The Communist Viet Minh, having fought the…
1954 CE
The Communist Viet Minh, having fought the French for eight years, finally defeat them in at Dien Bien Phu, ending French control of Indochina.
The UN-sponsored Geneva Conference of 1954, convened by an exhausted France during Dien Bien Phu’s ten-week siege, temporarily divides Vietnam along the 17th parallel into an independent Communist North and a French-backed South, ending the Indochina War, mandating French withdrawal from the North and recognizing Ho Chi Minh as the President of the Republic of North Vietnam.
The conference also recognizes Pathet Lao control over two of Laos’s northern provinces.
Prominent Roman Catholic anti-Communist Ngo Dinh Diem, supported by the US, is named premier of South Vietnam in June.
US Psychological warfare expert Edward Lansdale allegedly arranges for the spreading of the rumor that the US plans to drop a nuclear bomb on the North, creating an evacuation frenzy.
In the resultant population exchange between the divided nation, hundreds of thousands of northern Vietnamese Roman Catholic refugees move south, supposedly ferried by CIA ships and planes; hundreds of Communists move north.
France, the Indochinese nations, the USSR, China and the Koreas sign the Geneva Accords; the US and South Vietnam do not.
In 1954, the United States, at the behest of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, establishes the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), an anti-Communist military alliance including Australia, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and the US, all of whom pledge collective action in the event of external agression or internal subversion against any one of them.
Cambodia, Laos and South Vietnam are not signatories.