At the end of World War II, the United States was broadly popular in Vietnam for having repelled the Japanese occupiers.Even Ho Chi Minh, the nationalist and … The French did recruit conscripts in France for their war in Vietnam, in order to keep the war from becoming more unpopular at home than it was – a war being called the "dirty war" (la sale guerre) by France's communists and leftist intellectuals, including Jean Paul Sartre. After World War II, France reoccupied Vietnam … Vietnamese resistance prevented the French from advancing beyond Saigon, and it took French troops, under new command, until 1861 to occupy the three adjacent provinces. By the late 1880s, French-controlled Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were collectively referred to as Indochine Français (French Indochina). France had been a long-time occupier of Vietnam before 1954.It wanted no part of the new conflict. The Geneva Peace Accords. France took control of Annam, the large central part of Vietnam, in 1874. Vietnam War - Vietnam War - French rule ended, Vietnam divided: The Vietnam War had its origins in the broader Indochina wars of the 1940s and ’50s, when nationalist groups such as Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, inspired by Chinese and Soviet communism, fought the colonial rule first of Japan and then of France. Vietnam War (1954–75), conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. It was part of a larger regional conflict as well as a manifestation of the Cold War. The Vietnam War was the prolonged struggle between nationalist forces attempting to unify the country of Vietnam under a communist government and the United States (with the aid of the South Vietnamese) attempting to prevent the spread of communism. French colonialism in Vietnam lasted more than six decades. The Second Indochina War, 1954-1975, grew out of the long conflict between France and Vietnam. READ MORE: Vietnam War Timeline France. The Vietnamese, unable to mount effective resistance to the invaders and their advanced … By 1864 they controlled all of Cochinchina, the southern part of Vietnam. Learn why a country that had been barely known to most Americans came to define an era. The Geneva Peace Accords, signed by France and Vietnam in the summer of 1954, reflected the strains of the international cold war. Indochina became one of France’s most lucrative colonial possessions. The U.S. entered the Vietnam War in an attempt to prevent the spread of communism, but foreign policy, economic interests, national fears, and geopolitical strategies also played major roles. France began to colonize Vietnam between 1859 and 1862, when they took control of Saigon. Drawn up in the shadow of the Korean War, the Geneva Accords represented the worst of all possible futures for war-torn Vietnam.