Word: frenchmen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Communists were grabbing for Laos and Cambodia, as well as Viet Nam. But with most Frenchmen ignorant of the pitfalls in such a ceasefire, and impatient for peace, Bidault would find it difficult to reject it out of hand. Commented Bidault: "Very able and very specious. It would mean the complete swallowing of Indo-China by the Viet Minh...
...deeds are most crucial to the negotiations at Geneva is a small, enigmatic Frenchman who set out to teach history, not to help make it. Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, 54, speaks for the divided mind and flagging spirit of France. But his own mind is undivided: more than most Frenchmen, he has a passionate dislike of the Communists...
Well before Dienbienphu's day of defeat came, many Frenchmen at home had given up. "Verdun?" said the moderate left-wing newspaper Combat bitterly. "Verdun was a position which could be held at all costs because the entire future depended on it ... But what does Dienbienphu mean for the French fighting man? ... An obsessive, slow and stubborn war. A terrible kind of war for which the French were not made-because they have clear intelligence, and like to know for what they are fighting. They are impulsive, and need to have a little glory stirring their flags, a little...
...from the Indo-China campaign. Then Vietnamese Chief of State Bao Dai, who has lifted do-nothingism into a career, had balked for three days on the grounds that the package would probably be undone at Geneva by the French. Despite last week's agreement in principle, both Frenchmen and Vietnamese are still haggling over the legal and financial specifics of independence, and might not sign the treaties for several weeks (underlings were left to work out the details; Bao Dai relaxed in his chateau at Cannes). "Independence has come in such a way," grumbled one Vietnamese official back...
...garrison at Dienbienphu clung at week's end to six fire-whipped strong points by the Nam Yourn River. The tricolor still flapped jauntily above the French command post. But the 12,000 worn-out Frenchmen. Vietnamese. North Africans and Foreign Legionnaires had been squeezed into one-third of their original perimeter, and they were short of ammunition, supplies and fresh reinforcements. The men were so tired that their performance was losing effect. One night last week the Communists quickly isolated and overran a Foreign Legion outpost in the airstrip sector, and the French could not get it back...