debor044

Vichy France's "small war" with Thailand in 1940-1941 is one of the most unique campaigns and micro conflicts in the greater military history of World War Two (1939-1945). Marshall Pétains shakes Adolph Hitler's hand, 1941 The Vichy collaborators in France and abroad formed a coalition/puppet government with their conquerors in the North of France while a 'free' southern zone was established rule by Vichy following the defeat of the French Army and the capture of Paris. The Vichy army fought rather poorly against their former Allies in North Africa while helping to cement fascist rule throughout occupied metropolitan France and Algeria. Thousands of miles away in French Indochina where French rule had been established by imperial conquest beginning in 1862 as French Cochinchina (Vietnam), the Vichy government collaborated nominally with the Japanese in fear of being ousted by the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) forces who were already poised to invade the region ...

On 19 May 1883, the Battle of the Paper Bridge (Cầu Giấy, Hanoi) was fought between a French column led by Commandant Henri Rivière (b.1827-1883) and the Black Flag Army led by Liu Yongfu (b.1837-1917), a southern Han Chinese bandit, mercenary-soldier, and revolutionary. The Black Flag army ended Rivière’s expedition into the Tonkin (North Vietnam), then a tributary state of the Qing Empire (China and it Imperial provinces, 1644-1912) with a stunning ambush near what was called the Paper Bridge (Pont du Papier) outside modern day Hanoi in Vietnam. Background France’s early campaigns fought in Northern Vietnam from 1881-1889 form just the tail-end of a greater narrative of Franco-Vietnamese and Franco-Sino (Chinese) conflict for control over the Tonkin (Tonquin or Tongkin) province of North Vietnam. The Battle of the Paper Bridge (Cầu Giấy) in 1883 was arguably the first major conflict in France’s commitment to conquer and pacify what became Vietnam and French Indochina (1896-1954). The...