Ho Chi Minh, father of independent Vietnam, was a man of contrasts.
Standing at just four foot, eleven inches and weighing less than a hundred pounds, he
appeared to pose no threat to anyone.
Yet, through the force of his personality and the steely determination of his will he
defeated two of the world’s mightiest nations.
He portrayed himself as a simple man of the people yet he ruled over a repressive regime
that committed terrible atrocities.
While many viewed him as the bringer of light to a repressed people, to others he was simply
a Communist spy planted by the Soviets.
In today’s Biographics, we discover the truth about the real Ho Chi Minh.
Beginnings Ho Chi Minh was born on May 19th, 1890 in
the village of Hoang Tru in what was French Indochina.
He was given the birth name Nguyễn Sinh Cung.
From the age of five, he lived in the village of Lang Sen in the Nghe An province.
This was the hometown of his father, Nguyen Sinh Sac.
Sac was a man of learning, being a Confucian scholar and a teacher.
Cung was the third child, and the second son, to Sac and his wife.
Another child would follow, but this son died in infancy.
By the end of the 19th Century, French Indochina was France’s most prosperous colony, with
huge profits being made from rubber and rice exports.
The jewel in the crown was the area known today as Vietnam.
The native people there mostly worked on the large French owned rubber plantations.
They were pressed onto work gangs to toil for long hours and very little reward.
Any rebellions were violently stamped out by the French authorities.
The Nguyen family were of the upper class of Vietnamese society.
Cung was instructed by his father until around the age of seven years when formal instruction
began under a scholar by the name of Voung Thuc Do.
The boy was a quick study, mastering the art of Chinese calligraphy.
Instruction in Confucianism lay at the core of his studies and he rapidly came to embrace
its tenets.
Outside of the classroom, Cung displayed an inquisitive mind and an adventurous spirit.
His passions were kite flying and fishing.
When he was ten years his father, in accordance with Confucian tradition, gave him a new name
- Nguyễn Tất Thành, which means ‘ Nguyen the Accomplished’.
When he was eleven, Thanh’s family were struck with tragedy.
While his father was away on business, his mother gave birth to a fourth child.
However, she did not survive the delivery.
Thanh was devastated.
But he had no time to mourn.
He and his siblings had the responsibility of looking after a newborn infant until their
father returned.
By this time, Sac had become a Mandarin, or local official.
The job kept him away from home for long periods at a time.
As a widower he now had to rely on family and friends to help look after his children.
In his pre-teens, Thanh began attending a French boarding school in the city of Hue
along with his older brother.
Sac was of the view that, for his boys to succeed in making their mark on the world,
they would need to have the benefit of a French education.
However, Sac was no supporter of the French regime.
Despite being an official of the Indochinese government, he was an outspoken critic of
the manner in which the local authorities had so willingly ceded all power and control
to the French.
This criticism did not go unnoticed.
Eventually he would be dismissed from his position after a man died who Sac ordered
to be given 102 lashes as punishment for a minor wrongdoing.
Following his dismissal, Sac became greatly embittered against the French Indochinese
bureaucracy.
Unable to find work, he spent the rest of his life travelling from village to village
in search of a way to make a living.
Thanh saw very little of his father from then on.
He too became angry with the system, and especially the French rulers who treated the local people
so badly.
By 1908, Thanh had been studying at the National Academy in Hue for four years.
One day, he saw a large group of peasants marching past the school.
These people were protesting corruption in the government and high taxation.
It has long been related that Thanh joined the protest and that he translated the demands
of the people into French in order for the colonial rulers to understand what their grievances
were.
As a result, the story goes, he was dismissed from the school.
However, a recently discovered French document shows that he was admitted to the prestigious
College Quoc Hoc in Hue in August, 1908.
An expulsion would have made him ineligible for entry.
In his later life, however, he pointed to the protest in early 1908 as the point when
his revolutionary fervor emerged.
Upon completion of his studies in 1911, Thanh took a position as a teacher at the Duc Thanh
school in Phan Tiet on the eastern coast.
He stayed there for some six months.
He then moved to Saigon, the bustling metropolis in the southwestern part of the country.
To France and Beyond His four years of study had allowed Thanh
to become fluent in the French language.
It had also given him a good understanding of French culture and history.
He was aware of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity that had underpinned
the French revolution.
He knew that those principles were not being adopted in French Indochina but he was very
curious to see how they were being put into action in France itself.
In June of 1911, Thanh got his chance to satisfy his urge to explore France.
