Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the conquest and colonialization by France of Vietnam began by using the Catholic Church and their missionaries as an advance party to eliminate the threat to France's other vast southeast Asia holdings and ended with France's embarrassing military defeat in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. The author points out that the nationalist movement arose in Vietnam in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and gained momentum during the Japanese occupation of World War II; after the end of World War II, the Vietminh party (the League for the Independence of Vietnam, a coalition of nationalists and Communist groups), headed by Ho Chi Minh, established a republic with its capital at Hanoi. The paper relates that President Truman, not President Kennedy, were the first leader to entangle the U.S. in the Vietnamese malaise because Truman actually sent military forces to set up missions in Indochina to protect the United Nations troops in Korea from being attacked by Communists from both China and North Vietnam.

Table of Contents
Introduction and Thesis
The True Beginning and the Reasons Therefore
The Geography and History of Early Vietnam
Religion and French Imperialism in Vietnam
World War II and Post War Vietnam up to 1954
The French Indochina War
The Geneva Accords and U. S. Involvement

From the Paper:

"The first European missionary executed in the Vietnamese Central capital of Hue was Frenchman Francois Isidore Gagelin. This of course was a public and highly publicized event wherein the Good Father Gagelin was publicly strangled. Not hanged mind you but strangled with two beefy hands of a huge Vietnamese executioner. This incident happened in the late 1830s and stuck in the minds of both the Catholic Church and the French government."

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