Word: viets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...battle for Dienbienphu? Old Soldier Dwight Eisenhower readily obliged, and in the course of his remarks read a dual lecture to the French. One of the greatest problems, he said, is that the defenders (French and Vietnamese forces) are trying to hold a valley from attackers (the Communist Viet Minh) who control the flanking ridges. It was an indirect suggestion that the French pay more attention to the old military axiom: take the high ground. The President went on to recall a remark he made to a visiting Frenchman-presumably General Paul Ely, Chief of Staff of the French Armed...
...gain "a stranglehold on the people," said Dulles, and its agent is Moscow-trained Ho Chi Minh. Ho's armies "are supplied with artillery and ammunition . . . much of it fabricated by the Skoda Works in Czechoslovakia and transported across Russia and Siberia, and then down through China to Viet...
...among the lucky few of the wounded who got out early. The others had to wait, lying in foxholes the size of their stretchers, until the skies over Dienbienphu cleared and the planes which could strike at the Viet Minh Communist artillery zeroed in on the airstrip. Outside his ward in the military hospital at Hanoi, the corridors are filled with other wounded, in cots crowded head to foot in a row. The legionnaire talks matter-of-factly of the paratroop drop and of the wound he got only half an hour after landing; no heroism, no bravado, no whimpering...
...fought with means that are often pathetically small. It is a guerrilla war like Kenya, where no one knows who the enemy is. The man who serves your food and drives your car may be in one country a Mau Mau and in the other a Viet Minh. It is a colonial war, not so much in reality any more, but still so in the minds of some Frenchmen who have not unlearned the past, and in the minds of some Vietnamese who will not forget it. It is a civil war, too: countryman fighting countryman, often not because...
...moon sets, the Reds charge in through the dark. At 0400, they storm into Gabrielle. The French battalion commander falls. At dawn, De Castries thrusts tanks and a reserve Foreign Legion battalion toward the shrouded hill. Red bazookas stop the tanks but do not stop the legion. "Some Viets were dug in, so we cleaned them out," says a legion officer. "There were Viets everywhere, shoulder to shoulder. A Viet shot me. I fired my pistol at the Viet. He was dead, not me. Another Viet tried to bayonet one of my men. My man knocked the bayonet aside, then...