He managed to gain a position as a kitchen helper on the French steamship Amirale de
Latouche-Tréville.
A one-month journey brought the ship into Marseilles on July 5th.
On arrival in France, Thanh applied for entrance into a school that trained officials to serve
in the colonies.
The application was denied.
Having arrived in France, he still needed a means to support himself.
He decided that his best bet was to continue working as a kitchen hand on ships, where
he knew he could secure work.
As a result, he spent the next six years travelling the world on various steamships.
This gave him the opportunity to visit many colonial countries and compare the life and
conditions to what he knew of back in French Indochina.
Thanh’s travels took him to Africa, South America and the United States.
On a 1912 trip, he jumped ship at Boston Harbor and made his way to New York.
He claims to have lived and worked in Boston and New York for some time, though the only
evidence of his being in the U.S. at that time is a letter he wrote that has a New York
postmark on it.
While in the US, Thanh was surprised to learn that immigrants to America had legal rights
that the French in Indochina would not even give to the native people there.
Most importantly, they had the right to vote, something which impressed him greatly.
Just prior to the outbreak of World War One, Thanh sailed for England.
He worked as a pastry chef at the Carlton Hotel in Westminster.
During his London years, he began to associate with people of different nationalities, all
with one thing in common.
They came from either British or French colonies that were experiencing oppression and domination
by their colonial masters.
Over the course of many late-night discussions, Thanh came to dedicate himself to the liberation
of his homeland.
Revolutionary By 1917, Thanh had become an accomplished
pastry chef and had a solid career path laid out before him.
However, he decided to forego that opportunity.
He moved to Paris in order to learn the craft of the revolutionary.
He moved into the Parisian Vietnamese quarter, which was quite large.
During his first twelve months in the French capital he immersed himself in the culture
and glamor of the city.
To support himself, he worked as a cook and a photo re-toucher.
But his primary purpose was to organize ex pat Vietnamese into a force strong enough
to effect some real change back in Indochina.
Thanh was surprised to find that quite a number of Frenchmen were sympathetic to the plight
of the Vietnamese people.
They encouraged him to publish his ideas about what needed to be done.
He did just that, producing an anti-colonial newspaper targeted toward the expat-Vietnamese
population throughout France.
Copies even made their way back to Indochina.
He wrote about the terrible conditions for the native people, not just in France, but
in every colony, be it French or British.
At this stage his writings did not call for revolution.
He simply demanded fairer treatment and equal rights.
The writings of Thanh made their way to the Colonial Government in Indochina.
He was immediately condemned as a revolutionary and condemned to death if he ever returned
to his homeland.
Meanwhile the native people of French Indochina hailed him as a hero.
Thanh was in Paris at the time of the Treaty of Versailles and became involved with a group
of Vietnamese nationalists who tried to take their message to the international congress.
The statesmen were basing their restructuring of post-war Europe on the principals of self-determination
and democracy.
The Vietnamese nationalists wanted them to apply those very principles to Vietnam.
However, they were largely ignored by the international congress.
Becoming Communist With the establishment of Soviet Russia, the
worldwide socialist movement was suddenly split between two ideologies; social democracy
and communism.
Thanh, living in Paris, made the fateful decision to firmly throw in with the Communists.
In 1920, he became one of the founding members of the French Communist Party.
Thanh began to write pro-Communist articles for the anti-colonial newspaper La Paria.
Then, three years later, he made a trip to Russia.
There he met with Marxist leaders who encouraged him to view the struggle for Vietnamese independence
as a part of the international Communist struggle to overthrow Capitalism.
He became a member of the Comintern, the organization set up by the Soviets to take Communism to
the world.
Thanh was convinced that the example set by the Russian Communist revolution provided
the model for the overthrow of the French in Indochina.
In June 1924, the Soviet government sent Thanh to Canton, China to begin laying the groundwork
for the Communist take-over of Asia.
From this point on in his life, Thanh would operate as an underground figure.
He travelled under aliases and lived in mountain hideaways as he worked clandestinely to organize
Communist resistance movements.
In 1927, the Chinese authorities clamped down on the Communists.
Thanh was nearly arrested, narrowly making his escape into Siam.
In Siam, Thanh took on the persona of a Buddhist monk.
This allowed him to travel freely.
In the north of the country there was a large Vietnamese population.
It was there that he headed, preaching his Communist message as he wandered from village
to village.
Throughout the majority of the 1930’s, Thanh disappeared from the record books.
