It ill becomes an American to criticize the French for their policy in Indochina since it was by virtue of a U.S. strategic decision and a U.S. logistical action that Indochina was turned first from Japanese hands into the hands of the British in the south and the Chinese Nationalists in the north. The British did not care much about the local situation. The particular Chinese Nationalists in northern Indochina were mildly sympathetic with local nationalism, but chiefly preoccupied with stealing everything that could be put on a truck. After this ill-fated liberation the Americans then assisted the French in transporting forces back to Indochina. This was after much of the U.S. press and many U.S. leaders had indicated their disapproval of French colonialism and had given indirect but powerful encouragement to Viet Minh's rebellion against the French. Having helped foul up the situation for the French hopelessly, the United States then observed their return (a return which was definitely, though indirectly, made possible only by U.S. aid to France) with uncertainty and disquiet. It took the Americans four years to decide that they were on the French side and even then they were not very much on the French side. Neither were the French. The "French side" was an indefinable amalgam of old-fashioned French colonialism, the membership of three small Asian states in a French Union, and anti-Communism. The French made the mistake which the Americans repeated when they invited the Chinese Communist general, Wang Hsiu-ch'üan, to New York to defame the United States through the courtesy of the United States Government, or when they tried dealing with the Chinese Communists, fighting them, dealing with them, and fighting with them again. When the French finally decided to seek an all-out military victory against the Communists they set up local governments which they themselves promptly dishonored, giving them neither prestige nor authority enough to combat the Communist menace in local Asian terms. That the French should have held the Asian anti-Communist front under these strange political circumstances is a credit to France. The Indochinese war has been dirty, discouraging. It has often verged upon the hopeless. The French have been criticized by the Americans in the early period of the reoccupation of Indochina for not turning the country over to Communist "nationalists" lock, stock and barrel; later the Americans criticized the French because the French did not annihilate the same "Communist nationalists" whom the Americans had previously lauded. In the end, Dien Bien Phu and Geneva were the inevitable concomitants of Panmunjom. Once we made "peace," the French had to make an equally bad "peace" too.