Word: delta
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Navarre was making no apparent effort to relieve Dienbienphu, though he had some 20 battalions elsewhere in Indo-China, including four paratroop battalions in the Red River Delta. "Navarre seems to be drawing completely into himself," said one high-placed observer. "It's almost as though he had a Gotterddmmer-tmg complex." Navarre meant somehow to cling a while to Dienbienphu in the hope that peace could be negotiated at Geneva, but there would be no new blow against the Communists-for that, as one of his aides astonishingly explained, would be "inconsistent with the government's decision...
...Diversionary Red attacks in the Red River Delta squeezed some French posts to the north of Hanoi and shook the morale of undertrained Vietnamese troops whom the French sent in to replace the elite battalions flown out to Dienbienphu. The French now claim that the delta danger is under control...
Indo-China is a swamp war: fought literally in the paddy-fields of the Red River delta, but fought actually in minds that no longer are stirred and in hearts where resignation, suspicion, frustration and a dogged sense of duty are in confused conflict...
...stronghold, isolated between the Red River delta and Laos, was even more a psychological than a military pivot of the war. The French seized the saucer last November, built it into a bastion with a tireless airlift and talked of sucking the forces of wily Communist General Vo Nguyen Giap into an attack that they felt might hurt him sorely. For Giap, on the other hand, Dienbienphu became a challenge; to reduce the fortress could well deal a deadly blow to France's resolve to fight on in Indo-China...
Then Laniel ticked off France's conditions for an Indo-Chinese ceasefire: 1) evacuation of all Reds from the states of Laos and Cambodia; 2) creation of an agreed no man's land around the perimeter of the vital Red River Delta; 3) withdrawal of scattered Communist units in central Viet Nam into predesignated "standing zones" from which they could not move; 4) disarming or evacuation of Viet Minh rebels in south Viet Nam; 5) guarantees against "reinforcements"-presumably war supplies from Communist China...