The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 extended the heat of the Cold War from Europe to Asia, and this directly affected the course of the Indochina War. For one, upon the outbreak of the Korean conflict, American President Harry S. Truman declared on 27 July that the United States would not only send troops to protect the Republic of Korea against communist aggression, but that it would also step up its military aid to Taiwan and to the French fighting communists in Indochina as part of a wider containment strategy in Asia. Second, the French saw in the Korean War the chance to recast the Indochina War as a vital part of the global American Cold War to contain Sino-Soviet communism to its Eurasian limits. To this end, the French sent a regiment to fight alongside American forces in Korea, le régiment de Corée. American aid began flowing to the French in earnest following the outbreak of the Korean War, symbolized nicely by the creation of the American Military Advisory and Assistance Group in Saigon in September 1950. Third, not unlike the French, Vietnamese communists also saw in the Korean War a chance to link their movement more closely to the communist revolutionary one. Just as the Chinese were fighting the American “imperialists” in Korea, the Vietnamese were taking on the French “colonialists” in Indochina as part of the wider internationalist battle against the “capitalist camp” in Asia. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) recognized the North Korean government and dispatched delegates there during the Indochina conflict.
Hence, for both the French and the Vietnamese, the Korean War allowed them in varying degrees to link colonial and national liberation wars to the wider global struggles inherent in the Cold War. The DRV’s propaganda strongly supported the North Koreans and blamed the outbreak of the war in Korea on the United States. French propaganda reflected the opposing view of course. The linkage between the Korean and Indochina Wars continued to the end. When an armistice stopped the fighting in Korea in mid-1953, French leaders seeking to find an “honorable end” to the Indochina conflict announced that it “would be hard to conceive that a true peace could be instituted in the Far East as long as war continued in other parts of Asia”, meaning Indochina. Similar things were occurring on the Vietnamese side, as the Soviets and the Chinese began to emphasize the importance of negotiations both in Korea and Indochina. The key decisions leading to both the battle of Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Conference began in 1953, with the signing of the armistice on Korea constituting a major factor. North Korean pilots would later fly MIGs to protect the DRV against the Americans during the Vietnam War. See also DIEN BIEN PHU, BATTLE PREPARATION AND CONTEXT.