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French Failure at Dien Bien Phu

This research will examine the French failure at Dien Bien Phu. The research will set forth the historical context and background for exploring France's role in the modern history of Vietnam, which is, in the modern historical imagination, associated with Dien Bien Phu, and then discuss the causes of the encounter between French and nationalist Vietnamese military forces at the site, as well as issues surrounding the question of whether either the encounter in general or the French failure in particular could have been prevented.

The story of Western failure of culture, ideology, and military strategy in Vietnam in the 20th century is most immediately associated with the American debacle in that country in the circumstances of U.S. withdrawal and the aftermath in the mid-1970s. But a Western prelude to the American failure occurred, some 20 years earlier, when in 1954 the French colonial forces and government apparatus were decisively forced out of what had for decades been known as French Indochina, in the aftermath of a battle between the French and the communist-dominated nationalist forces known as the Vietminh, at a northern township called Dien Bien Phu.

The prelude to Dien Bien Phu began, from one point of view, in the aftermath of World War II, when the defeated Japanese forces that had occupied Vietnam during the war were obliged to withdraw from the territory. Meanwhile, the Potsdam Declaration, comprising Allied views of the postwar world, more or less guaranteed the repatriation of Allied colonies, including France's Indochina (Drake 25-6), despite rumblings of national independence from the region.

From another point of view the prelude was the decades-long occupation of Vietnam by the French, who had named the territory now known as Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam Indochina when colonizing it in 1887, the heyday of the European imperialist project in Asia. In fact, however, the institutionalization of French colonia...

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French Failure at Dien Bien Phu. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 16:34, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1711928.html