Sure. You read some liberal revisionist history book and took it in hook line and sinker.
As proof you say they used american helmets guns and planes.
Let’s see. You have a country, with a colonial holding that they were trying to hold on to (or, gee...did they try to just hand it back to the Vietnamese?) five years removed from having their country occupied for five years where they were generating no tax revenue and the country’s industry was barely coming back and the government coffers were empty.
They wanted to hold on to their colonial holding. The people who wanted the country were communists. They had no money to raise a large army to project power.
Where on earth could they possibly get military supplies? Gee, there is this country that was massively demobilizing up to the Korean war, and had warehouses bulging with helmets, rifles and were even shoving planes over the sides of ships, they just couldn’t figure out what to do with them!
But, wait! They have a former ally who needed equipment we were going to trash, who was going to hold onto a colonial possession that was likely going to be communist if they just handed it over, and...what to do? Gee...how about we forgive all their debts going back to WWI, and give them scads of money in addition to Marshall Plan money which didn’t need to be paid back? Sounds like a great plan.
All this, of course was fed from within from the factions that were siding with DeGaulle who wanted to hold onto French possessions like Algeria and French Indochina (Degaulle, was, after all the nationalist, the one who all those people in favor of fighting the communists in French Indochina and in Algeria sided with. Politically, it WAS “DeGaulle’s France”. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been fighting. Right?
Right?
Oh, yeah, but it was the Evil, Backstabbing Americans who betrayed the French in Indochina. We twisted their arms to fight there then stabbed them in the back.
Put a sock in it.
My country has plenty to be ashamed of with respect to our treatment of our South Vietnamese allies who trusted us, and we stabbed them in the back, to our shame.
We don’t need some other eurotrash trying to pin their own follies on us as well.
As for the Bay of Pigs, we have plenty to be ashamed of there as well. We have plenty to regret, but French stupidity and ineptitude is not one of them.
You’re full of it; the Indochina War started long before the Korean War finished. France admitted they couldn’t hold onto the colony by military means; we pushed them to fight the Viet Minh, denying them a separation along the lines of the British with their Commonwealth.
De Gaulle didn’t lead France during the Indochina War, but he did WHEN THEY GAVE INDEPENDENCE TO ALGERIA (and that was not considered a colony, but a part of France itself).
If you can’t refute my points stop pretending; you don’t appear smart.