There were rumours of him being in various places, such as with Mao Tse Tung in the Chinese
highland or in Soviet Russia with Stalin.
There were even reports that he was dead.
Ho Chi Minh His re-emergence on the world stage just after
the outbreak of the Second World War proved that last rumor wrong.
For the past fifteen years he had been biding his time as he waited for the opportune moment
to lead his people in rebellion against the French.
When France fell like a house of cards to the German assault in just six weeks in mid-1940,
he felt that that time had come.
A new French government that cooperated with the occupying Nazis was set up in Vichy, France.
This Vichy government also took control of French Indochina, but under the dominion of
the Japanese, who were one of the Axis Powers, along with Germany and Italy.
At the beginning of 1941, Thanh re-entered Indochina for the first time in thirty years.
He entered the northern jungle.
He had great plans for an overthrow of the French, but very little else.
He carried no weapons with him, had few followers and little money.
He immediately set about recruiting support among the mountain communities.
His revolutionary group was called the Viet Minh Doc Lap Minh, which was soon shortened
to Viet Minh.
The goal of this new group was to create a broad-based nationalist movement for the reclaiming
of Vietnamese independence and to gain the support of other nations, especially the Chinese.
The Viet Minh also vowed to oust the ‘Japanese fascists’, along with their ‘French accomplices.’
It was at this time that Thanh adopted the name by which he would become famous around
the world- Ho Chi Minh, which means ‘Bringer of Light’.
The name change was a calculated move to present himself as a wise sage in the Confucian tradition.
Ho lived the life of a peasant in order to win the people to his cause.
He spoke in simple language and rejected all materialism in pursuit of the cause of nationalism.
He also cultivated the image of a lifelong celibate who simply didn’t have time for
a wife.
In 1942 he went to China in order to recruit extra manpower.
However, he was arrested for being a Communist and spent fourteen months in a Chinese prison.
He finally convinced his captors to release him so that he could spy for them against
the Japanese in Indochina.
He walked all the way back to his mountain base.
His followers had given him up for dead but enthusiastically welcomed him back as their
leader.
There were other revolutionary groups at the time, but only the Viet Minh managed to establish
a number of clandestine cells around the country.
Small scale guerrilla activities against the Japanese continued throughout the duration
of the war.
Then the Japanese did something unexpected.
On March 9th, 1945, fearing an allied invasion, they overthrew the French established government
and declared an end to the French colony of Indochina.
The former nations of Laos and Cambodia were freed from the colonial yolk to once again
be independent kingdoms.
The Vietnamese provinces of Annam and Tonkin were given to the rulership of Bao Dai.
Still this was not genuine independence.
The Viet Minh bided their time.
They knew that the Japanese would eventually be defeated and have to leave their land.
At that time, they would step into the vacuum.
War with France With the dropping of the two atomic bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, the game was up for the Japanese.
They swiftly left Indochina, creating the vacuum that Ho Chi Minh had predicted.
Ho promptly declared Vietnam to be independent, and set up a government, which was based at
Hanoi.
The President who had been put in place by the Japanese, Bao Dai, could see what the
will of the people was and he quickly abdicated his position.
The French however, had absolutely no intentions of giving up their hold on the colony.
As far as they were concerned, now that the war was over and the Axis powers had been
defeated, things would revert to the way they were in the 1930’s.
But they were to find a greatly strengthened Viet Minh.
The American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had seen the Viet Minh as a useful ally
in defeating the Japanese and so had given support to Ho Chi Minh’s guerrilla forces.
The new government set about working to bring relief to the masses who had suffered under
Japanese rule and were largely now at the point of starvation.
Ho put together a declaration of independence which he modelled on the American version
of 1776.
This was done in an attempt to win American support.
For their part, the Americans were wary.
They had a natural inclination to want to assist native peoples to overthrow their colonial
overlords, just as they had done nearly two hundred years before.
But they also wanted to maintain as good a relationship as possible with the French.
The two countries had a long history, dating back to the very founding of the United States.
The French had backed them against the common enemy, Great Britain, supplying millions of
dollars, ships and men.
It was decided by the allies that the British would occupy the area of the country south
of the 16th parallel in order to accept the surrender of the Japanese in Vietnam.
The area north of the 16th Parallel would be occupied by the Chinese.
China agreed to allow the Viet Minh, under Ho, to remain in power.
The British, though, saw it differently.
They felt obligated to help the French restore their pre-war position.
