Word: vinhyen
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...Battleground: Geneva's decision reached out to Vinhyen, 25 miles northwest of Hanoi, where the late Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny had won France's most notable Indo-China victory 3½ years before. At Vinhyen the French were deploying 5,000 men against four Viet Minh battalions, in the last big fight of the war. "The battle for the delta is a good battle," insisted General René Cogny, but his soldiers now knew that their purpose was useless. "All we're doing is wasting ammunition," grumbled a Parisian sergeant, "and maybe...
What the French wanted was a set piece battle. For six 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...
...battle pounded on last week, De Lattre flew into the French outpost of Vinhyen (see map) after it was cut off from Hanoi by the Communists. He wanted to see the battle for Hill 101 himself. He watched two French columns go into a counterattack. Fighting for him, on one flank, there was a detachment of Muongs, hill people from the "Country of the Killing Water," where they hunt pigs with bows & arrows. Now, armed with rifles, they were stalking a Red column. As they edged forward under Communist machine-gun fire, clouds of smoke and dust rose ahead...
Meanwhile, in Vinhyen, news of De Lattre's visit to the fighting front spread among the troops. The Muongs and Moroccan Mohammedans went back to the attack. While the Muong hill men held the flanks, the Moroccans flung themselves at Hill 101, got to the top. Then four Communist battalions counterattacked. Three times they were driven off that night, but the fourth time they broke into the Moroccans, took the hill...
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