After Vietnam won independence from France in 1954, the country split into a communist North and a South, backed by the United States (US) and its allies. As an ally of the US, Australia supported the South, even hosting President Diem in 1957. From the 1960s, the North and South fought a civil war because they couldn't agree on who should lead a unified country. Millions of lives were lost before Saigon finally fell to a North Vietnamese offensive in 1975.
The distant origins of the Vietnam War lie in the nineteenth-century colonisation of Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) by France. French rule lasted until 1940, when the Japanese, embarking on a series of conquests in Southeast Asia and eventually war against Western powers, occupied Vietnam. Japan's defeat in 1945 prompted France to seek to regain control of her erstwhile colonies. Establishing the state of Vietnam, France installed the former emperor, Bao Dai, as head of state. For many Vietnamese, however, the end of the Japanese occupation meant the chance for independence, duly proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh, leader of Vietnam's Communist Party, in September 1945.
France refused to accept the declaration, and 8 years of war followed, ending with the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The peace settlement, known as the Geneva Accords, divided the country. The North was controlled by the communist Ho Chi Minh. The South was controlled by President Ngo Dinh Diem, who had deposed Bao Dai and proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam in October 1955.
The Geneva Accords mandated that a Vietnam-wide election, aimed at reunifying the divided country, be held in 1956. Diem claimed that the people of the North could not vote freely. With US backing, he refused to participate. Relations between the 2 Vietnams grew increasingly tense. In 1960, aiming to overthrow Diem and reunite the country under communist rule, the North proclaimed the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam.
Known as the Vietcong (Vietnamese communists) and hoping to foment a general uprising, the Front embarked on a guerrilla campaign throughout the South. The South Vietnamese Army proved unable to counter the insurgents' tactics, and the US, alarmed at the prospect of communism spreading throughout South-East Asia, began to significantly increase the limited assistance it had been providing to the South.
By 1962 more than 11,000 US military advisers had arrived in the country. They represented the beginning of a build-up in US troop numbers that would peak at more than 500,000.
Ngo Dinh Diem's visit to Australia
In September 1957, the President of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, visited Australia.
Feted as a man of courage and vision, Diem was credited with having made South Vietnam a viable country. The cost of Diem's authoritarian rule to his own people was little remarked upon in Australia, a country in which few possessed any knowledge of Vietnam. As the first foreign head of state to visit Australia, Diem was received with more fanfare than even Queen Elizabeth, who had visited just 3 years earlier.
In the photograph below, Diem lays a wreath in the Australian War Memorial's commemorative area. His visit resulted in lasting Australian support for the Republic of Vietnam, although no one could have guessed that this support would ultimately lead to the addition of more than 500 Australian names to the Roll of Honour, just metres from where Diem stood.
Ngo Dinh Diem lays a wreath in the commemorative area of the Australian War Memorial. [NLA 11969033 Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia]
Ho Chi Minh
Nguyen That Tanh, known famously as Ho Chi Minh, was born in May 1890 in central Vietnam. The youngest of 3 children, he and his siblings grew up in a strongly nationalistic household.
Ho left Vietnam in 1911 for Europe, where he worked in London and Paris. In 1920, he became a member of the group that founded the Communist Party of France. He then travelled to Moscow, where he studied Marxist doctrine before returning to Asia in 1924. He moved to Canton, China, where he began to organise a communist movement largely composed of Vietnamese exiles. Three years later, Ho was forced to leave China after the Chinese government launched an anti-communist crackdown.
During the 1930s, Ho returned to China, where he spent 3 years in a Hong Kong prison. Upon his release, Ho travelled to the Soviet Union again.
In 1940, Ho returned to Vietnam for the first time in 30 years and announced the formation of the Viet Minh, the League for the Independence of Vietnam.
In the dying months of World War II, Ho worked closely with United States (US) military representatives when both parties shared the common aim of defeating the Japanese. Having hoped that the US would support his postwar plans for a free Vietnam, Ho echoed the US Declaration of Independence when, in September 1945, he proclaimed his country's independence.
As president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Ho saw his country plunged into war against France, divided into separate political entities, North Vietnam and South Vietnam, and finally once again at war, this time against the US, a country that he had once admired.
While Ho was lauded as a great patriot who led Vietnam's fight against foreign domination, the Vietnamese communists were also responsible for the deaths of many thousands of people during the land reform campaign of the 1950s and later during the war against the US, when ruthless tactics were a hallmark of those fighting on both sides of the conflict.
Ho died in 1969 and was feted, even by his enemies, as a true nationalist. The city of Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in his honour.