In October, 1945, French forces, aided by the British, landed in southern Vietnam and
began to quash any and all Viet Minh resistance that they encountered.
The French status quo was established in Saigon and other key centres.
However, the countryside was rife with Viet Minh guerrilla fighters.
Then, under pressure from the allied powers, the Chinese relented and allowed the French
to take power north of the French Parallel also.
The Viet Minh government, under Ho Chi Minh, was forced to compromise.
The French proposed a form of Vietnamese self-government inside of a French ruled Indochina Federation.
Ho and an entourage flew to Fontainebleau in France to negotiate a peace deal.
But there was to be no deal.
The French were only willing to concede limited self-rule, which was a far cry from what the
Viet Minh were demanding.
The talks broke down and Ho returned to Vietnam without a solution.
In November, 1946, the rising tension between the Viet Minh and the French sparked into
open warfare.
The French began an air bombardment of the coastal city of Haiphong.
This led to an evacuation of the port by the Vietnamese.
Then, in December, the Viet Minh launched a full-scale attack on the French position
in Hanoi.
When this failed to find success, the native forces withdrew to the mountains in order
to undertake a campaign of full-scale guerrilla warfare.
Over the next eight years, the Viet Minh, under Ho’s skilful leadership ground down
the will of the French military.
By 1954, the French were desperate to end the war.
They decided to launch a surprise attack on the Viet Minh at a place called Dien Bien
Phu.
The French thought they were luring Ho’s guerrillas into a trap but their plan backfired
terribly and Dien Bien Phu ended up as a disaster for them.
Over two months of fighting, at least fifteen thousand French soldiers were killed.
The final Vietnamese assault was launched on May 1st.
For several days the battle raged on until the French were finally subjugated.
More than 10,000 prisoners were taken.
This was the final straw for the French and they admitted defeat.
Dividing Vietnam In early 1954, the leaders of the United States,
Britain, France and the Soviet Union agreed to convene an international convention in
Geneva in order to work out peace settlements regarding the two major Asian conflicts – Korea
and Indochina.
The Conference began in April.
The first issue was Korea.
Discussions led nowhere and, in the end, the terms of the ceasefire of the previous year
continued to rule the situation.
Then the focus switched to Indochina.
After heated discussions, an agreement was finally ironed out between the French and
the Viet Minh.
Cambodia and Laos were to be guaranteed their independence, without the intervention or
threat of Communist take-over.
In Vietnam itself, all Viet Minh forces were to regroup north of th 17th Parallel.
The French would withdraw to the south of this arbitrary line.
And so, the country was divided into North and South.
But only temporarily.
The Geneva accord stipulated that elections were to be held in two years to unify Vietnam
under a single democratic government.
A communist government under Ho Ci Minh was now officially established north of the 17th
Parallel.
South of that line, the Republic of Vietnam was installed with Ngo Dinh Diem as its first
president.
For 300 days after the signing of the Geneva accords, the borders were open, allowing for
people to move between north and south.
Approximately one million people took advantage of this opportunity to escape Communism and
move south.
Ho now concentrated on building the Communist state of North Vietnam.
A land reform program was started based on the model created by Mao Tse Tung in China.
Many landowners were executed and corruption was widespread.
Another War In the south, the US backed government of
President Ngo Dinh Diem was anti-communist and more corrupt that that in the north.
Diem was unpopular with the people in the south.
He, along with his American backers did not allow the Geneva accord stipulated unifying
elections to take place.
If they had, Ho Chi Minh would undoubtedly have won.
By the end of the 1950’s anti-Diem sentiment in the south had given rise to a civil war.
The southern guerrillas were called Viet Cong.
Ho sent Viet Minh fighters in to support them.
In return, the US sent advisors in to help the government forces of Diem.
The real goal of the US, however, was to stop the spread of Communism.
The Bright Star Dims By the mid 1960’s the Vietnam War was raging,
with thousands of Americans fighting against the Viet Minh.
Ho Chi Minh was now a frail old man of 76 years.
It is unlikely that he was involved any longer in the day to day military operations.
However, he was, as he had always been, the major source of inspiration for the Vietnamese
people to fight to win their independence no matter the cost.
Ho Chi Minh died on September 2, 1969.
It would be six more years until the Americans would be defeated and Vietnamese independence
finally achieved.
But the Vietnamese people owed that independence to the tenacity, vision and determination
of their visionary leader - Ho Chi Minh.
