By the time World War II ended, France had lost all of its Asian colonies.
Remember, the French had built a little empire in “French Indochina”—the land that today is held by the countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In French Indochina, French landowners and a few wealthy Vietnamese held most of the power and money, while most Vietnamese worked for them for very low wages. The Vietnamese patriot Phan Boi Chau had tried to drive the French out, but he had failed.
World War II changed French Indochina. When Germany moved into France and occupied it, Germany’s ally, Japan, moved into French Indochina. Beginning in 1940, French Indochina was under Japanese rule. The Japanese let the French officials stay in power, but—as in Vichy France—the officials had to obey Japanese orders.
To the Vietnamese, this seemed like a good chance to make another bid for independence.
The rebellion that rose up against both the Japanese and the French who obeyed them was led by a man named Nguyen Ai Quoc. He was probably born around 1890, although no one knows for sure. He used fifteen different names for himself. But the name that he made famous in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh, “He Who Enlightens.”
Even when he was a child, Ho Chi Minh hated the French occupiers. He could see that, in their own country, the Vietnamese had almost no power. They worked as servants and field hands. The French treated them with scorn. Before he was ten, Ho Chi Minh was working for the resistance movement in Vietnam, carrying messages from one anti-French fighter to another. His family also resented and worked against the French. His father refused to learn to speak the French language. His sister stole weapons for Vietnamese freedom fighters. And his brother joined a resistance movement.
When he was twenty-one, Ho Chi Minh decided to leave his country. He took a job as a ship’s cook and sailed away from Vietnam.
He would not return for thirty years. In those years, he visited countries all over the world, as his ship moved from port to port. He lived for a little while in London, and then in Paris, and then in New York. He began his own newspaper, writing articles that called for every country in the world to be free from foreign occupiers. He visited Russia, read the writings of Lenin, and joined the Communist Party. He organized the Vietnamese living in China into a resistance group called the Revolutionary Youth Organization, and started the Indochinese Communist Party. He became more and more convinced that if Vietnam were ever to be free from France, it would have to fight for its independence.
In 1941, when Germany occupied France, Ho Chi Minh saw his chance. Surely the French occupiers would now be at a disadvantage! He returned to Vietnam and proposed that the different revolutionary groups—working secretly against the French—all unite together. Ho Chi Minh and the Indochinese Communist Party would lead all the other patriotic groups in resisting the French and the Japanese.
The other Vietnamese agreed. The new rebel army, called the “Viet Minh,” was commanded by Ho Chi Minh. Over ten thousand Vietnamese joined the Viet Minh. They spent the years of World War II fighting a guerilla war against the Japanese, appearing from the brush of the jungles, attacking, and then melting back into the wilds.
Between 1940 and 1945, not only war but also famine turned Vietnam into a place of death. Crops failed. Nearly two million people starved to death. And for part of this time, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh had to fight without him. He had gone to China to ask Chiang Kai-shek to help him fight against the Japanese. But Chiang Kai-shek, who was busy fighting the Japanese himself, didn’t trust Ho Chi Minh because Minh was a member of the Communist Party. He threw Ho Chi Minh in jail for eighteen months.
Meanwhile, the Viet Minh had begun to spy for the Allied forces, giving the Allies news about the plans and movements of the Japanese in Asia. Being on the side of the Allies—even though the French, their original occupiers, were Allies too—seemed like the best way to get the Japanese out of Indochina.
Finally, Chiang Kai-shek agreed to release Ho Chi Minh. By the time Ho Chi Minh got back to Vietnam, World War II had begun to turn against Germany. In Vietnam, the Japanese decided to change the way Vietnam was governed. Since the Allied troops had driven Germany out of France, the nation of France was no longer under German control. French officials could no longer be trusted to cooperate with an Axis power like Japan. So all of the French officials in Vietnam were arrested and removed from their positions. The Japanese decreed that Vietnam would be ruled by a puppet emperor, Bao Dai—but the country was really under Japanese control.
This “puppet monarchy” would only last for five months, because Japan was close to surrender. When Japan surrendered to the Allies in August 1945, after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese had to give up their control of Vietnam. Bao Dai, Japan’s chosen emperor, had to give up his throne.
On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh announced to a huge gathering of Vietnamese in the capital city of Hanoi that Vietnam was now a free country, called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The new Vietnamese Declaration of Independence was based on the American Declaration. It began, “All men are born equal. The Creator has given us inviolable rights to life, liberty, and happiness!”
Just a few months after the surrender of Japan, the French moved back into Vietnam. They wanted to try to rebuild the empire they had lost during World War II. Although they didn’t immediately attack the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, they announced that they were reclaiming the southern part of Vietnam. It would no longer belong to the Democratic Republic; instead, the south would be a separate, French-controlled colony known as Cochin China.
Ho Chi Minh didn’t think that Vietnam could win an out-and-out war with the French. He offered to allow the French to put military bases in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, as long as they promised to leave the Democratic Republic alone to rule itself as a sovereign country.
But the Vietnamese didn’t trust the French, and the French didn’t trust the Vietnamese. In 1946, France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam declared war on each other. Ho Chi Minh called to his followers, “Let him who has a rifle use his rifle. Let him who has a sword use his sword. And let those who have no sword pick up axes and sticks to fight.”
The “French Indochina War” would go on for eight years. In the south, the French put Bao Dai back on a throne, announcing that he would rule over a southern Vietnamese (and French) country. The Vietnamese refused to recognize him, and went on fighting. French troops grew weary of fighting against Vietnamese guerillas who could slip easily through the brush and jungles.
Finally, in 1954, the French agreed to give up their claim to Vietnam.
But they would only surrender under certain conditions. They insisted that Ho Chi Minh divide the country in half. The northern part would still be the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, under Ho Chi Minh as president. The south wouldn’t belong to France, but it wouldn’t belong to the Democratic Republic either. Instead, it would be a separate country, with its own elections and a different president.
