Geneva Conference (1954)

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Geneva (Photo credit: Alan M Hughes)[/caption]

The Geneva Conference (April 26 – July 20, 1954^[1]) was a conference which took place in Geneva, Switzerland, whose purpose was to attempt to find a way to unify Vietnam and discuss the possibility of restoring peace in Indochina.^[2] The Soviet Union, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and the People’s Republic of China were participants throughout the whole conference while different countries concerned with the two questions were also represented during the discussion of their respective questions,^[3] which included the countries that sent troops through the United Nations to the Korean War and the various countries that ended the First Indochina War between France and the Việt Minh. The part of the conference on the Korean question ended without adopting any declarations or proposals. Some participants and analysts blamed the US for having obstructed movements towards the unification of Korea as a communist state.^[3][4][5] On Indochina, the conference produced a set of documents known as the Geneva Accords. These agreements separated Vietnam into two zones, a northern zone to be governed by the Viet Minh, and a southern zone to be governed by the State of Vietnam, then headed by former emperor Bảo Đại. A "Conference Final Declaration", issued by the British chairman of the conference, provided that a "general election" be held by July 1956 to create a unified Vietnamese state. Although presented as a consensus view, this document was not accepted by the delegates of either South Vietnam or the United States. In addition, three separate ceasefire accords, covering Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, were signed at the conference

Korea

Main article: Korean War

The armistice signed at end of the Korean War required a political conference within three months—a timeline which was not met—“to settle through negotiation the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea, the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, etc.”^[6]

[edit]Indochina

Main article: First Indochina War

Geneva Conference

After the defeat of the Japanese Empire in 1945, the Provisional Government of the French Republic restored colonial rule in French Indochina. Nationalist and communist movements in Vietnam led to the First Indochina War in 1946. This colonial war between the French Union's Expeditionary Corps and Hồ Chí Minh's Việt Minh guerrillas turned into a Cold War crisis in January 1950.^[7] The communist Việt Minh received support from the newly proclaimed People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, while France and the newly created Vietnamese National Army received support from the United States.

The Battle of Điện Biên Phủ started on March 13, 1954 and continued during the conference. Its issue became a strategic turnover as both sides wanted to emerge as the victor and forge a favorable position for the planned negotiations about “the Indochinese problem”. After fighting for 55 days, the besieged French garrison was overrun and all French central positions were captured by the Việt Minh.

This war was significant in that it starkly demonstrated the reality that a Western colonial power could be defeated by an indigenous revolutionary force; the French previously pacified a similar uprising in the Madagascar colony in March, 1947. A few months after the fall of Điện Biên Phủ, troops were deployed in Algeria and a second guerrilla-warfare-based war of independence started in November 1954. Growing distrust and defiance among the army's Chief of Staff toward the Fourth French Republic after the contested defeat of the First Indochina War led to two military coups d'état in March 1958 and April 1961. Most of the rebel generals were Indochina veterans, including their leader, Raoul Salan.

On the Korean question

The South Korean representative proposed that the South Korean government was the only legal government in Korea, that UN-supervised elections should be held in the North, that Chinese forces should withdraw, and that UN forces—a belligerent party to the war—should remain as a police force. The North Korean representative suggested that elections be held throughout all of Korea, that all foreign forces leave beforehand, that the elections be run by an all-Korean Commission that is made up of equal parts from North and South Korea, and to generally increase relations economically and culturally between the North and the South. The Chinese delegation proposed an amendment to have a group of “neutral nations” supervise the elections, which the North accepted. The U.S. supported the South Korean position and saying that the USSR wanted to turn North Korea into a puppet state. Most allies remained silent and at least one, Britain, thought that the U.S.-South Korean proposal would be deemed unreasonable. The South Korean representative then made a new proposal where there would be all-Korea elections but that they would be held according to South Korean constitutional procedures and still under UN-supervision. On June 15, the last day of the conference on the Korean question, the USSR and China both submitted declarations in support of a unified, democratic, independent Korea, and that negotiations to that end should resume at an appropriate time. The Belgian and British delegations said that while they were not going to accept “the Soviet and Chinese proposals, that did not mean a rejection of the ideas they contained.”In the end, however, no declaration was adopted. Some participants and analysts suggest that the U.S. obstructed efforts towards a peace agreement.Korea remains divided to this day.

Source

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Men of War: Vietnam

At least Men of War: Vietnam is honest up front. The very first mission tosses you into the deep end without any life preservers. Denied even the benefit of a brief tutorial or some tips on how to handle the first few enemy encounters, you're thrown into the midst of a battle between the US and a small group of Russian advisors and Vietcong soldiers. A Huey incinerates your convoy in the scripted opening seconds and then returns to obliterate the paltry four survivors in your squad within moments. Either you get your guys off the road and under cover in less time than it took you to read the start of this paragraph, or everybody dies. It's an abysmal introduction. It's hard to imagine anyone new to the Men of War series sticking around for very long after this greeting. Even series veterans can't help but be taken aback by how brutally the game begins. Playing on easy helps a bit by reducing enemy numbers, but the game remains incredibly punishing.

