In 1940, after the French Vichy government was established, the overlords of the French units stationed in French Indochina, currently comprised of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, became the Imperial Japanese forces. During World War 2, the French forces there were ordered to remain idle as the war raged on elsewhere. In March of 1945 the Japanese troops attacked the French troops stationed there without warning, massacring many due to the French troops not being ready, not properly equipped and being dispersed throughout French Indochina in amounts that would render a proper collective defense impossible to organize. One recognizable unit throughout the whole mess was part of the 5th Foreign Legion Infantry Regiment, as they notably managed to fight through Japanese forces into Nationalist China were they were ultimately detained.
The troops of the 5 REI subsequently went to the Kun Ming USAAF base, under the leadership of Lt. Chenel, the platoon was the first in the French Foreign Legion to be trained in paradrops after the Japanese surrendered. The destruction of French forces by the Japanese in Indochina was taken advantage of by a Vietnamese organization led by Communist Ho Chi Minh and his military ally Vo Nguyen Giap. France, shattered from it’s war against Germany, scrambled to send troops in February 1946 to Hanoi in order to curtail any possibly insurrection or challenge to French control. During this lack of control by the French, the insurrectionist organization known as Viet Minh managed to arm and establish themselves all over the country and declared Vietnam an independent state.
Negotiations between both parties did not fare well, as the Viet Minh did not want to be governed again by France and the French, bitter from their experiences with the Germans, did not want to make a compromise. There was subsequent skirmishes between French forces and the Viet Minh which only escalated tensions. In December 1946, the Viet Minh began to wage a guerilla war against French forces, and attempts by the French to destroy the Viet Minh outposts in Tonkin, located north of French controlled Hanoi and Haiphong in the Red River Delta were largely unsuccessful. Ho and Giap expanded the operations of the Viet Minh throughout Indochina, and with the first example of Maoist revolutionary warfare, managed to defeat the forces of France and it’s allies over a span of several years, ending French colonial rule in Indochina.
The Viet Minh army in 1951 numbered between 100,000 to 120,000 regular infantry, comprised of one artillery division and four infantry divisions, as well as additional and independent regiments. This regular Chuc Luc was in turn supported by an irregular paramilitary force of some 200,000 troops, who in turn was supported by the majority of the population, either actively or passively, in the regions it was operating in. While France’s army regarded the Vietnamese people as their own, the high command of France persisted on a policy to treat the population like criminals. Despite France’s acknowledgement of the size of the threat posed by Giap’s forces, an overly confident French army would have trouble subduing it’s enemy and this catastrophic failure would really come to surface in 1954.