Sources:
Pierre Brocheux: Ho Chi Minh: A Biography William J. Duiker: Ho Chi Minh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvX_s732ZBM&t=308s
Ho Chi Minh Ho Chi Minh, father of independent Vietnam,
was a man of contrasts.
Standing at just four foot, eleven inches and weighing less than a hundred pounds, he
appeared to pose no threat to anyone.
Yet, through the force of his personality and the steely determination of his will he
defeated two of the wrold’s mightiest nations.
He portrayed himself as a simple man of the people yet he ruled over a repressive regime
that committed terrible atrocities.
While many viewed him as the bringer of light to a repressed people, to others he was simply
a Communist spy planted by the Soviets.
In today’s Biographics, we discover the truth about the real Ho Chi Minh.
Beginnings Ho Chi Minh was born on May 19th, 1890 in
the village of Hoang Tru in what was French Indochina.
He was given the birth name Nguyễn Sinh Cung.
From the age of five, he lived in the village of Lang Sen in the Nghe An province.
This was the hometown of his father, Nguyen Sinh Sac.
Sac was a man of learning, being a Confucian scholar and a teacher.
Cung was the third child, and the second son, to Sac and his wife.
Another child would follow, but this son died in infancy.
By the end of the 19th Century, French Indochina was France’s most prosperous colony, with
huge profits being made from rubber and rice exports.
The jewel in the crown was the area known today as Vietnam.
The native people there mostly worked on the large French owned rubber plantations.
They were pressed onto work gangs to toil for long hours and very little reward.
Any rebellions were violently stamped out by the French authorities.
The Nguyen family were of the upper class of Vietnamese society.
Cung was instructed by his father until around the age of seven years when formal instruction
began under a scholar by the name of Voung Thuc Do.
The boy was a quick study, mastering the art of Chinese calligraphy.
Instruction in Confucianism lay at the core of his studies and he rapidly came to embrace
its tenets.
Outside of the classroom, Cung displayed an inquisitive mind and an adventurous spirit.
His passions were kite flying and fishing.
When he was ten years his father, in accordance with Confucian tradition, gave him a new name
- Nguyễn Tất Thành, which means ‘ Nguyen the Accomplished’.
When he was eleven, Thanh’s family were struck with tragedy.
While his father was away on business, his mother gave birth to a fourth child.
However, she did not survive the delivery.
Thanh was devastated.
But he had no time to mourn.
He and his siblings had the responsibility of looking after a newborn infant until their
father returned.
By this time, Sac had become a Mandarin, or local official.
The job kept him away from home for long periods at a time.
As a widower he now had to rely on family and friends to help look after his children.
In his pre-teens, Thanh began attending a French boarding school in the city of Hue
along with his older brother.
Sac was of the view that, for his boys to succeed in making their mark on the world,
they would need to have the benefit of a French education.
However, Sac was no supporter of the French regime.
Despite being an official of the Indochinese government, he was an outspoken critic of
the manner in which the local authorities had so willingly ceded all power and control
to the French.
This criticism did not go unnoticed.
Eventually he would be dismissed from his position after a man died who Sac ordered
to be given 102 lashes as punishment for a minor wrongdoing.
Following his dismissal, Sac became greatly embittered against the French Indochinese
bureaucracy.
Unable to find work, he spent the rest of his life travelling from village to village
in search of a way to make a living.
Thanh saw very little of his father from then on.
He too became angry with the system, and especially the French rulers who treated the local people
so badly.
By 1908, Thanh had been studying at the National Academy in Hue for four years.
One day, he saw a large group of peasants marching past the school.
These people were protesting corruption in the government and high taxation.
It has long been related that Thanh joined the protest and that he translated the demands
of the people into French in order for the colonial rulers to understand what their grievances
were.
As a result, the story goes, he was dismissed from the school.
However, a recently discovered French document shows that he was admitted to the prestigious
College Quoc Hoc in Hue in August, 1908.
An expulsion would have made him ineligible for entry.
In his later life, however, he pointed to the protest in early 1908 as the point when
his revolutionary fervor emerged.
Upon completion of his studies in 1911, Thanh took a position as a teacher at the Duc Thanh
school in Phan Tiet on the eastern coast.
He stayed there for some six months.
He then moved to Saigon, the bustling metropolis in the southwestern part of the country.
To France and Beyond His four years of study had allowed Thanh
to become fluent in the French language.
It had also given him a good understanding of French culture and history.
He was aware of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity that had underpinned
the French revolution.
He knew that those principles were not being adopted in French Indochina but he was very
curious to see how they were being put into action in France itself.
