Word: hedgehog
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...pass through" the Plaine des Jarres on their way to conquer Laos. There last week, in a two-mile perimeter around an airstrip, the French were hastily improvising a defense system of barbed wire and entrenchments. Soon Legionnaires and loyal Laotian troops were as securely trussed-up in their "hedgehog" as the ancient Laotians in their old stone jars...
...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...
...waited so patiently at the border, while the French-listening to the peace noises out of Moscow-had mistakenly ascribed his hesitation to possible peace overtures from the Kremlin. Now Salan was moving everything he could spare before the rains came, hoping to hold a hedgehog position in the Plaine des Jarres like that at Nasan...
...headquarters of eagle-faced General Gonzalés de Linarés, they had only an approximate idea of events that morning last week. Stretching out from the apex of the triangular French-held Hanoi delta to the China border is a string of hedgehog defenses: the Black River line. Three weeks ago, when Communist General Giap (TIME, Nov. 17) attacked Laichau at the westernmost end of this line, General Linares had thrown in Operation Lorraine. It was a counterpunch, aimed to throw Giap's armies off balance and to cut one of his main supply lines from Communist...
...Hedgehog's Spikes. In Hanoi, General Linares faced a new and alarming situation. Though he had extricated his center, his left flank was crumbling. First, farflung French outposts, and then Sonla itself had to be abandoned. The French pulled back into Nasan 117 miles west of Hanoi, the only remaining bastion of the Black River defense line. An airlift (a plane every 15 minutes) was bringing reinforcements into Nasan and flying out thousands of Sonla's refugees. Situated in a wide-open plateau, rare in that country, Nasan, with its fortified air strip and embrasured artillery...