Word: minh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Korea the backbone of Communist resistance was broken, but on the larger battlefield of Asia, the week brought defeat as well as victory for the free world. The French position in northern Indo-China was made exceedingly precarious by a brilliant campaign of Ho Chi Minh's troops, recently trained and equipped by the Chinese Reds (see below...
...forts were to cut off Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh rebel Communist army from the Chinese Communists. The French plan was to isolate the rebels in the wild hilly country which lies between the frontier and the Red River to the west. By holding the frontier and the good rice lands of the Red River delta the French hoped to starve out the Communists. For a while it looked as if the plan might work. Ho's radio exhorted his supporters to save rice, "every grain as precious as a drop of blood...
Last June, before the beginning of the war in Korea, documents captured by the French convinced them that Ho was about to receive extensive aid from Communist China's Mao Tse-tung. Mao, the French said, was training thousands of picked rebel Viet Minh troops in China and was equipping Ho's forces with heavy weapons. The Ho-Mao objective: the Red River delta. The time: after the summer monsoon and before the November rice harvest...
Soldiers Who Melt Away. A month ago, French fears materialized. Four Viet Minh battalions attacked Dongkhe (see map), a fort at the north end of the frontier, using antiaircraft guns and 105-mm. artillery, none of which they had had before. The French staff decided to withdraw from Caobang, a fort a few miles to the north of Dongkhe...
...week's end, the French disturbed the Communists, capturing Viet Minh's stronghold of Thai Nguyen (40 miles north of Hanoi) in what French authorities described as "the most important French operation undertaken since spring...