In June of 1911, Thanh got his chance to satisfy his urge to explore France.
He managed to gain a position as a kitchen helper on the French steamship Amirale de
Latouche-Tréville.
A one-month journey brought the ship into Marseilles on July 5th.
On arrival in France, Thanh applied for entrance into a school that trained officials to serve
in the colonies.
The application was denied.
Having arrived in France, he still needed a means to support himself.
He decided that his best bet was to continue working as a kitchen hand on ships, where
he knew he could secure work.
As a result, he spent the next six years travelling the world on various steamships.
This gave him the opportunity to visit many colonial countries and compare the life and
conditions to what he knew of back in French Indochina.
Thanh’s travels took him to Africa, South America and the United States.
On a 1912 trip, he jumped ship at Boston Harbor and made his way to New York.
He claims to have lived and worked in Boston and New York for some time, though the only
evidence of his being in the U.S. at that time is a letter he wrote that has a New York
postmark on it.
While in the US, Thanh was surprised to learn that immigrants to America had legal rights
that the French in Indochina would not even give to the native people there.
Most importantly, they had the right to vote, something which impressed him greatly.
Just prior to the outbreak of World War One, Thanh sailed for England.
He worked as a pastry chef at the Carlton Hotel in Westminster.
During his London years, he began to associate with people of different nationalities, all
with one thing in common.
They came from either British or French colonies that were experiencing oppression and domination
by their colonial masters.
Over the course of many late-night discussions, Thanh came to dedicate himself to the liberation
of his homeland.
Revolutionary By 1917, Thanh had become an accomplished
pastry chef and had a solid carer path laid out before him.
However, he decided to forego that opportunity.
He moved to Paris in order to learn the craft of the revolutionary.
He moved into the Parisian Vietnamese quarter, which was quite large.
During his first twelve months in the French capital he immersed himself in the culture
and glamor of the city.
To support himself, he worked as a cook and a photo re-toucher.
But his primary purpose was to organize ex pat Vietnamese into a force strong enough
to effect some real change back in Indochina.
Thanh was surprised to find that quite a number of Frenchmen were sympathetic to the plight
of the Vietnamese people.
They encouraged him to publish his ideas about what needed to be done.
He did just that, producing an anti-colonial newspaper targeted toward the expat-Vietnamese
population throughout France.
Copies even made their way back to Indochina.
He wrote about the terrible conditions for the native people, not just in France, but
in every colony, be it French or British.
At this stage his writings did not call for revolution.
He simply demanded fairer treatment and equal rights.
The writings of Thanh made their way to the Colonial Government in Indochina.
He was immediately condemned as a revolutionary and condemned to death if he ever returned
to his homeland.
Meanwhile the native people of French Indochina hailed him as a hero.
Thanh was in Paris at the time of the Treaty of Versailles and became involved with a group
of Vietnamese nationalists who tried to take their message to the international congress.
The statesmen were basing their restructuring of post-war Europe on the principals of self-determination
and democracy.
The Vietnamese nationalists wanted them to apply those very principles to Vietnam.
However, they were largely ignored by the international congress.
Becoming Communist With the establishment of Soviet Russia, the
worldwide socialist movement was suddenly split between two ideologies; social democracy
and communism.
Thanh, living in Paris, made the fateful decision to firmly throw in with the Communists.
In 1920, he became one of the founding members of the French Communist Party.
Thanh began to write pro-Communist articles for the anti-colonial newspaper La Paria.
Then, three years later, he made a trip to Russia.
There he met with Marxist leaders who encouraged him to view the struggle for Vietnamese independence
as a part of the international Communist struggle to overthrow Capitalism.
He became a member of the Comintern, the organization set up by the Soviets to take Communism to
the world.
Thanh was convinced that the example set by the Russian Communist revolution provided
the model for the overthrow of the French in Indochina.
In June 1924, the Soviet government sent Thanh to Canton, China to begin laying the groundwork
for the Communist take-over of Asia.
From this point on in his life, Thanh would operate as an underground figure.
He travelled under aliases and lived in mountain hideaways as he worked clandestinely to organize
Communist resistance movements.
In 1927, the Chinese authorities clamped down on the Communists.
Thanh was nearly arrested, narrowly making his escape into Siam.
In Siam, Thanh took on the persona of a Buddhist monk.
This allowed him to travel freely.
In the north of the country there was a large Vietnamese population.
It was there that he headed, preaching his Communist message as he wandered from village
to village.
