Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Contenders: Up to 500,000 anti-Communist troops (Frenchmen. Vietnamese, Thais. Laotians, Cambodians. Moroccans, Senegalese and foreign legionnaires from several nations, including thousands of Germans) v. about 360,000 Communist regulars and irregulars...
...such public works as 900 health institutions, 12,600 schools. The French reduced infant mortality by 50%; they built 13,800 miles of improved roads, railroads and canals; their irrigation projects brought 13 million more acres under cultivation. But the French were not wanted back. Frenchmen had made a lot of money out of Indo-China. and their administrators were often disliked. They had been discredited by the easy Japanese conquest. Like most South Asians, the Indo-Chinese simply wanted their independence. French General Jacques Leclerc had to fight to clear nationalist guerrillas from the capital, Saigon...
...Cost: French expeditionary forces: 34,600 killed and missing (including 16,500 Frenchmen), 34,500 wounded. Indo-Chinese nationalists: 31,900 killed, 24,500 wounded. The Communists: 222,000 killed, 230,000 captured. More than 2,000,000 Indo-Chinese civilians are homeless...
...hours' notice, newsmen were called to Saigon's colonnaded Palais Norodom, the seat of French government in Indo-China. There one day last week, beneath whirring fans and a lacquer painting of junks, they were confronted by the two top Frenchmen in Asia: Commanding General Henri Eugene Navarre, and Maurice Dejean, the Commissioner General...
...meeting was convened, the Frenchmen said, so they could deny press reports that there was friction between them. That settled, General Navarre lost no time getting into a defense of his 1953-54 campaign. "We have not been surprised," said Navarre. "The situation is just what we expected ..." The Communists had not taken their current major objectives: the rice-rich Red River Delta around Hanoi, and the encircled French strongpoint at Dienbienphu. And their heavily headlined offensive against Luang Prabang, the royal Laotian capital, "may be considered blocked...