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To: kearnyirish2
The treaty ending WWII separated Korea into a Soviet and US spheres; China had nothing to do with that. If anything, we bought Chiang 8 more years from 1937 on. While the fall of China did make it easier for the war in Vietnam to happen, the Soviets provided much of the arms (as well as pilots) to Ho Chi Minh.

Without Communist China, North Korea would have been threatened in its rear all along its 400 mile border with China. Hence, no Korean War. The Vietnamese Communist movement got the vast majority of its supplies - food, etc - as a grant from China (vs loans from the Soviets). Hence the Chinese feeling of betrayal when the Vietnamese turned against them at the end of the Vietnam War. Without a Communist China, North Vietnam would not have come into being. The French might still have decolonized, but there would have been no strong Communist faction in Vietnam. The one thing Communist movements in Southeast Asia (incl Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand) had in common is that the successful ones (i.e. the ones that defeated the non-Communist governments) had a common border with Communist China or with North Vietnam. Mao fed those movements with billions in supplies* even as the Chinese people were starving to death in the tens of millions (which he viewed as a cleansing of the weak and the unfit). The problem is that apart from the Indochinese trio of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia (border with North Vietnam), it was hard for the Chinese to get supplies to the region.

* In the 2000 time-frame, a UK-educated Chinese princeling who revealed this fact (i.e. the billions in aid) in a book about China's financial support of revolutionary movements abroad was promptly arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison for revealing state secrets.

19 posted on 04/20/2012 5:56:21 PM PDT by Zhang Fei (Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)
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To: Zhang Fei
You bring up an interesting point. the truly decisive edge that gave the Viet minh the victory at Dien Bien Phu was the massed artillery and anti-aircraft artillery that they dragged over mountains and through jungles to implace. The French realized they had been lured into a trap when Viet counter battery fire overwhelmed the French artillery and then began to subject the fortress to relentless bombardment. Col. Piroth, the French artillery commander, in the fortress committed suicide over the shame of being out gunned by the Viets. Anti-aircraft artillery fire was so intense that the French and US staffed Civil Air Transport aircraft were reduced to erratic high altitude parachute drops.
The question is where did the mass of artillery come from? From Chinese stocks made up of captured KMT tube artillery or were the guns from the vast stocks of the USSR. The Viet Minh propaganda film made about Dien Bien Phu while quite detailed and graphic carefully avoids showing any direct shots of VN artillery in action beyond stylized muzzleblast sequences.

This is an interesting question since the Soviets essentially reequipped the ‘Chinese Peoples Volunteers’ force in Korea after the war entered its static phase. US and allied forces reported massive artillery barrages from the communist side laid on with real professional skill. The US perception was the combination of massive Soviet material support and the limitless and disciplined masses of the Chinese made resumption of offensive warfare in 1952 impossible without resorting to atomic weapons. Was this the same combination that clenched Dien Bien Phu or did Mao push enough of his own artillery into the hands of the Viets to ensure the humiliating defeat of the ‘colonialist’ French forces?

24 posted on 04/21/2012 3:25:42 PM PDT by robowombat
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To: Zhang Fei

Great post! Your Jedi powers are strong.


25 posted on 04/21/2012 3:56:46 PM PDT by gaijin
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