Indo-china: A Military-Political Appreciation

The war in Indo-China, sinister, bloody, and seemingly endless, presents as curious a farrago of paradoxes and incongruities as any in recent military history. For one thing, its character has changed from a colonial to a civil war. It has changed from a war fought for the restitution of French sovereignty by a professional, traditionally colonial army to a war in which the same army is still fighting, but now side by side with native troops for the avowed purpose of securing the former colony's independence against the threat of Communist imperialism. Thus, in a sense, it has also become an international war, with Indo-China one of the areas ignited by the friction between the free and the Communist worlds. Indeed, it may be argued that the French forces in Indo-China are fighting the flank action of another and greater conflict, the main line of resistance of which lies somewhere between the 38th Parallel and the Yalu River in Korea.