Word: minh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years they had been fighting an enemy who avoided meeting them face to face or matching them gun for gun. In last year's Vinhyen and Dongtrieu battles, the late great Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny had shown briefly what could be done if the Viet Minh Communists could be tricked out into open combat. Now, at the encircled air strip of Nasan, 117 miles west of Hanoi, there was a chance that Communist General Giap would repeat his earlier mistakes...
...Nasan there were 12,000 French Union soldiers, Algerians, Moroccans, Goums, Senegalese, Foreign Legionnaires, Vietnamese and Thais. They were surrounded by three divisions of Viet Minh regulars (approximately 25,000 men) armed with bazookas, recoilless rifles, grenades and wire-busting Bangalore torpedoes. The terrain was high and wide open. The French had dug in, they had laid barbed wire and minefields, they had prepared their artillery to meet concerted infantry attack. Every ten minutes a plane came in from Hanoi with more ammunition, more barbed wire, land mines, 105-mm. guns, bread, brandy and wine. A few minutes later...
Flare-Lit Battlefield. There had been one mishap: a party of stragglers had appeared before the fortifications shouting, "Please open the fence." They had been let in, but behind them had charged a company of rubber-soled Viet Minh soldiers in French uniforms, throwing hand grenades into French bunkers. It had taken French paratroopers five hours to kill them out. Now the battlefield was continuously illuminated by flares...
...except the heavy armor of the rear guard, when suddenly a new wave of Reds jumped the road, recapturing the ambush area and cutting off the rear guard. Bucking their way through in the darkness, the tanks reached the center of the ambush area, with hundreds of suicidal Viet Minh swarming aboard with potato-masher stick grenades and plastic explosive charges. Some Viet Minh threw themselves under the grinding treads with armfuls of explosives. Six armored halftracks were destroyed and their crews slaughtered...
...blind, lumbering tanks had to clean the antlike Viet Minh off each other with machine-gun fire. Almost overwhelmed, the rear guard called for artillery support. The French gunners laid down a skillful box barrage which enclosed the tanks in a wall of fire. As the tanks moved forward, so did the barrage, until finally the column broke into the clear. The battle had lasted 14 hours...