The beautiful land of Vietnam has been a battlefield for centuries. Ethnic and cultural wars, wars of enslavement and aggrandizement, colonial and imperial wars have washed over the river deltas and through the rice paddies.

World War II brought the Japanese against the French colonists, and the French went down to harsh and cruel defeat, outnumbered, outweighed and finally outfought. French, Cambodian and Vietnamese soldiers died together before the Japanese onslaught.

In the northern reaches of the country guerrilla bands were active, drawing political and military support from Mao's units in the Chinese provinces of Kwangsi and Yunnan just across the border. Two of the most active of the Vietnamese guerrillas were young and ardent Communists Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. By late in World War II, their forces were strong enough to be a factor in the chaos after the surrender of Japan. Ho's forces moved into Hanoi on 19 August 1945, and were there, a de facto government, when the Chinese Nationalist troops arrived to disarm the Japanese and to receive the official surrender.

The American policy in Indochina was much a product of a personal prejudice. President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the French as the worst of the colonial powers; they had milked the country dry, he believed, and it was time to turn them out and let the people rule their own destiny. He was joined by China, under Chiang, and by Stalin, for his own reasons, and they outmanoeuvred and outvoted the French and the British in postwar conferences that settled the fate of millions of innocent and unknowing people.

Internally, Communist leaders were busy with a program of deliberate subversion and a drive to establish themselves as the absolute and recognised government in Indochina; terror was one of their effective weapons, and they had no scruples whatsoever about using it. In late September 1945, they incited a mob riot in Saigon that culminated in the murder of 450 French and Eurasian women and children.