Ho Chi Minh agreed to these terms. Vietnam was finally free of both France and Japan.
But the decision to divide the country in two would turn out to be a disaster. Struggles between the north and south of Vietnam would continue for another twenty-one years, and would lead to yet another foreign country—the United States—fighting a war in Vietnam.
In the years after World War II, the Soviet Union did its best to draw other countries into communism, while the United States grew more and more worried about this spreading change.
During World War II, the United States had not been nearly as worried about the USSR. The possibility that Nazis might take control of Europe and that Japanese soldiers might seize all of Asia had seemed much more threatening than the chance that the Soviets might convince other countries to become communist.
But now Germany and Japan were defeated. The Soviet Union was claiming other countries for itself. The enormous country of China was communist. So was the northern half of Vietnam, and the eastern half of Germany.
The country of Korea would become the next place where communism and democracy collided.
When Japan surrendered in 1945, the Japanese were forced to give up the land that they had seized during World War II. But what about Korea? Korea wasn’t part of the original land of Japan. On the other hand it had been part of the Japanese Empire since 1910—well before World War I. Korea had been ruled by Japan for so long that it had no Korean government left that could step up and run the country once the Japanese were gone. Korean officials would have to learn how to govern their own land. And hundreds of thousands of Japanese, many of whom had lived in Korea for twenty years or more, had to be moved back to Japan.
The United States and the Soviet Union decided to divide up the responsibility for slowly giving Korea back its independence. For convenience, they agreed to split the country in two. They drew an imaginary line right at the “38th Parallel” (the line of latitude that ran roughly across the middle of the country). North of the 38th Parallel, Japanese troops would surrender to the Soviets. South of the 38th Parallel, they would surrender to American troops.
If this sounds arbitrary, it was. There wasn’t anything particularly distinctive about the 38th Parallel. In the United States, you can find the 38th Parallel on a map if you draw a line from Charlottesville, Virginia, on the East Coast, straight across to Stockton, California, on the West Coast. This division was as arbitrary as saying that everyone above that line would speak one language, and everyone below it another. No one had yet figured out that partitioning off countries into smaller pieces didn’t work very well.
And the Americans and the Soviets began to distrust each other very soon. The division of Korea was supposed to be temporary. But by 1948, neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union was willing to move out of Korea. Each was sure that the other country would immediately grab power.
So instead of helping Korea return to independence, the Soviet Union set up a communist government in the north of Korea: the People’s Republic of North Korea. It was led by a Korean soldier named Kim Il-sung, who had served in the Soviet army.
Down in the south of Korea, a different country formed. The president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, appealed to the United Nations for help. Even though American soldiers were occupying the country, the United Nations agreed to give South Korea a hand in holding its own elections. In August of 1948, the southern Republic of Korea had its first elections. A Korean politician named Syngman Rhee became president. Rhee was friendly to the United States. As a matter of fact, he had lived in America, and had even earned a PhD at Princeton University, in New Jersey.
But North and South Korea were both a mess. The president of the south hadn’t exactly been appointed in a free and fair election; Syngman Rhee had been very willing to look the other way while his supporters assassinated the politicians who might run against him. And in the north, the Soviet-led People’s Republic of Korea was sending soldiers to silence anyone who objected to a communist government.
Refugees from North Korea were flooding into South Korea. At the same time, South Koreans who sympathized with communism were trying to fight their way into North Korea.
In June of 1950, ninety thousand North Korean soldiers, given all the most recent and powerful weapons by the Soviets, marched past the 38th Parallel and into South Korea. They brought with them 150 huge, powerful, Russian tanks. The South Koreans were completely surprised. It was a Saturday night, and many South Korean soldiers had gone to Japan for the weekend. Others had left their posts and had gone home. Those who were still guarding the border didn’t have any weapons powerful enough to fight off the enormous Soviet tanks.
The North Korean soldiers trooped on southwards. When the United Nations learned of this invasion, its members agreed that soldiers should be sent into South Korea to help the South Koreans push the Soviet-trained North Koreans back.
So British Commonwealth soldiers and American soldiers, under the command of the American General MacArthur, were sent back into Korea. They were given the job not just of driving the North Koreans out of South Korea—but of capturing North Korea and forcing it to rejoin the south.
The British and American soldiers managed to push the communist forces back past the 38th Parallel, and then kept marching. They managed to march so far north that they were almost up to the Chinese-Korean border. At this, the Chinese grew worried about being invaded themselves! Two hundred thousand Chinese soldiers marched south into Korea to push the UN forces back.
Now, instead of helping Korea recover from occupation, four different countries—the U.S., Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China—were fighting on Korean land. The Chinese pushed the South Korean and UN forces back across the 38th Parallel again. Then the UN sent in more troops and pushed back up to the 38th Parallel once more.
Back and forth, back and forth! A North Korean soldier named Chung Dong-kyu described an old woman who lived in a farmhouse near the 38th Parallel, who cooked meals for the soldiers who came to her door. She seemed entirely unworried by the explosions and battles going on nearby. “Living so close to the 38th Parallel had caused her to see northern and southern soldiers take and retake her village many times,” he wrote. “She showed neither surprise nor fear over the fact of the latest changeover.”
By 1953, more than three million people had died in this pointless fight. Half of them were civilians who had not even been armed. Finally, after the death of Joseph Stalin, everyone involved agreed to a truce so that the Korean War would end. Korea would remain divided into two. The north would stay the People’s Republic of Korea, and would be a communist nation. The south would still be the Republic of Korea, with an elected president. And the border between the two countries would be exactly where it had been placed at the end of World War II, almost ten years before—right along the 38th Parallel.
