It's not surprising to intelligent historians that when the Allies won World War II, Charles DeGaulle sent personal messengers to the remainder of the French collaborationist bureaucrats who'd served the Japanese in Vietnam, telling them to surrender with the enemy. Yet, according to nationalistic Vietnamese, instead of surrendering, the Japanese seized total control of Vietnam in June 1945 and held on until late September, weeks after the nominal VJ surrender date. I Officially, the United States was against continued French rule in Vietnam for a number of reasons. The French colonials wanted business as usual. For their own colonial reasons, the British sided with the French. The weak-kneed American State Department smiled its way to a bad decision, and the corruption of colonialism was allowed to resume, which fueled local discontent, r Although France held paper title to the country, with United States and British agreement, armed resistance began again across Indochina. A force known as the Viet Minh, both Communist and non-Communist, began to push its liberation movement. Abandoned by his British and American wartime allies. Ho Chi Minh turned to the USSR and China for support. As Bernard Fall wrote, Americans are not so quick to scream 'RED' about Communists helping American GIs in France, Italy, Poland, and even in Indochina prior to 1946. The freedom movement was sporadic. In addition to the political elements, the religious Cao Dai and the Wa Ho sects were involved, as were the Binh Xuyen bandits, better known as the Vietnamese Mafia. Had these diverse elements ever gotten totally together, the history of the Vietnam War surely would have been different. Used in the fighting were hoards of World War I and World War II weapons, plus the products of hundreds of workshops and individual technology. The Communists were holed up in Viet Bac along the then Nationalist Chinese border, where they manufactured copies of standard pistols, rifles, shotguns, ammunitions, and grenades in their own shops.