Indochina wars (aug 18, 1946 – aug 18, 1954)

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A key factor to the beginning of the Vietnamese war was the 1954 French Indochina War, which saw France's defeat and led to the division of Vietnam into a communist dominated North and a democratic South. Vietnam was gradually acquired by the French in the later half of the 19th century, who administered it as a colony in 1883 to 1939 and eventually as a property in 1939 to 1945.

Vietnamese rule did not return to the country until September 2, 1945, when Nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh declared independence. From 1946 to 1954, the French fought independence, and Ho Chi Minh conducted guerrilla warfare against them in the first Indochina War, which ended with the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954. On July 21, 1954, an agreement was negotiated in Geneva that provided for a temporary division of the country, between a communist-dominated north and a US-backed south.

Procommunist insurgent activities in South Vietnam prompted substantial US engagement in the mid-1960s and the Second Indochina War, or Vietnam War, which resulted in widespread devastation and a high death toll. It came to a halt briefly in 1973, when a cease-fire agreement was struck on January 27, 1973, and the last US soldiers in South Vietnam began to disengage. The war was shortly resumed. The South Vietnamese government fell apart in 1975, and a communist-dominated regime took over on April 30. The two Vietnams were reunited as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on July 2, 1976.

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