Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tough foreign legionnaires, Frenchmen, North Africans, Thais, Cambodians and Vietnamese snatch back one outpost. At 0800, De Castries counterattacks again, and fails. At 1000, he goes in for the third time-and wins. But two hours later, De Castries has to withdraw. Says an HQ spokesman: "This is the most violent struggle of the war." All day the French hang...
Just 15 miles out of Hanoi, on the crucial supply road to Haiphong, our car is suddenly halted. Trouble ahead in the next village: the Viet Minh have ambushed some trucks and four Frenchmen have been killed. The tanks must clear the road; there will be half an hour's delay. Finally we are allowed to move ahead again, and we meet the tanks heading back to the nearby fort, like fire trucks ready for the next alarm. Before us in the highway sits the ambushed truck, its cab split apart, its load a charred twist of metal...
...quite different one: What keeps the French here at all? If Indo-China goes, the French have no significant strategic considerations left in Asia. The war costs them more than any economic advantages they can get from it. They are fatigued and frustrated by eight years without victory. Yet Frenchmen continue to plant crops, build houses and, though it may seem whimsical, to make plans...
...nations. At Geneva, this explanation continues, the French only want to find out China's terms for sealing off its border; the French have no intention of capitulating. Implicit in this explanation is the continuance of a certain kind of controlled and limited war. Ask either Vietnamese or Frenchmen whether large-scale American aid would be welcomed, and the usual answer is that such aid would turn Indo-China into another Korea. They define Korea as a greatly stepped-up war, with vast devastation and loss of life, and in the end only stalemate again...
...difficulty is that not all Frenchmen in Indo-China share Dejean's optimism about the outcome. Some give the impression of having thought out the relative benefits and harms of every degree of victory or defeat. Here is how many of them talk. Says a handsome officer with a good combat record: "Maybe the French did not do enough in time. But no longer can the French win militarily because French public opinion will not wait long enough for that. It would take until 1955 or 1956. If there is no solution at Geneva, French public opinion will want...