Battle of Kỳ Hòa

Battle of Kỳ Hòa
Part of Cochinchina campaign
Date February 1861 Location Southern Viet Nam Result French and Spanish victory
Belligerents
French Empire Kingdom of Spain	Nguyễn Dynasty
Commanders and leaders
Admiral Léonard Charner	Nguyễn Tri Phương
Strength
several dozen French and Spanish warships around 3,000 French and Spanish regulars and colonial infantry	22,000 regular soldiers 10,000 militiamen
Casualties and losses
12 dead, 225 wounded	500, rest of the army routed or captured

The Battle of Kỳ Hòa (Trận Đại đồn Chí Hòa) on 24 and 25 February 1861 was an important French victory in the Cochinchina campaign (1858–62). This campaign, fought between the French and the Spanish on the one side and the Vietnamese on the other, began as a limited punitive expedition and ended as a French war of conquest. The war concluded with the establishment of the French colony of Cochinchina, a development that inaugurated nearly a century of French colonial dominance in Vietnam.

After early French victories at Tourane and Saigon, the Cochinchina campaign reached a point of equilibrium with the French and their Spanish allies besieged in Saigon, which had been captured by a Franco-Spanish expedition under the command of Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly on 17 February 1859. The arrival of massive reinforcements from the French expeditionary corps in China in 1860 allowed the French to break the Siege of Saigon and regain the initiative.

The end of the Second Opium War in 1860 allowed the French government to despatch reinforcements of 70 ships under Admiral Léonard Charner and 3,500 soldiers under General de Vassoigne to Saigon. Charner's squadron, the most powerful French naval force seen in Vietnamese waters before the creation of the French Far East Squadron on the eve of the Sino-French War (August 1884–April 1885), included the steam frigates Impératrice Eugénie and Renommée (Charner and Page's respective flagships), the corvettes Primauguet, Laplace and Du Chayla, eleven screw-driven despatch vessels, five first-class gunboats, seventeen transports and a hospital ship. The squadron was accompanied by half a dozen armed lorchas purchased in Macao.

The French and their Spanish allies were besieged in Saigon by a Vietnamese army around 32,000 strong under the command of Nguyen Tri Phuong. The Vietnamese siege lines, 12 kilometres long, were centred on the village of Ky Hoa (Vietnamese: Kỳ Hòa), and were known to the French as the 'Ky Hoa lines'. Ky Hoa itself had been transformed into a formidable entrenched camp:

The first objective was the capture of the entrenched camp of Ky Hoa. This was a rectangle measuring around 3,000 metres by 900 metres, divided into five compartments separated by traverses and enclosed within walls three and a half metres high and two metres thick. The camp was armed with more than 150 cannon of all calibres. Subsidiary defences were piled up in front of its walls: wolf-pits, ditches filled with water, palisades and chevaux de frise. Bamboo was employed in the defences with consummate art, and the walls were crowned with thorn bushes along their entire length. The number of enemy soldiers both in and around the fortified camp had grown steadily during the previous year. After the victory, we discovered from the muster rolls that there were 22,000 regular troops and 10,000 militiamen. There were also 15,000 men manning the forts along the upper course of the Donnai. All these men were under the command of Nguyen Tri Phuong, the most celebrated general in the Annamese army.

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Wikipedia