ABSTRACT
Navarre and his government hoped to be able to regain the initiative in Indochina during the next two years with the objective of strengthening their battlefield position prior to the beginning of peace negotiations. Prime Minister Laniel insisted in February 1954 that the Indochina issue should be discussed at the Geneva Conference scheduled to begin in April for the purpose of working out a political settlement in Korea. The war planners argued that the United States would have to send ground troopsseven American combat divisions if China stayed out of the conflict and twelve divisions if China became involved in order to assure an ultimate victory in Indochina. The Indochina phase of the Geneva Conference began just one day after the last French gun fell silent at Dien Bien Phu. The cease-fire arrangement, worked out at Geneva in July 1954, provided for the temporary partition of Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel.
