Foreign News: INDOCHINA: THE WORLD'S OLDEST WAR

Duration: Seven years, two months and three weeks to date.

Battleground: An area about the size of Texas forming the Associated States of Viet Nam (pop. 23 million), Laos (1,100,000 ) and Cambodia (3,700.000).

Contenders: Up to 500,000 anti-Communist troops (Frenchmen. Vietnamese, Thais. Laotians, Cambodians. Moroccans, Senegalese and foreign legionnaires from several nations, including thousands of Germans) v. about 360,000 Communist regulars and irregulars.

ROUND ONE, 1945-46 How It Began

In October 1945, the French returned to Indo-China, their "marvelous balcony on the Pacific." The Japanese had surrendered, the British and the Nationalist Chinese were in merely nominal occupation—by order of the Big Three at Potsdam—and would soon be gone. "My mission," proclaimed the new High Commissioner, "is to re-establish French sovereignty," and the French could see no wrong in that. In 80 years before World War II, they had invested $2 billion in Indo-China, 28% of it for such public works as 900 health institutions, 12,600 schools. The French reduced infant mortality by 50%; they built 13,800 miles of improved roads, railroads and canals; their irrigation projects brought 13 million more acres under cultivation. But the French were not wanted back. Frenchmen had made a lot of money out of Indo-China. and their administrators were often disliked. They had been discredited by the easy Japanese conquest. Like most South Asians, the Indo-Chinese simply wanted their independence. French General Jacques Leclerc had to fight to clear nationalist guerrillas from the capital, Saigon (pop. 1,000,000).

Who were these nationalists, who came from the jungles to take over all IndoChina when the Japanese surrendered? They represented all colors of the anti-white spectrum, but their dominant hue was Red. The Communist leader was a tuberculous agitator who learned his trade in Moscow. His name: Ho Chi Minh.

In March 1946, the French made a deal with Ho, who held the north firmly with Japanese arms and Nationalist China's support. They recognized Ho's government as a "free" state within the French Union, and Ho let the French army into his capital, Hanoi (pop. 237,000). The French invited Ho to Fontainebleau as a chief of state to work out details of the agreement. By November, Ho was back in Indo-China, offering to work "in loyal cooperation" with the French. But the French soon learned, as others have painfully since, that Communist "interpretations" always differed from theirs.

On Dec. 19, Ho ordered a surprise attack against the French garrison at Hanoi. His men blew up the power station, raided a hospital. France declared it would not yield to such violence, and the war was on. "The battle will be long and difficult," said Ho. All this got little attention in Washington, 13,000 air miles away. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had referred to French colonialism's "shocking record"; the U.S. now stipulated that U.S. economic aid to France must not be diverted to its colonial war.

ROUND TWO, 1946-49 The Local War