Throughout the majority of the 1930’s, Thanh disappeared from the record books.
There were rumours of him being in various places, such as with Mao Tse Tung in the Chinese
highland or in Soviet Russia with Stalin.
There were even reports that he was dead.
Ho Chi Minh His re-emergence on the world stage just after
the outbreak of the Second World War proved that last rumor wrong.
For the past fifteen years he had been biding his time as he waited for the opportune moment
to lead his people in rebellion against the French.
When France fell like a house of cards to the German assault in just six weeks in mid-1940,
he felt that that time had come.
A new French government that cooperated with the occupying Nazis was set up in Vichy, France.
This Vichy government also took control of French Indochina, but under the dominion of
the Japanese, who were one of the Axis Powers, along with Germany and Italy.
At the beginning of 1941, Thanh re-entered Indochina for the first time in thirty years.
He entered the northern jungle.
He had great plans for an overthrow of the French, but very little else.
He carried no weapons with him, had few followers and little money.
He immediately set about recruiting support among the mountain communities.
His revolutionary group was called the Viet Minh Doc Lap Minh, which was soon shortened
to Viet Minh.
The goal of this new group was to create a broad-based nationalist movement for the reclaiming
of Vietnamese independence and to gain the support of other nations, especially the Chinese.
The Viet Minh also vowed to oust the ‘Japanese fascists’, along with their ‘French accomplices.’
It was at this time that Thanh adopted the name by which he would become famous around
the world- Ho Chi Minh, which means ‘Bring of Light’.
The name change was a calculated move to present himself as a wise sage in the Confucian tradition.
Ho lived the life of a peasant in order to win the people to his cause.
He spoke in simple language and rejected all materialism in pursuit of the cause of nationalism.
He also cultivated the image of a life-long celibate who simply didn’t have time for
a wife.
In 1942 he went to China in order to recruit extra manpower.
However, he was arrested for being a Communist and spent fourteen months in a Chinese prison.
He finally convinced his captors to release him so that he could spy for them against
the Japanese in Indochina.
He walked all the way back to his mountain base.
His followers had given him up for dead but enthusiastically welcomed him back as their
leader.
There were other revolutionary groups at the time, but only the Viet Minh managed to establish
a number of clandestine cells around the country.
Small scale guerrilla activities against the Japanese continued throughout the duration
of the war.
Then the Japanese did something unexpected.
On March 9th, 1945, fearing an allied invasion, they overthrew the French established government
and declared an end to the French colony of Indochina.
The former natiions of Laos and Cambodia were freed from the colonial yolk to once again
be independent kingdoms.
The Vietnamese provinces of Annam and Tonkin were given to the rulership of Bao Dai.
Still this was not genuine independence.
The Viet Minh bided their time.
They knew that the Japanese would eventually be defeated and have to leave their land.
At that time, they would step into the vacuum.
War with France With the dropping of the two atomic bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, the game was up for the Japanese.
They swiftly left Indochina, creating the vacuum that Ho Chi Minh had predicted.
Ho promptly declared Vietnam to be independent, and set up a government, which was based at
Hanoi.
The President who had been put in place by the Japanese, Bao Dai, could see what the
will of the people was and he quickly abdicated his position.
The French however, had absolutely no intentions of giving up their hold on the colony.
As far as they were concerned, now that the war was over and the Axis powers had been
defeated, things would revert to the way they were in the 1930’s.
But they were to find a greatly strengthened Viet Minh.
The American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had seen the Viet Minh as a useful ally
in defeating the Japanese and so had given support to Ho Chi Minh’s guerrilla forces.
The new government set about working to bring relief to the masses who had suffered under
Japanese rule and were largely now at the point of starvation.
Ho put together a declaration of independence which he modelled on the American version
of 1776.
This was done in an attempt to win American support.
For their part, the Americans were wary.
They had a natural inclination to want to assist native peoples to overthrow their colonial
overlords, just as they had done nearly two hundred years before.
But they also wanted to maintain as good a relationship as possible with the French.
The two countries had a long history, dating back to the very founding of the United States.
The French had backed them against the common enemy, Great Britain, supplying millions of
dollars, ships and men.
It was decided by the allies that the British would occupy the area of the country south
of the 16th parallel in order to accept the surrender of the Japanese in Vietnam.
The area north of the 16th Parallel would be occupied by the Chinese.
China agreed to allow the Viet Minh, under Ho, to remain in power.
The British, though, saw it differently.
