United States Increases Its Commitment to Aiding the French Military

June 27, 1950

Overview

President Truman announces the United States will accelerate “the furnishing of military assistance to the forces of France and the Associated States in Indochina and the dispatch of a military mission to provide close working relations with those forces.” By July, the United States commits $31 million in military aid to the French for the war in Indochina. American military advisers deploy to the region along with U.S. tanks, naval vessels, aircraft, artillery, and other supplies. Before the end of 1954, the United States spends approximately $2.6 billion on the First Indochina War, paying as much as 80 percent of France’s war costs.1

¹“Statement by the President on the Situation in Korea,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1950 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), 492; Doris M. Condit, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Volume II: The Test of War, 1950–1953 (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1988), 207–8; Mark Philip Bradley, Vietnam at War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 56 (for “80 percent”); Tucker, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, 311-312, 725; Herring, America’s Longest War, 21–33, 51 (for $2.6 billion, see p. 51). Also in Kathryn Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam, (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2007), 19–20.