THE NATIONS: The French MacArthur

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As the He de France, stately and beautiful, came up New York Bay, one of her prominent passengers,* a five-star general of France with a faint battle scar on his left cheek, had a particular wish. The general wanted a picture of himself with the Statue of Liberty as backdrop. The massed press photographers were glad to oblige. General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, impeccable from kepi to pigskin gloves, turned his hawklike profile to the lenses and pointed theatrically toward his country's copper gift to the U.S.

It was a deliberately significant gesture: the general had freedom—and mutual aid—very much in mind. During the past nine months in Indo-China. as French

High Commissioner and commander in chief, he has been fighting one of freedom's bloodiest and most crucial battles. He had left the front to come to the U.S. on an urgent mission: to see the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and get more U.S. aid for Indo-China, the rampart against the Communist surge toward Singapore and the Indies.

To Manhattan newsmen, General de Lattre read a statement in English: "The war in Indo-China is not a colonial war, it is a war against Red colonialism; as in Korea, it is a war against Communist dictatorship. France has assumed the burden of the war in Indo-China at a tremendous cost to her manpower and financial resources . . . We are fighting on a world battlefield, for liberty and for peace . . ."

De Lattre knows the cost of the fight and the weight of the burden: the band of mourning on his sleeve and his wife's severe black dress testified to that. Only four months ago their only son, Bernard, 23, an infantry lieutenant, was killed on the Indo-China front.

The "Dirty" War. The Indo-China war has been dragging on for six years. It started as a slow guerrilla nuisance, with none of the dramatic shock of the Red attack in Korea, and at first the free world, including France herself, looked on it as a dubious cause. The Indo-Chinese Reds, led by a wily, veteran Communist, Ho Chi Minh, pretended with some success to be patriotic nationalists, rising against the yoke of French imperialism. In France itself, Communists and fellow travelers loudly berated "the dirty war," sneered at their countrymen who returned from the Indo-China theater, and sabotaged arms shipments to the French forces —then only a few thousand professional soldiers defending blockhouses in a far-off jungle against an elusive, nearly invisible enemy. Frenchmen had little interest in Indo-China until De Lattre helped persuade them that it was important.

The war with Ho turned Indo-China into a ledger of death and liability. In six years the French army in Indo-China lost 31,000 killed and missing. Today, 240,000 men, amounting to a third of France's armed forces, are tied down in the war against the Red Viet Minh—which means that, until that war is over, they are lost to Western Europe's defense.