Capture of Biên Hòa

Capture of Bien Hoa
Part of Cochinchina campaign
Date 16 December 1861 Location Bien Hoa, South Central Coast of Viet Nam Result French and Spanish victory
Belligerents
Second French Empire Spain	Viet Nam (Nguyễn Dynasty)
Commanders and leaders
Louis-Adolphe Bonard Diego Domenech	Nguyen Ba Nghi
Strength
to be supplied	unknown
Casualties and losses
2 dead, several wounded	unknown

The Capture of Bien Hoa (Vietnamese: Biên Hòa) on 16 December 1861 was an important allied 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 regain the initiative. On 24 and 25 February 1861 Admiral Léonard Charner relieved the Siege of Saigon by defeating the besieging Vietnamese army in the battle of Ky Hoa. He followed up this victory with the Capture of My Tho (12 April 1861).

Charner had been sent out to the Far East for the war with China, and had not expected to be required to fight a campaign in Cochinchina as well. Believing that he had broken Vietnamese resistance with his victories at Ky Hoa and My Tho, he asked to return to France in the summer of 1861. Rear Admiral Louis Adolphe Bonard (1805–67), appointed as his successor by an imperial decree of 8 August 1861, arrived in Saigon on 27 November and assumed his duties on 30 November.

Bonard's arrival coincided with an upsurge in Vietnamese guerilla activity against the French fomented by the government at Hue, which placed a bounty on the heads of both Frenchmen and Vietnamese in their service. Bands of insurgents attacked Tay Ninh and Tran Bang, and in one particularly galling incident the French lost one of their small warships. A band of Vietnamese mounted a hit-and-run attack on the French lorcha Espérance during the absence of her captain, enseigne de vaisseau Parfait, and lured the French vessel into an ambush. Her crew of 17 Frenchmen and Filipinos were overpowered and killed, and the insurgents burned the vessel. Bonard decided that an exemplary reprisal was required. A fortnight after his arrival in Saigon, after receiving an unsatisfactory response to an ultimatum he had sent to the Vietnamese governor Nguyen Ba Nghi, he mounted a major campaign to occupy the province of Bien Hoa.

...
Wikipedia