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wausfpp.org
Because the US actions in Vietnam are so widely misrepresented in the US media today (rather than being simply hidden away), we use that false history to organize our presentation of the unpatriotized history, with each chunk of reality under the specific false claim that it undermines. Note that we are deliberately leaving out the massive scale of the destruction, killing and torture committed by the US against Vietnam and the Vietnamese; this is not because we wish to continue the practice of hiding these, but because our concern here is with countering the false history listed below.
Propaganda says the US was in South Vietnam because it was invited in by the South Vietnamese government. This makes it sound like there was a South Vietnamese government, and then the US came in to help it. This is the reverse of the truth. The US chose, installed, and controlled the "government of" South Vietnam. Before the US installed the US-controlled Ngo Dinh Diem regime (and its US handlers) into South Vietnam, South Vietnam was controlled by the French (who were actually funded by the US anyway). So there was no government "of" South Vietnam to "invite" the US before the US came in, bringing its own government. From the very beginning this regime was chosen by the US, funded by the US, had US "advisers" telling it what to do, and South Vietnam was the subject of an extensive CIA operation throughout the country in support of this new US puppet.
The government in South Vietnam immediately prior to the US coming into South Vietnam was France, the old colonial ruler, which had just been defeated in a war for all of Vietnam by the Vietminh (the Vietnamese nationalists led by communist Ho Chi Minh, who had been fighting for Vietnamese independence against the French and Japan and the US for decades by this time). In 1954, after the Vietminh had defeated the French, the French and Vietminh held talks at Geneva. In the Geneva agreements, the Vietminh had agreed to let France set up a puppet regime in the southern half of Vietnam only on the condition that France agreed to make the puppet hold elections for all of Vietnam in 1956, which everyone knew the Vietminh would win because they were by far the most popular movement in all of Vietnam, including the south. The Geneva Agreements said that the division of the country would be temporary, and that the two chunks would not be two separate countries, but merely two pieces of the same country, the leaders of whom both claimed the whole country, even though they would only control half. This was a huge concession by the Vietminh because the Vietminh already controlled the north, and a large part of the south as well, which they agreed to turn over to the French puppet government.
The reason the Vietminh agreed to give so much territory to the French was because of the promise of unification elections, which everyone knew the Vietminh would win (and because the Vietminh were being pressured hard by China and the Soviet Union, which wanted to get along with the US). The reason the French agreed to it, even though they knew it meant they would soon lose south Vietnam when the elections were held, was because the French government was under extreme pressure from the French people, who were completely tired of fighting, and because French forces had been soundly beaten by the Vietminh.
France, in its war to take Vietnam from the Vietminh, had been funded and armed almost entirely by the US, and US personnel had flown planes in the war on the French side. Now France was going to set up its own puppet regime in the South, but the US didn't like France's choice of puppet, Buu Hoi, so the US set up its own regime. In the very beginning, this regime was a US puppet. It was installed by the US, a CIA operative named Edward Lansdale directed the activity of its "president", hundreds of US "advisers" helped handle the activity of the "government," which was funded by the US, and the puppet president himself (Ngo Dinh Diem) was a Vietnamese exile who had been living in the US and Europe until the US installed him in Saigon. (Yes, by the way, that was the same Edward Lansdale who had created the US's own client president, Magsaysay, in the Philippines.)
The US (and its puppet president, Diem) did not want to hold the elections that the Vietminh demanded, and that the Geneva agreements had called for, because the US knew the Vietminh would win. Moreover, instead of allowing the Vietminh in the south to campaign and organize, the US and its puppet regime started killing the ex-Vietminh in the south in huge numbers. (This was also in violation of the Geneva agreements that the Vietminh had made with France when the French-Vietnamese war ended in 1954, which had said that people would be allowed to try to campaign for the 1956 elections.)
