SOUTH VIET NAM: BIRTH AT GENEVA

AT 10:42 a.m., Peking time, Wednesday, July 21, 1954, the war in Indo-China came to an end. The result had been a foregone conclusion since the ignominious French defeat by the Communist Viet Minh at Dienbienphu two months earlier. Even before that, diplomats from nine nations, halfway round the world in Geneva, had been working feverishly to hammer out the final peace settlement. Fearful that high-level participation in Geneva might put the U.S. in the position of approving a sellout to the Reds, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were hesitant about endorsing the conference. But when French Premier Pierre Mendes-France said that he needed U.S. support to avoid unnecessary concessions, Washington sent Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith to Geneva to stiffen him up.

In Geneva, diplomats argued over how Indo-China should be partitioned. When discussions appeared to be getting nowhere, Mendes-France imposed a deadline after which he threatened to resign--a move that would have brought the conference to a grinding halt and continued a war that could not be won. Prodded by this ultimatum, the conference finally agreed on terms that would partition Viet Nam at the 17th parallel. The agreement gave the Viet Minh the industrial North, leaving the government of Ngo Dinh Diem with the rice-rich South. New military bases were prohibited, and civilians were permitted to leave one zone to take up residence in the other (nearly 800,000 North Vietnamese moved to the South, but only a few thousand southerners moved North). Elections to unify Viet Nam were supposed to be held in 1956, but Diem repudiated this with the argument that any election in the Communist North would be rigged. The conference set up an International Control Commission of India, Poland and Canada to investigate all border violations and arbitrate all treaty disagreements; but the I.C.C.'s troika arrangement stymied whatever effectiveness it had.

In January 1955, the U.S., at Diem's request, took over the primary responsibility for the training of the Vietnamese army as part of Dulles' effort under the SEATO treaty to curb Communist subversion in Southeast Asia. Though the U.S. poured in lavish economic aid, the total U.S. military strength assigned to the Military Assistance Group did not exceed 2,000 men. But as the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas began increasing their terrorist attacks against the government, the U.S. started to get seriously concerned. In October 1961, General Maxwell D. Taylor visited South Viet Nam, came back with the outline of a vastly stepped-up program of U.S. military aid. Today, total U.S. strength in South Viet Nam is about 14,000 men. The Vietnamese army is almost completely armed with U.S. weapons, and U.S. Army helicopters ferry government troops on practically every long-range offensive mission.

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