Word: dienbienphu
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...disagree on the major policy issue confronting Hanoi?how best to win the war in the South. Giap, Dong and Le Duan support the current policy: intensive guerrilla activity interspersed with conventional, regular-force battles or "high points," all aimed at inflicting a decisive victory in the tradition of Dienbienphu. Truong Chinh, clearly influenced by the theories of Mao Tse-tung, favors dropping to a lower level of warfare. He argues that such protracted conflict would eventually exhaust...
...cable and telex wires humming. Hard-pressed to find stories in an increasingly quiet war, the press corps in Viet Nam seized eagerly on Ben Het. Some stories even warned that the outpost might be overrun, a threat the North Vietnamese encouraged by code-naming the base Dienbienphu...
...fought as a Hitler Youth in Germany's last-ditch defense against the advancing U.S. Army. After the German surrender, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. He spent seven years in Indo-China, an enfant terrible who was at least twice busted from sergeant to private. At Dienbienphu, he was wounded and lost the use of a lung. After five years of service in Algeria, a spell with the S.A.O. and a suspended sentence, he was living in Paris last year when he heard of Biafra. He set out to serve Ojukwu's cause, first...
Died. General Rene Cogny, 64, commander of French troops in North Viet Nam during the fall of Dienbienphu in 1954; in the crash of an Air France Caravelle jetliner that took 94 other lives; in the Mediterranean, near Nice. Known to his men as Le General Vitesse (General Hurry-Up), Cogny protested angrily when superiors ordered him to hold a defensive position at Dienbienphu, which fell to the Communists after an eight-week siege. Equally bitter was the political settlement reached at the Geneva Conference shortly thereafter. Said the general: "Too many deaths, too many deaths for nothing...
...better to sniff the French dung for a while than eat China's all our lives," he is said to have remarked at the time. But even before Dienbienphu, Ho had spotted "American imperialism," in Lenin's classically Communist thinking, as the "main adversary...