But only at the very beginning was South Vietnam a true puppet regime, in that it ruled, with the US holding it up. After 1961, South Vietnam was a combination of a US puppet regime and a direct US dictatorship, because from then on, US personnel themselves began to directly kill the people of South Vietnam. (Before that, the US had merely directed the puppet regime that was killing the peolple of South Vietnam.) In 1961 US president Kennedy began to greatly expand the numbers of US troops in South Vietnam (11,000 by the end of 1962). By mid-1962, US pilots were flying between a third and half of all air "combat" missions against the South Vietnamese, for example. This violated the Geneva Agreements, as did the introduction of large numbers of US troops. Kennedy also started the practice of bombing South Vietnamese people with napalm and herbicides, though he specified that the pilots actually flying the planes during these runs be Vietnamese.
This is obviously not true because the US was attacking the people of South Vietnam. But propaganda also says most of the people of South Vietnam supported the US's regimes and wanted the US to help them fight the "Viet Cong" (actually the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam) and the North Vietnamese. This is not true either. First of all, the "Viet Cong" *were* South Vietnamese. Very large numbers of the people of South Vietnam opposed the US and its puppet regimes, which quickly became widely hated, many of them supported the "Viet Cong" to fight the Americans, despite (or because of) the incredible repression against them. The Americans secretly admitted that the Viet Minh/National Liberation Front were the only politically powerful group in South Vietnam. But many South Vietnamese who were not really part of the "Viet Cong" also opposed the US and its puppets (and were brutally crushed). This included highland tribes, some religious sects, many Buddhist religious leaders, and even at one point a fairly large chunk of the puppet's army itself, which had turned against the US-backed group and was then crushed.
The US and its puppets drove the South Vietnamese people into even stronger opposition by their policies of mass imprisonment and killing of former Vietminh (remember, the Vietminh had led the independence struggle against the French, and were very popular; there were a lot of former Vietminh around). They also herded the South Vietnamese peasants into camps, killed huge numbers of them with bombs and napalm, imprisoned, tortured, and killed many thousands, destroyed their crops with airborne defoliants, destroyed their houses and food.
Some "criticism" of the US says that the US was intervening in a civil war in Vietnam, which was a stupid thing to do and not the US's business, according to the critics. This is not true. It wasn't a civil war. The US was at war with the Vietnamese, first with the South Vietnamese, and later, after the US had started killing South Vietnamese in large numbers, with the South Vietnamese who had gone north after Geneva and now came back to fight the US, and finally, after the US started bombing North Vietnam, with North Vietnamese who came south to help the South Vietnamese who were already at war with the US. It was the US's idea to fight the Vietnamese.
The "civil war" propaganda line says that the US was intervening in a civil war between Vietnamese people who just didn't get along. This is the opposite of the truth too. The US had to work very hard to keep the Vietnamese from getting along. Not only did the US create its own little team of Vietnamese that then helped the US attack the rest of the Vietnamese, but the US had to work very hard to try to keep its own little team from making peace with the rest of the Vietnamese. The US's biggest problem was to keep its own puppets from making peace with the National Liberation Front (the group of South Vietnamese that Americans usually call the "Viet Cong") and telling the Americans to leave. (The US puppets also kept getting annoyed at their own lack of control of the country due to the US's desire to control it through its own US personnel. The puppets wanted US money, but they didn't like US personnel being in control. They also expressed annoyance that they didn't even know who or how many Americans were in South Vietnam.)
Diem himself had been very annoyed at US demands to put more and more US troops into South Vietnam, but his annoyance didn't stop it from happening. Then his brother Nhu started talking with the National Liberation Front about making peace and making South Vietnam neutral, which was intolerable to the US. So Diem and Nhu were overthrown, with US acquiescence, by General Minh in early November 1963. (Both Diem and Nhu were killed during this coup.)
But then General Minh started doing the same thing. First, Minh didn't want to go along with the US's desires that he rebuild the "strategic hamlet" program for controlling the South Vietnamese peasants by herding them into camps. Minh opposed US proposals for bombing North Vietnam. He also opposed US desires for increasing US military "advisers" at lower and lower levels throughout the provinces. When he started talking about having South Vietnam go neutral and making peace with the National Liberation Front, the US applied pressure to shuffle Minh's officer corps around in a way that left him vulnerable, and he was overthrown in another coup. General Khanh took over on January 30, 1965.
