1956 in the Vietnam War
| 1956 in the Vietnam War | |||
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← 1955
1957 →
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 Ba Cụt in Cần Thơ Military Court 1956 |
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| Belligerents | |||
 South Vietnam United States
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Anti-government insurgents: Viet Minh cadresHòa Hảo sect |
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| Commanders and leaders | |||
| Ba Cụt | |||
| Strength | |||
| Viet Minh: 4,300 | |||
| Casualties and losses | |||
| US casualties: 1 | |||
Ngo Dinh Diem consolidated his power as the President of South Vietnam. He declined to have a national election to unify the country as called for in the Geneva Accords. In North Vietnam Ho Chi Minh apologized for a disastrous land reform program he had initiated in 1955. The several thousand Viet Minh cadres the North had left behind in South Vietnam focused on political action rather than insurgency. The South Vietnamese army attempted to root out the Viet Minh.
France completed its military withdrawal from Vietnam. The United States expanded the number of its military advisers in South Vietnam. The first American killed in the Vietnam War died June 8 at the hand of another American soldier.
In 1956 the term Viet Cong came into use and gradually replaced the older term Viet Minh. The government-controlled Saigon press first started using the term referring to communists in South Vietnam as Viet Cong a shortening of Viet Nam Cong-San which means "Vietnamese Communist."
President Diem issued Ordinance Number 6 which permitted the imprisonment of communists and others "dangerous to national defense and common security." Diem's anti-communist repression reduced communist party membership in South Vietnam by about two-thirds between 1955 and 1959, but the repression also alienated many non-communists.
In the words of scholar Bernard Fall, Ordinance No. 6 gave the Diem government "almost unchecked power to deal with the opposition--and the non-Communist opposition, least inured to clandestine operations, was hit hardest. The non-communist opposition to Diem came mostly at this time from the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo religious sects and the Bình Xuyên criminal mafia.
The Geneva Accords of 1954 forbade any increase in foreign military personnel in Vietnam. Adhering to the agreement, the U.S. had kept the level of its Military Advisory Assistance Group (MAAG) in Saigon at 342 personnel. On this date, however, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles with the concurrence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Department of Defense authorized a "temporary mission" of 350 additional American military personnel to South Vietnam to salvage about $1 billion in military equipment left behind by the French military, now departed. By the end of 1957, nearly all of these additional personnel had been assigned to MAAG to train the South Vietnamese army (ARVN).
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Wikipedia