Word: giap
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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DDay: Communist Commanding General Vo Nguyen Giap opens fire against Dienbienphu's two airstrips, supply dumps, parked aircraft and battalion-command posts. At 1700 hours, he concentrates 105-mm. fire-one shell every six seconds-against two French battalions on top of two 1,500-ft. hills to the northeast and the north of Dienbienphu. The French call these hill positions Beatrice and Gabrielle. A direct hit knocks out the For eign Legion command post on Beatrice. De Castries radios Indo-China command in far-off (180 miles) Hanoi: "The attack has begun...
Phase Two. At last, the weather clears. French tactical air flies 1,000 sorties in six days against the bleeding Communist army. General Giap pulls back into the jungle to re-form and count the cost. It is very high: about 3,500 killed, between 4,000 and 9,000-wounded. They have cracked the northern rim, but have not broken the main defenses of Dienbienphu. They have knocked out Dienbienphu's two airstrips, but supplies pour in and wounded move out in a motley armada of helicopters and transports that parachute their cargoes. For the French, the cost...
...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...
...weeks Giap slowly edged three crack divisions, perhaps 36,000 men, around the periphery of Dienbienphu. Last week he was ready. Artillery fire poured in. Early one morning the radiotelephone crackled in Hanoi H.Q. of General Rene Cogny, the three-star commander of French Union forces in north Viet Nam. The voice of the garrison commander at Dienbienphu told Cogny the news: Giap was attacking at last...
After last fortnight's quick thrust by the Communists east from the Vietnamese coast to the Mekong River, General Henri Navarre, the French commander in Indo-China, guessed that the Reds might turn south and attack Savannakhet and Seno. But last week Communist General Vo Nguyen Giap, who directed the Communist thrust to the Mekong, was biding his time. Meanwhile, various spokesmen pointed out that the military value of the enemy operation was almost nil. Secretary Dulles pooh-poohed it in Washington; so did the Ministry of the Associated States in Paris. The fact indeed was that headlines...