At first Khanh was all the US had hoped for. He agreed to have US personnel infiltrated at the lowest village level throughout the country, something Minh had resisted, and was very cooperative with his US "advisors." But it wasn't long before Khanh started doing the same sort of thing as his predecessors. He got a lot of support from Buddhist leaders that the US didn't like because they were too friendly with the National Liberation Front. Then Khan himself started talking with the National Liberation Front about making peace and going neutral. What is more, he now opposed US plans for the sustained bombing of North Vietnam (after having supported the idea earlier). In December 1964 the US started looking for a new leader for South Vietnam. In early February 1965 the US bombed North Vietnam twice. In late February Khanh was overthrown, with a lot of last-minute maneuvering and arranging by US ambassador Taylor and US general Westmoreland, by a group of three generals: Thi, Ky and Thieu. Shortly after Khanh was overthrown, the US started its sustained bombing North Vietnam, "Operation Rolling Thunder."
What eventually caused the US to bring down all three of these US puppet regimes in South Vietnam was that they starting talking about making friends with South Vietnamese who were enemies of the US. Thus the "civil war" propaganda line is exactly backwards from reality. It was the US's project to keep the Vietnamese from getting along.
Ky and Thieu, who didn't make peace with the National Liberation Front, managed to keep US support until 1975, though they didn't get along with each other. (Ky only had any share of power until 1971; Thieu lasted until 1975.)
This line isn't true either. First, as US officials privately admitted, the problem for them was that so many South Vietnamese wanted to vote for the leaders of North Vietnam to be the leaders of all Vietnam, which was why the US refused to hold the 1956 elections for all of Vietnam that the leaders of North Vietnam were demanding.
Second, the US and its puppet regime were attacking the South Vietnamese, not defending them, and establishing US dictatorship over them.
Third, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, the most powerful enemy of the US in South Vietnam, was allied with the leaders of North Vietnam, and was widely supported in South Vietnam. After all, the leaders of North Vietnam were the same people who had just finished leading the people of Vietnam, north and south, in their successful war against the French throughout the whole country. They had also led the anti-Japanese resistance during the war. It stands to reason they were widely supported throughout the country, north and south. But the actions of the US and its regime also drove many into the group.
The US/Diem regime targeted the Vietminh and many others in South Vietnam. It arrested or killed tens of thousands of South Vietnamese. It attacked any opposition or even expression of oppositional thought, forced thousands to move away from their homes and farms, abolished elected local councils and replaced them with government appointees, made a host of actions including belonging to certain groups and even the spreading of certain rumors punishable by death (as fast as 3 days after charge, no appeal), herded thousands into concentration and reeducation camps. This repression was not restricted to former Vietminh; it also targeted members of other groups, religious sects, anyone who criticized the regime, and Central Highland tribes. The result was an even greater revulsion by the South Vietnamese against the hated US-backed regime. In 1957 the first armed southern resistance to the US-backed regime's military sweeps developed. By 1958 various South Vietnamese groups, including some highland tribes and some Vietminh, were fighting the US and its regime. In 1959 South Vietnamese Vietminh who had gone north in 1954 began coming back into the south to fight the US. In 1960 the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam was formed by South Vietnamese to fight the US and its regime in South Vietnam. The NLF was however tied to the same leadership that led North Vietnam; this is an important way that the Vietnamese resistance, north and south, was united, despite the fact that the NLF was southern-led.
Even to discuss this issue is to buy into propaganda in a sense, so I'm reluctant to do so. Below I show that the North Vietnamese Army was late arriving in South Vietnam, and didn't do so until after the war was underway. Some people might say that this proves that the US wasn't there to defend South Vietnam from North Vietnam. But it doesn't. Even if North Vietnamese troops had begun fighting the US in South Vietnam the day after the US established its own regime there in 1954, this would not have made true the propaganda line that says it was a war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. That propaganda line requires translating a US conquest of the South Vietnamese into a defense of the South Vietnamese, a redefinition of "South Vietnamese" to exclude all South Vietnamese who wanted the Vietnamese to defeat the US and who did not support the US puppet regime, and the deliberate erasure of the fact that the south and north Vietnamese were part of the same country, one that had just fought two wars against foreign conquerors and had just signed an agreement with France that the division of the country would be temporary, pending elections in 1956. It also requires forgetting that the northern regime was Vietminh, as was the leadership of the southern resistance.
