After months of collapsing negotiations following World War II, Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh forces attacked French positions and the city's power station in Hanoi, beginning open warfare against colonial rule. The conflict would grind on until the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, reshaping the map of Southeast Asia and drawing the United States into the region that would soon become Vietnam.
Tensions between Ho Chi Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam and returning French colonial authorities had been building since Japan's surrender in 1945 left a power vacuum in Indochina. France, determined to reclaim its prewar empire, had already shelled Haiphong harbor in November 1946, killing thousands of Vietnamese civilians in an act that convinced Viet Minh leadership that negotiation was futile.
Just before 8 p.m. on December 19, Viet Minh fighters sabotaged Hanoi's electrical grid, plunging the city into darkness, and launched simultaneous assaults on French military posts and residential areas where colonial officials lived. Ho Chi Minh broadcast an appeal that night calling on all Vietnamese to resist, using guerrilla tactics against a materially superior enemy—a strategic template his general, Vo Nguyen Giap, would perfect over the following decades.
The war that began that night dragged on for nearly eight years of jungle ambushes, sieges, and diplomatic stalemates, ending only with France's catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. The Geneva Accords that followed split Vietnam at the 17th parallel, planting the seed for the far larger and bloodier American war that would consume the country for two more decades.
Key people: Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap