Replying to a message of Adam Flinton to Bob.Ackley:

 AF> From: "Adam Flinton" 

t.
 >> 
 >> You don't have to go back that far.  Perhaps the biggest diplomatic
 AF> blunder
 >> this country made in the last century was Truman's 1946 refusal to
 AF> recognize
 >> Ho's *functioning government* in Hanoi.  Ho fought the Japanese
 >> occupiers throughout WW II, and was supplied by us via the Chinese
 >> government in
 AF> K'unming
 >> (supplies flown 'over the hump' and later via the Burma Road).  We even
 AF> had OSS
 >> attaches with Ho's people, and they recommended that we recognize his
 >> government after the Japanese collapsed at the end of WW II.  France
 >> objected to any recognition of an independent state in Vietnam,
 AF> deGaulle
 >> wanted his colonies (Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia) back.  Truman believed
 >> he needed deGaulle to help float his pet 'United Nations' project. 


 AF> What's funny now is that if Vietnam had stayed "part of
France" then
 AF> France would split citing "Too many vietnamese living in
France" 

 >> The French returned, Ho went back into the jungle.  In 1954 the French
 AF> decided
 >> to fortify a small hamlet in western Vietnam, Dien Bien Phu.  400 miles
 AF> west of
 >> the main French support bases in the Red River delta, over a narrow,
 AF> winding
 >> dirt road.
 >> See "Hell In A Very Small Place" by Bernard B. Fall,
for a pretty good
 >> description of events. 

 AF> The British "liberated" Vietnam & it's astonishing
how quickly a
 AF> recently soundly beaten France could find soldiers to put into
 AF> Vietnam.

Actually it isn't.  The French had a reconstituted army fighting along with
the British and Americans.  And in fact the French division commanded by
LeClerc was the first Allied force to (officially) enter Paris.  Also, the
French Foreign Legion was available, its troops were not allowed to be in
France.  IIRC it was the Foreign Legion's 9th Parachute Regiment that was
destroyed at Dien Bien Phu.

 AF> Oddly if the US had liberated Vietnam vs the "arch colonialist
 AF> British"....then they might have been a major ally vs the Chinese.

Actually, if we'd recognized Ho's government in 1946 they probably would
be, too.  Most people either forgot or weren't aware that the Vietnamese
and Chinese had a pretty good dust-up along their common border shortly
after the government of South Vietnam fell.  The Vietnamese don't trust the
Chinese, and that distrust goes back centuries.  Various Chinese emperors
tried to conquer Vietnam with varying degrees of success.

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