<text id=00he1703><title>Viet Minh Take Control</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Viet Minh Take Control</hdr><body>
<p>From then on, it was open warfare. The French tried to hold the entire countryside at first, and then slowly were pushed first out of the border areas and then out of the river deltas. When Mao Tse-Tung announced the birth of the new China in September 1949, it was the beginning of the end for the French. With the Chinese provinces bordering Vietnam under Communist control, the Viet Minh had their own sanctuary, just as the North Koreans had theirs across the Yalu River. The French pulled back to the deltas, then lost parts of them to the Viet Minh in early 1950. The Vietnamese kept on the offensive, hitting the French forts in the northern part of the country. Lang-Son was abandoned on 17 October, and by the end of that month the Vietnamese held absolute control of most of the northern part of North Vietnam. It was the worst defeat the French armies had suffered in a colony since the British met them on the Plains of Abraham near Quebec.
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<p>The campaign that ended at Lang Son was, incidentally, paralleled by the Chinese intervention in Korea. Both began late in October 1950, and both depended on a sanctuary across a border that was not violated by the Americans in Korea or the French in Indochina.
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<p>Giap's words, spoken before a group of political commissars about that time, appraised the contemporary situation neatly and were also, read now, chillingly prophetic: "... the enemy will be caught in a dilemma. He has to drag out the war in order to win it, and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long, drawn-out war ..."
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<p>Giap tried at first to achieve a decisive series of victories over the French by engaging them in major set-piece battles, a strategy that was doomed to failure. Between January and June 1951, his forces were beaten three times in the Red River delta area. He pulled his armies back into the highlands, and there analysed what had happened. After a few months Giap went on the offensive again, but in the meantime he had learned not to tackle a modern army in open battle. In September he began assaults on the French positions in the highlands, picking on one outpost at a time and neutralising them systematically.
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<p>By mid-1953, the Korean armistice had taken the pressure off the Chinese and their instructors were free to leave North Korea and move south to help Giap. With them came huge shipments of captured American weapons.
