Re: Digest for vietnam-old-hacks@googlegroups.com - 3 updates in 2 topics

[Dawson]

Vietnam's 80th and French baguettes.

Carl Robinson <robinso...@gmail.com>: Sep 02 03:10AM +0700 Well, as good a news peg as any, I guess.

Surely everyone in this group is aware of Uncle Ho's declaration, plagiarised from the document awarded to him by the Deer operation.

But a few things occured after August of 1945 -- like, oh, for example Dien Bien Phu.
It's actually a good story, buried in a few good books, of how post-war events were decided, chiefly at Yalta but elsewhere. Harry Truman thought that countries that were essentially liberated by World War II should stay that way, and the State Department and OSS disagreed. To use the polite term.
Vietnam, which sorta-kinda was still three places got several short ends of several sticks. Not only was France to continue the Indochina colonies, but it was complicated. China occupied Cochinchina for example, and France was so militarily puny that even Nixon wanted to help them out by bombing the darned Viet Minh with one of those new atomic thingys.
Hanoi gets to "celebrate" dear old dead Ho's declaration, but a lot of things happened before the colonial French finally said, zut, alors. Carl writes about leaving stuff out. No kidding.

Not to mention Vietnam makes the best "French bread" in the civilised world, right today.

73