Word: namdinh
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Dates: during 1954-1954
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What happened in the textile city of Namdinh (pop. 100,000), the third largest city in the north, was enough to scare even the most optimistic French businessman. As soon as the Reds arrived, everybody was ordered to turn in his nationalist piasters (value: 3? U.S.) for Ho Chi Minh piasters, got the arbitrary rate of 22 Ho Chi Minh piasters to one nationalist. Prices soared. After a short period of false prosperity, while merchants sold their stocks at wild prices, all business came to a standstill. Import taxes of 30% to 40% were levied on new goods, killing...
...final truce deadline. In the campaign's last 24 hours they killed 21, wounded 64. Behind their lines, the Communists were already seizing hold: Vietnamese fleeing their rule reported that the Reds had executed several unfriendly village elders, had plundered Roman Catholic settlements. Inside the cathedral at fallen Namdinh, the Communists displayed a portrait of their President, Ho Chi Minh...
...churches to move south, or to stay and face the possibility of martyrdom at the hands of the Reds. Anti-Communist Vietnamese reported last week that Catholics in the north must already pay fees to attend Mass or wear crosses. A report from a Spanish Dominican priest at Namdinh was released by the Vatican. "Let us hope," he wrote, "that their faith will not fail before persecution...
...skirmishes conveyed new menace to Hanoi's 300,000 people and the 100,000 refugees who poured in around them. About 20,000 Vietnamese have already left for Saigon, and 120 fly out every day (Air Viet Nam space is filled up for all July). Refugees from fallen Namdinh crowded aboard buses for Haiphong in the second phase of their exodus...
...last hours of Namdinh, the profiteers made big money: bus fares to Hanoi shot up from 80 piasters ($2) to 1,000 piasters ($28); ice-cream men were charging 5 piasters a kilo instead of the customary 1½; and some Vietnamese officials, entrusted with the grave responsibility of determining which citizens should be evacuated by air to Hanoi, were making sure their selections were rewarded. In Namdinh there was also courage: a bunch of Catholic teenagers strapped grenades to their belts and vowed they would start a guerrilla war against the Communists; a Vietnamese priest considered what the Communists...