Foreign News: INDO-CHINA A War of Gallantry & Despair

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Arriving in Indo-China, the stranger has one question on his lips—why don't the French fight through to victory?—and stays to ask himself a quite different one: What keeps the French here at all? If Indo-China goes, the French have no significant strategic considerations left in Asia. The war costs them more than any economic advantages they can get from it. They are fatigued and frustrated by eight years without victory. Yet Frenchmen continue to plant crops, build houses and, though it may seem whimsical, to make plans.

The official and optimistic explanation of French ambitions in Indo-China is heard from men like Commissioner General Maurice Dejean: it is that the French have held successfully this year and can win militarily in two more years; by that time the Vietnamese will have an army good enough so that the French can pull their own troops out, and Viet Nam will have sovereignty almost comparable to that of British Commonwealth nations. At Geneva, this explanation continues, the French only want to find out China's terms for sealing off its border; the French have no intention of capitulating. Implicit in this explanation is the continuance of a certain kind of controlled and limited war. Ask either Vietnamese or Frenchmen whether large-scale American aid would be welcomed, and the usual answer is that such aid would turn Indo-China into another Korea. They define Korea as a greatly stepped-up war, with vast devastation and loss of life, and in the end only stalemate again.

So the French fight a kind of war within their own means. They accept substantial American aid but insist on deciding what kind and determining its uses, and have an irritating way of making only minimal public acknowledgment of it. In an age of atom and jet. there is no thought of the atom bomb and not a jet in the country. Over the only existing live war against the Communists, the weapons are those of World War II: U.S.-made B-26s. Bearcats and Corsairs. Talk of American air armadas to a French air commander, and he answers that he hasn't the bases, hasn't the crews and hasn't the mechanics to service them. And he adds that, except for the occasional battle of position, like Dienbienphu, he hasn't the targets. The enemy is all around, but hardly to be seen.