BATTLE OF INDO-CHINA: Victory Is Where You Make It

• Share

BATTLE OF INDOCHINA Victory Is Where You Make It

Said General Jean Gilles: "We only pray they will attack us." The commander of Nasan waved his hand around the encircled battlefield: the dusty mile-long airstrip and the score of 500-ft. hills around it. Every hill and every valley was a network of barbed wire and dug-in strong points; with its 12,000 French troops, air-supplied by a constant shuttle of planes, Nasan was like a military anthill. French officers likened it to the classic French position at Verdun, the great turning-point battle of World War I.

No Enemy. Three times the Viet Minh Communists attacked and retreated, leaving 3,000 dead on the wire. The French, whose strategy is based on the principle that the Viet Minh cannot take heavy losses, were jubilant. On Christmas Eve the French broke out a force of 5,000 men to the southeast, linked up with Viet Nam paratroopers dropped near the Black River. Instead of meeting expected opposition, the French found no sign of the enemy. Said a French army spokesman: "Nasan is no longer besieged . . . [We] have recovered the initiative in the Thai country." As the French saw it, the battle of Nasan was a resounding local victory.

But Communist General Giap was not wasting time licking his Nasan wounds. Part of his forces had pulled out for a three-week rest north of the Hanoi delta, while others 1) captured Dien Bien airport and garrison, 65 miles west of Nasan; 2) ambushed a detachment of Moroccans retreating from Laichau and then encircled the old Thai capital; 3) forced the French to abandon Phong Tho, 35 miles north of Laichau; 4) moved south to the borders of Laos. Giap's most serious effort was a two-division attack (20,000 men) on the flooded area around Phat Diem, only 62 miles south of Hanoi. The French replied by moving in .three mobile groups (each comparable to a U.S. regimental combat team), supported by French navy units. In a wide encircling movement, the French pinned down a section of the Communist forces in a bamboo-screened village.

Got You. Foreign Legionnaires led the attack but were forced to retreat across the paddies under withering machine-gun and mortar fire. In their second attack, the legionnaires got in among them with bayonets and grenades. The fight went on behind the cactus hedges and straw huts, with fanatical young Communists in brown homespun clothing shouting "La dai" (Come and get us). The legionnaires got them. On the river, naval units sank six barges full of Viet Minh soldiers and equipment. Four-star General Raoul Sa-lan, who has been consistently chipper, even on the eve of past setbacks, boasted: "The future of our military actions is now secured."