The Longest Wars: Indochina 1945-75

In 1981-82, as a graduate student of history, Stein Tønnesson was lucky enough to be admitted to the Indochina files of the French archives, where secret cables and reports had been conserved since the outbreak of the first Indochinese war in late 1946. In the first part of this article he presents a new version of the process that led to the Franco-Vietnamese war, based on this previously unpublished material. New light is thrown on French actions and motives and also on the Indochina policy of the United States at that time. The French sources show how the high commissioner in Saigon, with backing from the French premier and foreign minister Georges Bidault, deliberately provoked war. This was done at the same time as Bidault's government was replaced by a Socialist government under the veteran Léon Blum. Once taking office, Blum sent a peace proposal to Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh and ordered the French troops to negotiate a cease-fire. His order was ignored by the French army, however, and in the face of vigorous nationalist sentiments in France, Blum had to give in. In the second part of the article Stein Tønnesson compares the first and second Indochinese wars and finds notable parallels in the ways they escalated and in the reasons why they lasted so long.