ABSTRACT
The Geneva Conference’s most important legacy was the partition of Vietnam—an issue that is more often taken for granted than analyzed in literature on the First Indochina War. Partition, coupled with the failure to reunite Vietnam in 1956, provided an important cause for the conflict’s second phase, which culminated with US entry into the war as a belligerent. Officials from each of the interested governments began to consider the implications of a negotiated settlement after the Berlin Conference ended on 18 February 1954. Policymakers from each side immediately realized that the physical separation of the belligerents might be necessary to achieve and armistice. Korea and Germany provided recent but far from salubrious precedents and Vietnam had also been temporarily divided in 1945. After VJ Day, Nationalist China occupied the country north of the 16th parallel and Commonwealth forces supervised the south. Partition was an all too familiar means of conflict resolution in 1954.
