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HISTORY OF UNITED STATES INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM 41 that the essential purpose of the agreement relating to Vietnam is to settle military questions with a view to ending hostilities and that the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.” * The Victminh was reluctant to agree to this partition, which left it with slightly less than half of the territory of Vietnam, despite the fact that at the time it controlled three-quarters. How- ever, Ho Chi Minh’s government was under strong Sovict and Chinese pressure to give way on this point. The concern of China, and probably also the Soviet Union, was that continuation of the war might cause the introduction of American military power —pessibly atomic—in support of the French, a course of action which the United States did in fact come very close to taking. The Vietminh accepted this temporary loss because of the explicit promise in both the armistice agreement and in the Geneva Dec- laration that within a period of two years national elections would be held to unify the country. They had every reason to believe that these elections would take place because the agreements stipulated that France, the other party to the armistice, was to maintain control of civil administration in the South until elections were held (Article 14a of the armistice agreement). In effect, then, the elections and the military truce were interdependent, a fact often disregarded. Despite this stipulation, less than a year after the Geneva Con- ference, France, alleging American pressure, pulled out of Vict- nam without honoring its obligations concerning the clections; and the United States stepped in to fill the void left by the depar- ture of French power, The United States had not been a party to the military truce and had not actually assented to the Geneva Declaration. In- formed observers have said that the major reason was the unwill- ingness of Secretary of State Dulles to appear to give any ground to Communism, especially at the time of an election campaign. Instead, at Geneva the United States had made its own unilateral declaration wherein it undertook to refrain from the threat or use of force to disturb the Geneva Accords. With respect to the pro- * See Appendix J-B.