They felt obligated to help the French restore their pre-war position.
In October, 1945, French forces, aided by the British, landed in southern Vietnam and
began to quash any and all Viet Minh resistance that they encountered.
The French status quo was established in Saigon and other key centres.
However, the countryside was rife with Viet Minh guerrilla fighters.
Then, under pressure from the allied powers, the Chinese relented and allowed the French
to take power north of the French Parallel also.
The Viet Minh government, under Ho Chi Minh, was forced to compromise.
The French proposed a form of Vietnamese self-government inside of a French ruled Indochina Federation.
Ho and an entourage flew to Fontainebleau in France to negotiate a peace deal.
But there was to be no deal.
The French were only willing to concede limited self-rule, which was a far cry from what the
Viet Minh were demanding.
The talks broke down and Ho returned to Vietnam without a solution.
In November, 1946, the rising tension between the Viet Minh and the French sparked into
open warfare.
The French began an air bombardment of the coastal city of Haiphong.
This led to an evacuation of the port by the Vietnamese.
Then, in December, the Viet Minh launched a full-scale attack on the French position
in Hanoi.
When this failed to find success, the native forces withdrew to the mountains in order
to undertake a campaign of full-scale guerrilla warfare.
Over the next eight years, the Viet Minh, under Ho’s skilful leadership ground down
the will of the French military.
By 1954, the French were desperate to end the war.
They decided to launch a surprise attack on the Viet Minh at a place called Dien Bien
Phu.
The French thought they were luring Ho’s guerrillas into a trap but their plan backfired
terribly and Dien Bien Phu ended up as a disaster for them.
Over two months of fighting, at least fifteen thousand French soldiers were killed.
The final Vietnamese assault was launched on May 1st.
For several days the battle raged on until the French were finally subjugated.
More than 10,000 prisoners were taken.
This was the final straw for the French and they admitted defeat.
Dividing Vietnam In early 1954, the leaders of the United States,
Britain, France and the Soviet Union agreed to convene an international convention in
Geneva in order to work out peace settlements regarding the two major Asian conflicts – Korea
and Indochina.
The Conference began in April.
The first issue was Korea.
Discussions led nowhere and, in the end, the terms of the ceasefire of the previous year
continued to rule the situation.
Then the focus switched to Indochina.
After heated discussions, an agreement was finally ironed out between the French and
the Viet Minh.
Cambodia and Laos were to be guaranteed their independence, without the intervention or
threat of Communist take-over.
In Vietnam itself, all Viet Minh forces were to regroup north of th 17th Parallel.
The French would withdraw to the south of this arbitrary line.
And so, the country was divided into North and South.
But only temporarily.
The Geneva accord stipulated that elections were to be held in two years to unify Vietnam
under a single democratic government.
A communist government under Ho Ci Minh was now officially established north of the 17th
Parallel.
South of that line, the Republic of Vietnam was installed with Ngo Dinh Diem as its first
president.
For 300 days after the signing of the Geneva accords, the borders were open, allowing for
people to move between north and south.
Approximately one million people took advantage of this opportunity to escape Communism and
move south.
Ho now concentrated on building the Communist state of North Vietnam.
A land reform program was started based on the model created by Mao Tse Tung in China.
Many landowners were executed and corruption was widespread.
Another War In the south, the US backed government of
President Ngo Dinh Diem was anti-communist and more corrupt that that in the north.
Diem was unpopular with the people in the south.
He, along with his American backers did not allow the Geneva accord stipulated unifying
elections to take place.
If they had, Ho Chi Minh would undoubtedly have won.
By the end of the 1950’s anti-Diem sentiment in the south had given rise to a civil war.
The southern guerrillas were called Viet Cong.
Ho sent Viet Minh fighters in to support them.
In return, the US sent advisors in to help the government forces of Diem.
The real goal of the US, however, was to stop the spread of Communism.
The Bright Star Dims By the mid 1960’s the Vietnam War was raging,
with thousands of Americans fighting against the Viet Minh.
Ho Chi Minh was now a frail old man of 76 years.
It is unlikely that he was involved any longer in the day to day military operations.
However, he was, as he had always been, the major source of inspiration for the Vietnamese
people to fight to win their independence no matter the cost.
Ho Chi Minh died on September 2, 1969.
It would be six more years until the Americans would be defeated and Vietnamese independence
finally achieved.
But the Vietnamese people owed that independence to the tenacity, vision and determination
of their visionary leader - Ho Chi Minh.