Saigon! Final French Pull-out from Vietnam: April 10, 1956

Source: Lockhart, Greg. Nation in Arms: The Origins of the People's Army of Vietnam. Wellington-London-Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1989.

[Highlighted hither and yon. And, no! Personally, I may not necessarily be 100% in agreement with Lockhart's spin, but! I still think he's worth quoting in full.]

Page 267

Epilogue

"On April 10, 1956, ninety seven years after the first French units landed at Saigon, others paraded there for the last time. Many Vietnamese wearing French medals watched sadly as Paratroopers clad in camouflage uniforms, Foreign Legionnaires wearing white kepis, and bearded Moroccans in tan turbans carried their battle stannards through the streets of the southern capital and boarded their ships. The French imperial adventure had ended in Vietnam, even if its consequences had not.

"True to the nature of almost 100 years of colonial rule the French left Vietnam a divided country. Yet Vietnamese of all political persuasions opposed this division. In 1954, Ho Chi Minh's government only accepted the Geneva partition under strong international pressure, and with clear assurances of reunification elections for which it knew it had the overwhelming support of the population. Although [token emperor] Bao Dai was by now a broken playboy living at Cannes, the delegation his State of Vietnam sent to Geneva was still so trenchantly opposed to partition that, like the American government, it refused to adopt the Final Declaration. In 1954 what divided Vietnamese was the kind of government that would rule the unified nation.

"Within months of Geneva, however, the Americans were involved in consolidating the partition. In October 1954, Bao Dai's Premier, Ngo Dinh Diem, who seemed attractive to the Americans because he had not served the French, received a letter of unconditional support from President Eisenhower....."

HERE ENDS THIS FRAGMENT OF TWENTIETH CENTURY HISTORY!