Fall of French Indochina
https://youtu.be/ZMPNY9w8OmQ In May 1954 communist Viet Minh forces won a decisive victory over the French colonial army in the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ. The war ended shortly afterward with signing of the 1954 Geneva Accords in which France agreed to withdraw its...
read more
First Indochina War – 1947-1954
https://youtu.be/8kgcUFU5_eA After WWII, the decolonization of French Indochina left the region divided into four independent states: North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In September 1945, a provisional government in Hanoi...
read more
Battle of Hoa Binh – French Indochina War
https://youtu.be/pl-0uqJhi3o From 1887 to the mid-1900s, French Indochina was the collective name for the French colonial regions of Southeast Asia composed of Cochin-China, Annam, Cambodia, Tonkin, Kwangchowan and Laos....
read more
United Nations Forces in the Korean War
https://youtu.be/LYE0nfqnqc0 Sixteen UN nations supplied fighting units and five sent military hospitals and field ambulances. Australia was one of the very first to contribute military personnel from all three services. The single largest UN contributor was the...
read more
French Communism 1950
https://youtu.be/V3dHS3xirhU The French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français- PCF) was banned in 1939 at the outbreak of WWII when it opposed the war. Since the USSR and Nazi Germany had a neutrality pact, the PCF may have actually sabotaged arms...
read more
Cold War ~ Polish Movie
Cold War is a Polish film directed by Pawel Pawlikowski that stars Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot. The plot follows the passionate and fateful romance of a couple from the ruins of post-war Poland through Cold War East Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris. Shaped by politics,...
read more
Vietnam Uprising
https://youtu.be/pl-0uqJhi3o In October 1950, led by Võ Nguyên Giáp, Communist troops in the northern region of the French colony of Vietnam began a series of attacks on French colonial fortresses along the border with China. 10,000 French troops. isolated in...
read more
Bảo Đại
https://youtu.be/rfzHg9wEXV0 Bảo Đại, the last of the Nguyễn dynasty, was the Emperor of Annam (a protectorate within French Indochina) from 1926 to 1945. After the Japanese ousted the Vichy-French administration in March 1945 Bảo Đại was named ruler. He soon renamed...
read more
Haiphong Incident
On November 23, 1946 the French navy bombarded the Vietnamese coastal city of Haiphong, killing 6,000 Vietnamese people overnight. The Haiphong shelling was the first in a series of armed clashes leading to the December Battle of Hanoi and the outbreak of the First...
read more
Bikini Bathing Suit
In the 1930s, European women wore two-piece bathing suits consisting of a halter top and shorts with some midriff visible -- the navel was always hidden. On Jul 5,1946 the bikini bathing suit, created by former civil engineer Louis Reard, made its debut...
read more
Cannes Film Festival
Although originally scheduled to be held in Cannes in 1939, the outbreak of WWII delayed the opening of the first International Film Festival until September 1946 when twenty-one countries presented their films. Held on the French Riviera, the festival was...
read more
Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh, born in 1880 into the family of a poor country scholar as Nguyen Sinh Cung (also called Nguyen Tat Thanh or Nguyen Ai Quoc) attended grammar school in Hue, taught school in Phan Thiet, and was apprenticed at a technical institute in Saigon. In 1911...
read more
Vietnam After WWII
French Indochina was formed in the late 19th century by combining three Vietnamese regions (Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina) with Cambodia, Laos and Guangzhouwan. With the fall of France in 1940, the control of the colony shifted to the Vichy French who...
read more
Dunkirk
After seeing the new movie DUNKIRK directed by Christopher Nolan last night, I wanted to recommend it to you readers. Like the top film critics, I found this film technically flawless and emotionally extremely powerful. The film's soundtrack by Hans Zimmer kept...
read more
Execution of Pvt. Slovik
This haunting scene from the 1963 film The Victors depicts the Christmas Eve execution of a GI deserter modeled after Private Eddie Slovik. Private Eddie Slovik was the first American soldier since the Civil War to be executed for...
read more
Liberation of Paris
After a one month blitzkrieg by the Wehrmacht, Paris fell to Nazi Germany on June 14, 1940. An armistice with Germany subsequently established a French puppet government with its capital at Vichy. The Nazi occupation of Paris lasted four years until the city was...
read more
D-Day
On June 6, 1944, >5,000 Allied ships, supported by 13,000 airplanes performed the largest amphibious landing in the history of warfare. Code-named Operation Overlord, the invasion of ~50 miles of beach in Normandy France signaled the beginning of the tough campaign...
read more
Vichy France
Vichy France propaganda cartoon about the allied bombings of France. A Jewish radio announcer in London broadcasts the imminent arrival over France of Allied Liberator aircraft. US planes, flown by Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Popeye, Goofy and Felix the Cat, drop bombs...
read more
Casablanca Conference
In January 1943, two months after the Anglo-American landings in French North Africa in November 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Casablanca, Morocco. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, engaged in the decisive...
read more
All the Light We Cannot See
This superbly written, often lyrical, WWII novel about a blind French girl and a young German soldier is excellent reading. “I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green...
read more
INFERNO
I am currently reading this excellent book by Max Hastings. Not only is it detailed, balanced and well-referenced; it is superb writing. Before dawn next morning, "a warm, damp, rather hazy day," American and Japanese pilots breakfasted. The Yorktown's men favoured...
read more
Virulent Anti-Semitism Redux
The current eruption of virulent anti-semitism and violence against Jews in France, makes it imperative that we recall the progressive Nazi legislation from 1933-1945 that resulted in the institution of draconian measures against the Jewish community and ultimately...
read more
Occupied Paris
German victory and occupation in June 1940 "entangled France and the French in a web of cooperation, resistance, accommodation, and, later, of defensiveness, forgetfulness, and guilt from which they are still trying to escape.” - Ronald Rosbottom, professor of French...
read more
News Parade of the Year
News Parade of the Year: 1942 - Castle Films - YouTube.
read more
Casablanca
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLQwphwP0ys Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid had its world premiere in November 1942. In a love triangle in Vichy-controlled Casablanca, an American expatriate must choose between his love for a...
read more