The two-part campaign that sees the first five missions focusing on Russian and Vietcong troops and the second five missions swinging over to the US is unforgiving all the way through. You go into missions with tiny squads ranging from just four guys to around a dozen or so, and you have to fight and/or sneak your way through huge maps crawling with countless enemy patrols and dotted with umpteen goals. The playing field is so tilted against you that you're at risk of it falling on your head at any moment. Enemies can spot you from long distances, hear you even when you're firing silenced rounds, and shoot you with unerring accuracy even when you're hunkered down behind brush. The entire squad can be wiped out in mere moments, at almost any time. You need to creep forward very cautiously, experiment with a lot of trial and error, and save every time you do anything even remotely good. Kill a bad guy? Save. Find a great cover spot? Save. And so on. At least the game helps out by autosaving at smart, frequent intervals.

There are a couple of saving graces. Mission maps are extremely detailed and come with multiple options to get past every enemy troop position. Granted, sometimes none of them are pleasant, but at least you have many choices, ranging from open assaults to flanking maneuvers to firing locations and weapon selection. Enemy artificial intelligence is lacking, too, though at least the stupidity of your foes makes it easier to complete scenarios against the incredible odds. Foes typically respond to attacks by going back to standard patrol routes, oblivious to the corpses of their comrades and the burning wreckage around them, or by walking mindlessly into the jungle until your lads shoot them to bits. When you're beaten, you're beaten through sheer force of numbers or by superior enemy positions like bunkers, but never from being outsmarted.


Zoom in close for all the glorious battle detail, like your men being overrun enemies.
Unfortunately, your own troops aren't very smart, either. They often switch weapons for no apparent reason in mid-battle and ignore enemies gleefully murdering the whole squad from a few feet away. Maybe it's the cover itself, or maybe it's dumb soldiers not standing in the right spots, but your boys often seem to think they're hidden when they're exposed enough to take a bullet to the head. Targeting isn't very accurate, unless you micromanage troops with direct control, which is hard to do in the middle of a big scrap. You can order your squad to assault a lone VC hiding behind a truck, for example, and watch in horror as your lads line up behind the bumper and fill it full of holes…while your enemy pops out of cover and slaughters everyone.

Special abilities and weapons offer some chance at survival. There is something of a role-playing flavor here with named squadmates who come equipped with gear and combat skills. At times, the game resembles the Commandos series. Troops with silenced SMGs, sniper rifles, and big M60s provide you with a shot at whittling down enemy numbers. That said, the small size of your squads makes it devastating when just one man is killed. Lose your sniper, and it's pretty much game over unless you're in the home stretch.

Jungle terrain is both an ally and an enemy. The engine does a great job rendering the foliage of Southeast Asia, and it isn't just for show. It's so thick that you can ably stage hit-and-run raids where you blitz enemy positions and then fade back into the green. Bad guys take advantage of the green stuff as well, though, and it's so voluminous that you often can't see anything. Events develop so fast that your men might be slaughtered before you can get the camera properly into position. You expect a lot of jungle in a Vietnam game, of course, but it seems like you wind up with a big frond in your face every time you adjust the camera the slightest bit to better view a firefight.


The plan: Kill, or be killed.
All of the campaign missions can also be run through cooperatively with up to four other players. This is the best way to play the game, as it mitigates the extreme difficulty of going solo. It also lets you tackle objectives more efficiently via coordinated attacks. Some missions seem to have been designed with co-op in mind. The first mission, in fact, features a section where you must detonate three US Hueys before they take off. This is hard to achieve playing solo without sacrificing at least one man during the assault, because the choppers head to the skies almost as soon as you open fire. But when you're playing with a buddy, you can divvy up the targets to blow them all up before the pilots can get the rotors spinning. Unfortunately, there are some technical problems with online play. Connection errors frequently pop up on the server screen, making it impossible to join many matches. This may be because of conflicts between various versions of the game sold by different retailers or conflicts between those who purchased the DLC pack released alongside the main game and those who did not. Either way, a patch is desperately needed. Even when you can get into games, the play is a bit laggy, and synchronization issues frequently arise.

As frustrating as Men of War: Vietnam is, it still provides some satisfying moments. Emerging hale and hearty at the end of a mission is always cause for celebration, seeing how the odds are so slanted against you, and the opposing forces are made up of what seems to be the entire US Army or Vietcong. Still, the extreme challenge is a tough sell, and it makes it so difficult to get past the first mission that you might never get to the point where you can get hooked.