BATTLE OF INDO-CHINA: Come & Get Us

• Share

BATTLE OF INDOCHINA

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.

At 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 it took off again with refugees, soldiers' families, and wounded.

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.

The Communists had no aircraft or antiaircraft guns. With impunity, French spotter planes could hover close enough to see a man reading a map, call in a dozen Bearcats for a napalm strike and watch a camouflaged Viet Minh troop concentration scatter in terror. All that was required now was for the fanatical Communists to charge the French positions, throw themselves on the French wire and die.

Posies & Taxi-Girls. As the week went by, however, the Communists seemed undisposed to oblige. Instead they launched a series of guerrilla attacks back in the Hanoi delta, each an apparently independent operation, except that they all occurred in areas between Hanoi and the sea, the escape route for the French. But in Hanoi nobody worried. Staff officers bought their ladies posies at the flower stalls by the glassy Petit Lac, dined sumptuously at Le Manoir or the Hotel Metropole or danced with taxi-girls at the Ritz and Paramount. At night, beneath their mosquito nets, they listened to the comfortable sound of their own artillery. Said an official spokesman: "There appears to be no reason why the besieged defenders of Nasan cannot hold out as long as planes can supply them."