French Indochina Essay

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French and the British were both experienced colonial masters. Why do you believe the French essentially failed to maintain order and control whereas the British maintained control? What were the differences in their adversaries? What were the most and least effective components of the French response?

In contrast to the British experience in its colony of Malay, the French faced a relatively organized and unified force in French Indo-China. The French attempts to install a 'puppet' leader were a miserable failure and he had little popular support. Thus "France was less successful in Indochina…unlike the British in Malay…the French faced an opponent that had a secure neighboring base."[footnoteRef:1] The French, also unlike the British, were spread over a wide territorial area in Indochina. The French leadership was vulnerable to attack, particularly upon their communications systems, and while the French had advanced weaponry like napalm, the road system was poor, making guerrilla warfare easier to wage against the French. The Vietcong also had financial support via possession of local opium fields (although the French eventually did regain control of these) as well as from the Chinese.[footnoteRef:2] Finally, the French made a number of tactical errors such as the failure to occupy high ground during combat, leading them vulnerable to Vietnamese advances.

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[footnoteRef:3] [1: 1. Jeremy Black, War Since 1945, (London: Reaktion Books, 2005): 37.] [2: Black, 28.] [3: Black, 39.]

However, although the French made a number of blunders militarily, it is unclear if a more effective campaign would have really made a difference in the long-term. "There are those who have suggested that if the French fought their campaign in a different way, if they had followed the pattern that the British had in Malay, they would have succeeded. But conditions were very different."[footnoteRef:4] The Vietnamese people "bitterly resented" the French in a uniform fashion, in contrast to the divisions which riddled the relationships between the opponents of the British in Malay.[footnoteRef:5] French commanders felt that the only hope was to create an indigenous army to oppose the Vietcong, yet they had no ideological rallying point to encourage the development of such a fighting force. One possibility was that France could have granted "real and immediate independence to Tonkin and Annam" and "concentrated her efforts on maintaining control in Cochin-China" but that would have been a "bitter pill to swallow."[footnoteRef:6] Part of the campaign in Vietnam was ego-driven: France….....

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