lar appeal of the South Vietnamese government, which could not maintain itself in power without massive American military involvement; (b) the implacable determination of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong to achieve the forcible unification of Vietnam under their rule, which the Americans underestimated; (c) declining support for the war in the United States; and (d) the ineffectiveness of American military strategy.
As Morrison says, for many centuries, "Vietnamese history is a continuing story of resisting invasion --mostly by armies from China." Before the French were finally forced to leave after their defeat by the communist Vietminh at the Battle of Dienbienphu in 1954, French rule in Indochina (1860-1954) was generally unpopular with Vietnamese because of its exploitative and oppressive nature. During the Japanese occupation of French Indochina (1940-1945), the Vietnamese communists seized effective control of the nationalist movement. After briefly establishing an independent republic in Hanoi in 1945, they were forced into the hills by the French and emerged in 1954 in control of the northern half of the country under the Geneva accords.
During the Second World War, President Franklin Roosevelt indicated that he favored either Vietnamese independence or an international trusteeship for Vietnam. According to Edmonds, FDR told Secretary of State Cordell Hull in 1944 "France has had the country for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than were at the beginning." American officers of the Office of Strategic Services assisted Vietminh leader, Ho Chi Minh, in his guerrilla efforts against Japanese during the summer of 1945. After the war, however, the United States chose not to interfere with the reimposition of French colonialism in Indochina, because, according to Brown, "our European objectives were deemed more vital to our interests than Indochina's problems." After the communist takeover of China in 1...