In 1949, the First Indochina War stopped being a colonial conflict and became a Cold War struggle. China’s communist victory gave Ho Chi Minh powerful backing. France reframed the war as ...

Decades after the guns fell silent, unexploded ordnance (UXO) remains a daily threat in Laos, so much so that President Thongloun Sisoulith is renewing calls to hasten clearance efforts and bring an ...

During the last months of the First Indochina War in 1954, French General Henri Navarre believed that he could get rid of the Viet Minh Communist guerrilla if he concentrated his forces at the valley ...

1883-1945 – Cochin-China, southern Vietnam, and Annam and Tonkin, central and northern Vietnam, along with Cambodia and Laos make up colonial empire French Indochina. 1946 – Communists in the north ...

In the final months of World War II, a small team of American commandos parachuted into the mountains of northern Vietnam to train Ho Chi Minh’s guerrillas to fight Japan. They were members of the OSS ...

Jack Cheevers’s intriguing new book Kennedy’s Coup begins at the end of the First Indochina War (1945-1954). Cheevers notes that Ho Chi Minh’s communist army ­defeated a French colonial power that had ...

A dead-end alley: the United States, France and the First Indochina War, 1950-1954 -- Our offspring: nation-building in South Vietnam, 1954-1961 -- Limited partnership: Kennedy and Diem, 1961-1963 -- ...

The period from the Paris Peace Agreement of January 1973, which marked the end of the United States’ direct military involvement in the Vietnam War, to the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in ...