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During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. Both Japan and France controlled different parts of Indochina for a time, and the Japanese supported the 1945 August Revolution that led to a Communist take-over in North Vietnam. The Communists killed untold thousands throughout this struggle, and their victory led to a brief incursion into Vietnam by Nationalist China. Ho Chi Minh arrived in Vietnam in 1941, and had seized control of all of North Vietnam by 1945. North Vietnam received massive supplies of arms from [[Josef Stalin]] and [[Mao Tse-Tung]], enabling it to escalate its conflict with France into a full-blown, and bloody, war for independence. The Communists enacted drastic reforms that brought about a total collapse of whatever remained of the North Vietnamese economy; as a result, harvests declined by 20% in just one year. North Vietnam's Communist rulers rejected food aid from South Vietnam and France in order to escalate their guerilla war; they exported food despite the obvious failure of their economic policies; and they indiscriminately massacred the top producers in society. Massive bombing by all sides during World War Two had destroyed much of Vietnam's infrastructure; a drought in 1944 made conditions even more deadly and desperate. Although Japan bears primary responsibility, the Communist take-over turned this volatile situation into an outright catastrophe, as political and economic changes in the North caused the mass death by starvation of 400,000 to 1,000,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>A la barre de l'Indochine. Decoux, Jean. A French government report documented some 400,000 deaths, which may have been 50% too low. Others suggested an even higher toll. Rummel counts famine as non-democidal, but it would be hard to argue that the Communists were not responsible for at least 50% of the death toll</ref> South Vietnam was virtually untouched by the famine. (This is even more remarkable when one considers the massive aid given to North Vietnam by the USSR and China, all of which was diverted for war). Inflating the scale of the famine for propaganda purposes, and heaping all of the blame on France; Ho Chi Minh absolved the Communists of any responsibility for the tragedy. He argued that war against France was the only way for the country to make a full recovery.<ref>http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~vern/van_kien/declar.html</ref> Most of the food aid given to Imperial Japan or Vichy France ''came from their colony, South Vietnam;'' the Vietnamese Communists deliberately diverted American, Soviet, and Chinese aid sufficient to avert a famine towards their guerilla war against France and South Vietnam while forcing farmers to give up their harvets and exporting rice. To the extent the Communist North supplied food to the Japanese, it was largely part of a deliberate strategy: The Communists alternatively played the French, Vietnamese Nationalists, and Japanese against each other during their consolidation of power. The August 1945 formal Communist take-over (they had already controlled most of the country for years) of North Vietnam was, in fact, orchestrated in large measure by Japan: On August 14, 1945, the Japanese surrendered to the Allies. In Indochina, the Japanese officials took advantage of the situation to cause additional problems for the Allies. Violating their surrender agreements, they helped Vietnamese nationalist groups, including the Việt Minh, take over public buildings in various cities. On August 25, 1945, Bảo Ðại was forced to abdicate in favor of Hồ and the Việt Minh. Although Japan must share responsibility for the death toll, it would be hard to argue that the Communists were not responsible for at least part of it. Further, Ho's collaboration with Japanese war criminals continued long after World War Two. Hundreds of Japanese soldiers trained or commanded Vietnamese forces during the war with France.<ref>Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, (New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 1997), pp. 146.</ref> According to Bernard Fall, both France and the Việt Minh were ready to come to terms by late 1947, but peace talks broke down due to Ho's refusal to hand over Japanese military officers for trial in France. Ho praised them as friends and comrades whose loyalty could not be disabused, and then stormed out. Hundreds of thousands died as a result.<ref>Fall, Bernard, Last reflections on a War, pp. 88. New York: Doubleday, 1967.</ref>