However, because the chronology of northern military involvement is so important to the propagandists, it is worth mentioning that it is wrong too. Recall that the top leaders of the Vietminh after the Geneva agreements had become the government of North Vietnam. The Vietminh had just defeated France in most of the country, claimed the whole country, and had only agreed to stay north in exchange for the promise of 1956 reunification elections which everyone expected it to win, which is why the US/Diem refused to hold them. The Vietminh organization, existed north and south (and was supposed to be legal in the south according to the Geneva agreements, although this was violated by the US/Diem regime, which, in essence, made being an unrepentant Vietminh a crime punishable by beheading). Within the Vietminh organization, the push to armed struggle against the US/Diem regime came from southern Vietminh, who had to exert a great deal of effort to get the northern Vietmihn leadership to agree to armed struggle in the south. (It's an interesting fact that while the northern Vietminh are criticized today in western propaganda for supporting armed struggle in the south, at the time, within the Vietminh, the northern Vietminh were criticized in the south for initially not approving armed struggle in the south, at a time when the Vietminh was almost decimated in the south by the armed force of the US/Diem regime.)
The first Vietnamese moving south from North Vietnam came in 1959, five years after the US/Diem regime was established over the South Vietnamese (that is, five years after the US conquest of South Vietnam), and they came to fight with the other South Vietnamese who were already fighting against the US. (Most of the Vietnamese coming south were actually South Vietnamese members of the Vietminh who had gone north in 1954 and were now returning to their own home in the south.) By 1965 there were 39,517 of these people in the south, according to US military estimates. By September 1961, 80-90 percent of those fighting the US and its regime in South Vietnam were South Vietnamese who had never gone north (by CIA estimates), and 10-20 percent were South Vietnamese who had gone north and returned south. At this time the southern resistance was still using weapons they themselves made in the south, or US or French weapons, according to the CIA. (They were also using weapons the US-backed regime's troops had "lost" in "combat"). The first actual North Vietnamese Army combat battalion (about 1000) arrived in the south in April 1965, 11 years after the US had established its puppet dictatorship over the South Vietnamese people, four years after the US had started bombing the South Vietnamese, and months after the US had already started bombing North Vietnam. At this time (April 1965), there were already 56,000 US military personnel in South Vietnam plus 2000 South Korean troops working for the US. A year later, by March 1966, there were 13,100 North Vietnamese Army troops in the South, working with 225,000 southern National Liberation Front troops to fight the US and its regime. By this time, there were 216,400 US troops in South Vietnam plus 23,000 troops from other US client states (especially South Korea) but led by the US military. (All these are US military estimates taken from George Kahin's Intervention, p.307-308).
Again, however, it is essential to point out that in recounting this chronology, we are in a sense buying into patriotic propaganda, if it is interpreted to imply that if some North Vietnamese had some south earlier, this would make true the US media's claim that the US was "defending" the South Vietnamese. This claim is wrong regardless of when northern Vietnamese came south to fight the US conquest of the southern half of their country.
[written by me, this history is based entirely on George Kahin's Intervention (1986)]
Prior to World War II, France ruled all of Vietnam as part of its colonial holdings in Southeast Asia, which also included Laos and Cambodia. In 1932 France crowned Bao Dai as the "emperor" of Vietnam, while France retained all real power there.
