Word: giap
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Communist General Vo Nguyen Giap's Chinese-trained and equipped army of some 40,000, supported by another army of ragged coolie carriers, was swarming through the valleys and mountain passes as fast as their bare feet could carry them. They came in three columns, from the east, northeast, and north. There was plenty of room: Laos, one of the two kingdoms in the Associated States of French Indo-China, is as big as Oregon. In a fortnight they advanced almost 150 miles, leaving behind them French mountain-top outposts abandoned, surrounded, or in smoldering ruins, their tiny garrisons...
...months had passed since Communist General Vo Nguyen Giap conquered the Thai country lying between Red China and Laos (see map). Instead of throwing all his forces against several hundred thousand French Union and Vietnamese troops bottled up in the Red River delta and in the airstrip at Nasan, Giap began probing the defenses of Laos with his Viet Minh commandos. In his exquisite white palace overlooking the palm-fringed Mekong River, aging (67), crew-cropped King Sisavang Vong told the French: "This is my country; this is my palace; I am too old to tremble before danger." Not until...
Hedgehogs. To head off Giap's drive, the French had set up a hedgehog defense point at Samneua, in a narrow pass leading to Laos, 50 miles south of the Nasan hedgehog. They spent $100,000 of U.S. Mutual Security funds* to repair the Samneua airstrip. Fortnight ago, after throwing one of his divisions around Nasan, Giap's forces jumped Samneua. The French abandoned Samneua and its air strip as "indefensible," and the garrison fled south across uncharted mountains, carrying their wounded on their backs and harried all the way by the Viet Minh. Supplied by air with...
...flew them into the Plaine des Jarres at the rate of 50 aircraft a day. At Saigon, soldier clerks and interpreters were sent off to fight in Laos. At week's end there was a strong force of Foreign Legion battalions reinforcing the slim Laotian army. But Communist Giap had chosen his time well: within a few weeks the rainy season begins in Laos, and all but two of its 20 airstrips become unusable. This was why he had waited so patiently at the border, while the French-listening to the peace noises out of Moscow-had mistakenly ascribed...
...battle shaped up, King Sisavang Vong appealed to the U.N. to recognize the invasion of Laos as an act of external aggression, rather than as another phase of the Indo-China war, as the French prefer to regard it. His aim: to head off establishment by Giap of a Communist "Free Laotian Government" headed by Prince Souphranouvong, a distant relative. Meanwhile, the old King complained of rheumatism, and thought he might pay a visit to Paris. It would be a long time before the water was high enough for the fish to eat the ants...