movements together into one party. By , he had returned to China and was serving as a radio operator with the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army, eventually becoming political commissar of a guerrilla training mission in Kwang-Si Province.
In May of , after 30 years abroad, Ho finally returned to Vietnam. He went to the town of Pac-Bo on the northern border, where the Central Committee of the Indochinese Communist Party was to hold its eighth meeting.
At this meeting, the party created the Viet Minh, a front organization intended to draw the support of Vietnamese who opposed the French, but were not yet Communists. Upon his return to China in early , he was imprisoned by a Chinese warlord, but released in to gather information about the Japanese units in Indochina.
Operating from the jungles of North Vietnam, Ho received aid from China and from the United States, fought the Japanese, and extended his influence throughout the area, building a firm infrastructure to support the Viet Minh. By May , he had managed to liberate six provinces from the Japanese and moved to assume control of the government. The French, however, were determined to reestablish their colonial hegemony in Indochina. Talks with the French failed to produce a negotiated settlement, and French armed forces seized Haiphong and Langson in November , initiating a war.
Ho moved his government into the mountains of North Vietnam and began almost nine years of warfare, culminating in the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in
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