During World War II, Germany conquered France and set up a German follower state in France, the Vichy French regime. This meant that Vietnam was now ruled by the Vichy French, a German client state. The Vichy French agreed to allow Japanese troops into Vietnam. Shortly before the end of the war, the Japanese military imprisoned the French rulers of Vietnam and set up their own "Vietnamese" regime, still under emperor Bao Dai, who now became the Japanese puppet instead of the French puppet he had been. However, Japan was fast losing control in many areas of Vietnam anyway, losing it to the Vietminh. The Vietminh, the League for the Independence of Vietnam, had been founded in 1941 by some of the leaders of the old Indochinese Communist Party (declared illegal by the French rulers), under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, a senior Vietnamese communist leader who had been opposing foreign rule of Vietnam for decades. The purpose of the Vietminh was to fight the French and the Japanese in Vietnam and bring about Vietnamese independence. It included both communist and noncommunist elements, and it quickly acquired broad support throughout Vietnam; the result was that by the time the US OSS (the forerunner of the US Central Intelligence Agency) first entered Vietnam in May 1945, the Vietminh had already taken a great deal of northern Vietnam away from the Japanese.
The Vietminh also acquired the support of the US military, which made Ho Chi Minh an agent of the US OSS. In addition to fighting the Japanese, the Vietminh rescued US pilots shot down over Vietnam and received small amounts of weapons and other aid from the US.
During 1944 and 1945 there was a great famine in northern Vietnam, caused by bad weather, US bombing of the dikes that had protected northern Vietnam from floods, and Vichy French/Japanese policies of hoarding rice in storage depots and burning it for fuel. The famine killed over a million people, between ten and twenty percent of the people of the northern part of Vietnam. In 1945 the Vietminh led a series of protests and rebellions at the rice storage depots, taking them over and distributing the rice, which further increased the Vietminh following.
When Japan surrendered to the allies, the Vietminh sent out the message for a general Vietnamese uprising against Japanese power throughout the country. At this time the Vietminh already controlled the countryside in most of north and central Vietnam, and quickly took the cities there as well, including Hanoi and Haiphong in the North as well as the imperial seat at Hue in the central region. At the end of August 1945, Emperor Bao Dai officially turned the government of Vietnam over to the Vietminh, and in early September 1945 the Vietminh, still under Ho Chi Minh, finally controlled all of Vietnam and declared Vietnam an independent country. The Vietminh had become the government of all Vietnam.
This ended the first of the Vietminh's wars to take Vietnam from foreign control. The US had been an ally of the Vietminh in this war, and US OSS members had attended the Vietnamese independence ceremonies as friends of the Vietminh. Both the US and the newly-founded United Nations (of which the US was the most important founder) had publicly said that they would support independence all over the world; Ho Chi Minh informed the US and the UN that the Vietminh took the UN promise of independence seriously and that the Vietminh would fight if the promise of Vietnamese independence was not kept.
The promise was not kept. France wanted to rule Vietnam again, as it had before the war. France had been occupied by the allies and was now under the rule of the anti-Vichy French General de Gaulle. Months earlier, at the founding meeting of the UN, the US had privately informed France that it did not question France's right to be the ruler of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. While its public and official stance was neutral, the US actually funded the French effort to take Vietnam away from the Vietminh.
In September 1945, the same month that the Vietminh declared Vietnam independent, the victorious allies occupied Vietnam. Britain took the southern half of Vietnam (the area south of the 16th parallel), and China (which was under the government of the anticommunist Chiang Kai-shek, who was not driven out of China until 1949) took the north. Their official job was to disarm the Japanese troops, but both Britain and China actually fought against the new independent Vietnamese (Vietminh) government.
Less than a month after Vietnam declared independence, the US was already pressuring China to try to help France take control of the north away from the Vietminh. The Vietminh was much stronger in the north than in the south, however, and after briefly attempting (and failing) to install their own followers in power, the Chinese officers in the north of Vietnam reached an informal accord with the Vietminh, whereby the Vietminh continued its administration while the Chinese military continued its occupation.
