Word: airstrips
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Advancing in five columns, Viet Mink Communists were in sight of the ancient Laotian capital of Luang Prabang last week. Flying in with French reinforcements, TIME Correspondent John Dowling reported: THE plane, loaded with Legionnaires, JL jeeps, artillery, barbed wire, ammunition, slips smoothly into the grass airstrip. We step out and the hills and mountains enclose us in their green embrace. To the west, rising from the jungle, is a hill surmounted by a white, bell-shaped stupa (shrine) whose glistening, golden spire points needlelike at a soft blue sky. To the east and south tower the forest-clad mountains...
...town is 2½ miles from the airstrip, on a spit of land at the confluence of the Nam Khan and Mekong rivers. We reach it over a frail bamboo bridge floating on native dugout canoes. Here the jungle seems to be about to swallow the city's few houses and streets. Charming white temples and graceful stupas, elaborately decorated with legends and characters from the Ramayana relics of India, are everywhere crowded by tall green rustling palms, fragrant frangipani trees and scarlet-blossomed poincianas...
...Plaine des Jarres because of the ancient stone burial urns dotted about the landscape. According to French military thinking, the invading Viet Minh Communists "had to pass through" the Plaine des Jarres on their way to conquer Laos. There last week, in a two-mile perimeter around an airstrip, the French were hastily improvising a defense system of barbed wire and entrenchments. Soon Legionnaires and loyal Laotian troops were as securely trussed-up in their "hedgehog" as the ancient Laotians in their old stone jars...
...months had passed since Communist General Vo Nguyen Giap conquered the Thai country lying between Red China and Laos (see map). Instead of throwing all his forces against several hundred thousand French Union and Vietnamese troops bottled up in the Red River delta and in the airstrip at Nasan, Giap began probing the defenses of Laos with his Viet Minh commandos. In his exquisite white palace overlooking the palm-fringed Mekong River, aging (67), crew-cropped King Sisavang Vong told the French: "This is my country; this is my palace; I am too old to tremble before danger." Not until...
Hedgehogs. To head off Giap's drive, the French had set up a hedgehog defense point at Samneua, in a narrow pass leading to Laos, 50 miles south of the Nasan hedgehog. They spent $100,000 of U.S. Mutual Security funds* to repair the Samneua airstrip. Fortnight ago, after throwing one of his divisions around Nasan, Giap's forces jumped Samneua. The French abandoned Samneua and its air strip as "indefensible," and the garrison fled south across uncharted mountains, carrying their wounded on their backs and harried all the way by the Viet Minh. Supplied by air with...