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This article traces the origins of the thirty-year war that tore Viêt Nam apart from 1945, with a particular focus on the situation in the south of the country. After Japan’s unconditional surrender in mid-August of that year, Ho Chi Minh and his comrades in the Indochinese Communist Party seized power through an insurrectionary process called the “August Revolution.” In reality, this process marked the beginning of a terrible civil war that would be particularly violent in the southern section of the country. Since the communists’ hold there was much weaker than in the north, a multitude of groups and movements would contest it. The savage war of recolonization initiated by Paris in the fall of 1945, facilitated by the British occupation and fueled by a massacre of French and Indo-Europeans, would only aggravate the divisions among the Vietnamese, which would be exploited to the fullest extent by French forces.