Replying to a message of Adam Flinton to Jeff Shultz:

 AF> From: "Adam Flinton" 
 >>> You didn't, you just off loaded large tonnages of high explosive onto
 >>> it
 AF> inc
 >>> onto it's cities. Oddly enough my parents went on the
"B52 trail" (my
 AF> name
 >>> for it) just before Xmas ( Laos, Thailand, Vietnam &
Cambodia). Very
 >>> much enjoyed it.  Oddly I got a Viet Cong scarf for Xmas as one of my
 >>> pressies from them.  Adam 
 >> They attacked an ally of the United States (South Vietnam). Anyone have
 >> the dates of existence for SEATO?

 AF> Hohum. When the French pulled out of Vietnam (singular) the deal was
 AF> that the North / South thing was temporary. It was the politicos&
 AF> generals of the south who decided to break all the agreements because
 AF> they knew everyone would vote for uncle Ho.

At the time of partition, approximately 300,000 Vietnamese (mostly
Catholic) moved from the north to the south while approximately 10,000
Vietnamese moved the other way.
While you are correct that the division was supposed to be temporary, it
was Ho's people who cached their weapons all over the south and later
infiltrated back into the country to foment unrest.  In 1954/55, 'Uncle Ho'
most likely would have won a popularity contest; however, in 1957 he and Vo
Nguyen Giap engineered a very bloody repression of a peasants' revolt in
*North* Vietnam.
'Uncle Ho's people - the unrest in South Vietnam was *never* an indigenous
problem, and the VC were *always* owned and operated by the Hanoi regime -
began fomenting trouble in South Vietnam in the late 1950's.  There's at
least one book out on the subject, IIRC it's titled 'A Vietcong Memoir,'
written by one of the VC higherups that was shunted aside after Saigon fell
in 1975 (did anyone hear any mention of the 'National Front For The
Liberation Of South Vietnam' *after* 1975? or find any officials of that
organization in power?).

---