In the south of Vietnam, things went differently. Instead of disarming the Japanese, the British forced the Japanese troops to fight against the Vietnamese (Vietminh) government, threatening to treat Japanese officers as war criminals if they refused. The British also led Indian troops, and released and rearmed the French troops that the Japanese had imprisoned, in what quickly became an all-out war against the Vietnamese (Vietminh) government in the south of Vietnam. By October 1945, US vessels were transporting large numbers of French troops to Vietnam, and the US supplied France with generous quantities of weapons as well as allowing it to buy US ships on credit. Because of the official US policy of neutrality between France and the Vietnamese, the weapons were not sent directly to Vietnam but to France; from France they were then sent to Vietnam. The British-led Japanese, Indian and French troops quickly defeated the Vietminh in the south of Vietnam and turned all of Vietnam south of the 16th parallel over to France.
By March of 1946 Britain had left, leaving 65,000 French troops in charge in the south. The Vietminh's independent government of Vietnam, now called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), existed as an administration only in the north, which was still occupied by Chinese troops. Its rule of the south as well had lasted for only three weeks. Soon China, which had been pressured by the US to help France regain control of the north, signed an agreement with France to allow French troops into the north of Vietnam as well.
The Vietminh government in the north, now under pressure from China and still reeling from the massive destruction and famine, cut a deal with France in March 1946. The government of Vietnam (the DRV) would remain, still under Vietminh leadership, but France would be allowed to insert 15,000 troops into the north. In return, France agreed that every year it would remove three thousand of its troops from the north, that all French troops would all be gone in five years, that the DRV would be a free state under its own leadership with its own military and government, and that France would agree to hold elections in the south to decide whether the southerners wanted to join the north in a single country. Because the Vietminh expected it would win these elections due to its popularity, this was thus essentially an agreement to give the DRV the independent and unified state of Vietnam that it sought, but gradually. The agreement said that the DRV would become a part of something called the French Union, a federation made up of France and its colonies, with representation in the French parliament.
France's promises turned out to be false as well. In June 1946 France refused to hold the elections to see if the southerners wanted to join the DRV; instead France established what it intended to be a permanent French puppet regime in the south of Vietnam. France soon put many more than 15,000 troops into the north, and its idea of representation for French colonies in the French parliament was to give all of the former French colonies together only one sixth of the number of seats that it gave to the French in France, despite that fact that there were far more people in the former French colonies than in France. Put more simply, France intended to continue ruling all of Vietnam, now with massive US support.
The DRV, still led by Ho Chi Minh, asked for help from fellow leftists in France, but was turned down. The French communist and socialist parties were both members of the government in France, but they did not respond to Ho's appeals. Fighting soon broke out in Vietnam between the French and the Vietminh, and the French communist party signed the orders to use force against the DRV. France's first major act was to demand control of the port of Haiphong in the north, "to teach the Vietnamese a lesson," and when the DRV refused to leave, France shelled the city, killing 6,000 Vietnamese people by France's own estimate. This was in November 1946.
Six months later the US wrote secretly to its embassies that "We recognize Vietnamese will for indefinite period require French material and technical assistance and enlightened political guidance which can be provided only by nation steeped like France in democratic tradition and confirmed respect human liberties and worth individual."
[Parenthetical note to Americans, who are by now so used to supporting US troops as they kill huge numbers of people in their own homes in other countries that you probably just passed over this without even noticing:] I am trying to say that you are supposed to be amazed at the huge discrepancy between what the French did in Haiphong and what the US said about them shortly afterwards. If you didn't even notice, please register this as evidence of your own habituation to the strange way of thinking produced by propaganda. The number of people killed by the French in Haiphong was twice the number killed in the famous terror incident of September 11, 2001 in New York. Would you refer to the people who murdered those New Yorkers as "enlightened" with a "confirmed respect for human liberties and worth of the individual?" That's how the US government described the people who had just done something twice as bad as the 2001 New York terror incident. (Of course, they did it with massive US support, support so massive that they wouldn't have been able to do anything at all without it.) You may also want to consider the significance of the fact that you have probably never even heard of the Haiphong massacre, and think about what it would tell you about the information environment if many people had never even heard of the New York terror incident of September 11, 2001. [end parenthetical note]
After the November 1946 shelling of Haiphong, Ho Chi Minh continued to ask for peace with France, once in late November and then again in December, when he presented a detailed plan for calming things down. Neither had any result. The French were taking over government buildings in Hanoi and demanding that Vietnamese government troops disarm. Finally in mid-December 1946, Vietnam, still led by Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh, decided to rise up again against French rule.
