Play as · Cold War 1947 · L1 · French Union Territory · At War
French Indochina - 1947
French Indochina in 1947 is not a possession being administered but a war being fought. The tidy colonial order of the 1930s is gone: the Japanese swept the French aside in March 1945, Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi that September, and when France came back to reclaim its jewel the two sides slid into collision. The shelling of Haiphong in November 1946 and the Việt Minh assault on the French in Hanoi that December opened a shooting war that, in 1947, is a year old and spreading. France holds the cities, the deltas and the main roads; the Việt Minh, led by Hồ and with Võ Nguyên Giáp building an army, hold the villages, the highlands and the night. Paris no longer speaks of a colony at all but of the French Union, and casts about for a Vietnamese figure - the former emperor Bảo Đại - through whom to claim a legitimacy the fighting has stripped away. The strategic identity is the colony at open war: the sharpest possible contrast with the profitable calm of a decade before.
Starting position
The starting board in 1947 is a war of cities against countryside. The French Expeditionary Corps under a succession of commanders holds Saigon, Hanoi, Haiphong and the coastal towns and controls the arteries between them; the Việt Minh hold the initiative in the interior, running a parallel state in the liberated zones, taxing, recruiting and drilling the guerrilla and regional forces that Giáp is welding into a regular army. In the autumn the French mount Operation Léa, a thrust into the Việt Bắc mountains meant to decapitate the resistance and capture Hồ Chí Minh - and it fails to catch him, a failure that sets the pattern of the whole war. Politically, France is pursuing the 'Bảo Đại solution': the attempt to install the ex-emperor as head of an associated Vietnamese state, granting a nominal independence inside the French Union so as to split moderate nationalists away from the Việt Minh. Cambodia and Laos are quieter but drawn into the same framework. The pieces are an expeditionary army holding the towns, a revolutionary movement holding the land, a failed decapitation strike, and a search for a puppet legitimacy.
What turns the campaign
What France wants in 1947 is to recover its position by force and diplomacy together - to hold the cities and the economy militarily while manufacturing, through Bảo Đại, a Vietnamese authority loyal to the French Union that can drain the Việt Minh of support. What Hồ Chí Minh's republic wants is complete independence and reunification, and, having been refused it, is prepared to fight a long war of attrition it believes France lacks the will to sustain. The campaign turns on whether France can convert its control of the cities into control of the country, or whether the war settles into the stalemate that in fact develops - the French unable to destroy an enemy that melts into the population, the Việt Minh unable yet to beat the French in open battle. It turns, too, on the Cold War frame closing around it: within two years the Chinese Communists will reach Vietnam's northern border and begin arming Giáp, and the United States will start funding France's war as an anti-communist front. Beyond 1947 lies Điện Biên Phủ and the end of French Indochina in 1954 - but in this year the outcome is still contested, city by city and village by village.
Signature challenge
The jewel France is fighting to keep
French Indochina's defining condition in 1947 is that France is now trying to hold by war what it once held by administration, and discovering that the two are not the same. The colony that produced rubber and rice in profitable quiet a decade earlier has become a country in arms, where French power reaches as far as its soldiers stand and no further, and where a revolutionary state governs everything the Expeditionary Corps cannot physically occupy. NationFall surfaces this as the Indochinese campaign's central tension: the classic asymmetry of the colonial war of reconquest - one side holding the cities, the wealth and the firepower, the other holding the population, the terrain and the patience - with a puppet-legitimacy strategy standing in for the consent that has been lost. The player inherits a war already a year old and already showing its shape: Operation Léa has failed to catch Hồ, the Cold War is about to pour in from China and America, and the deepest fact of the position is that the very possession France prizes most has become the one it can only keep by fighting - and, in the end, cannot keep at all.
Try the French Indochina campaign
Free demo. Pick Cold War. Pick French Indochina. Hold the cities while the Viet Minh hold the land - the colonial war of reconquest.
Play Free Demo as French IndochinaRegional: British Burma · British Malaya · the Republic of China - see the Cold War 1947 scenario hub
French Indochina across the eras