Word: haiphong
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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...
...Algerians, drove them back. Meanwhile, the main Communist force of ten battalions was snaking through the winding river valleys to the southeast toward the town of Nghia Lo. At dawn French-manned B-26 bombers and Hellcat and Bearcat fighters were roaring off the airfields of Hanoi and Haiphong, a few minutes later were diving between the mist-shrouded peaks surrounding the Nghia Lo basin to plaster the Viet Minh troops with bombs and napalm. Over the town of Nghia Lo, C-47s and three-motored Junkers transports dropped French and Foreign Legion paratroopers, who quickly set up new defenses...
...Early last December, about the time the Chinese Communists were sweeping down through North Korea from the Yalu, Indo-China seemed all but lost. Ho Chi Minh's forces, newly equipped by Red China, drove the French into a pocket on the Red River delta around Hanoi and Haiphong, were shifting from guerrilla raids to frontal attack, and boasting that they would take
When a guard of honor at Haiphong seemed slovenly, De Lattre tongue-lashed the general and colonel in charge, a terrifying treatment known in French slang as the "shampoo." He ordered 25 days' confinement for the pilot of his plane, because the pilot had neglected to put the new commander's insignia on the fuselage. To a bearded copilot, De Lattre snapped: "And you've got five minutes to shave yourself clean!" Later, to an aide, the martinet confided: "I have terrible obligations. I have to abuse those I like the best. These air force...
...been a major defeat for Ho Chi Minh. On the Red radio, he told his troops that they must now abandon open warfare and go back to their former guerrilla tactics. Said Ho's Commander in Chief General Vo Nguyen Giap: "Our objective is not to take Haiphong or Hanoi, but to start a war of attrition...