French Foreign Legion Paratroops

The power vacuum in Indochina was skilfully exploited by a Vietnamese nationalist organisation dominated by the Communist leadership of Ho Chi Minh and his military subordinate Vo Nguyen Giap. It was February 1946 before war-torn France was able to send troops to Hanoi. By that time Ho had used the respite offered by a sketchy inter-Allied occupation to turn his 'Viet Minh' into a well-armed nationwide guerrilla organisation, and to declare an independent republic. The talks which followed were doomed from the start. The Viet Minh had no intention of accepting the re-imposition of French colonial rule; and the French, still smarting from the traumas of the Second World War, were in no mood for compromise. Negotiations broke down, accompanied by violent episodes which left each side with a legacy of hatred. In December 1946 the Viet Minh look to the hills; and early French attempts to destroy their refuges among the wooded cliffs of Tonkin, north of the French centres of Hanoi and Haiphong in the Red River Delta, met with failure. Ho and Giap activated their organisation throughout the peninsula; and over the next eight years they tied down, and eventually defeated, the French Union forces in the world's first text-book demonstration of Maoist revolutionary warfare.
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