A large-scale war ensued, in which the Vietminh, supported by huge segments of the population, took most of the country except the areas surrounding the largest cities. Most of the funds for the French side in this war were provided by the USG, and most of the Vietminh's weapons were stolen from the French. The French were beaten decisively at last at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The ensuing talks between France and the Vietminh were held at Geneva. The Geneva agreements called for the removal of foreign troops from Vietnam, and the regroupment of troops into regions above and below the 17th parallel. The region above would be controlled by the Vietminh, and the region below by the French-backed puppet regime of Bao Dai.
This was agreeable to the French leaders, whose public was demanding an end to the war, because the Vietminh agreed to hand over huge portions of the country that the Vietminh already controlled.
It was agreeable to the Vietminh partly because both the USSR and China were pressuring them to accept the agreements, but more importantly because the Geneva agreements also specified that there would be elections held to unify the country under a single government in 1956, and everyone expected that the Vietminh, which was by far the most popular force in most of the country both North and South, would win back in elections what they had agreed to give up after taking it militarily. The Geneva Accords also specified that any group would be free to campaign in the elections; the communist-led Vietminh would thus be free to campaign in the South, and could be expected to win, given their widespread popularity. The Geneva Accords stated quite clearly that Vietnam was a single country, not two countries, and that reunification awaited only the elections. It forbid the entry of foreign troops into any part of Vietnam, and required all French-allied troops to go to the south and all Vietminh troops (including those whose homes were in the south) to go to the north.
After Geneva, however, the Americans, who had not signed the Geneva agreements (though they had said they wouldn't use force to undo them, which wasn't true), took over the southern half of the country and backed Ngo Dinh Diem, their chosen leader, with massive funds. Diem and the Americans targeted the Vietminh and made being a communist punishable by death. They imported large numbers of US troops into the country, herded the people into "strategic hamlets," imprisoned thousands of ex-Vietminh and their supporters, and killed huge numbers of people. Eventually, under US president Kennedy, the Americans began bombing South Vietnam.
Although the Vietminh had preserved a few soldiers with hidden weapons in the south (in violation of the Geneva agreements), they had sent the vast majority of their soldiers to the north, including most of those whose homes were in the south. The Vietminh in the south were supposed to be organizing for elections. They were completely unprepared for the onslaught by the US and Diem. The leadership in the north kept arguing for peaceful campaigning in the south, but this did not work when Diem and the Americans were targeting the southern Vietminh for death. The Vietminh in the south formed an organization, the National Liberation Front, which was really subordinate to the same Vietminh group that ruled the North, but was led by southerners and consisted entirely of southerners. The southern communists began to demand a return to armed conflict against the repressive US/Diem regime, but the north, busy trying to rebuild its infrastructure and set up a communist economy, kept resisting this argument. Eventually the rulers in the north gave permission for the southern communists to fight against the US and Diem, although for years they did not send northern army troops to help. Finally, they did so, after the war was well underway.
[source for this entire article is : George Kahin. Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (Knopf, 1986).]
Below are a few quotes in support of these points, from a man who was arguably America's greatest Southeast Asia scholar, George Kahin of Cornell University. Kahin studied Southeast Asia for 50 years, knew many of the principal actors personally, and interviewed many of them himself. His students also wrote some of the most accomplished American academic studies of political events in the area.
[In February 1954] Under Secretary of State Beddell Smith told an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the administration was thinking of 'providing a certain religious leadership' [i.e. Ngo Dinh Diem, whose devotion to Catholicism was one of his most well-known attributes. Among those Americans backing the choice of Diem for South Vietnam were Francis Cardinal Spellman (Archbishop of New York), future US president John F. Kennedy, future US Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, and future US Vice President Hubert Humphrey.] (Kahin 1986, 80).
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