"Permanent Nightmare"

BATTLE OF INDOCHINA

Early in October, French pilots reconnoitering over the wild Thai country 90 to 100 miles northwest of Hanoi saw a peculiar thing. The once-faint paths through the jungle, though empty, seemed much more clearly marked than before. They were being trodden (as the French discovered later) by 25,000 night-moving Communist coolies carrying arms to well-hidden caches for the Viet Minh guerrillas.

The Viet Minh's General Vo Nguyen Giap had three Red divisions which had lain low for eight months. Last fortnight Giap attacked on a 40-mile front, quickly toppled a handful of mud-and-bamboo French outposts. His main target was the French stronghold of Nghialo (which the Communists had tried vainly, a year ago, to wrest from the late great General De Lattre de Tassigny).

Nghialo was defended by a force of about 600 French and Vietnamese troops. Giap's first two assaults were beaten off with the help of B-26s and napalm bombs. After the third attack, in darkness and mist, a last message reached the military teleprinter in Hanoi: "Thank you for very close air support. Goodbye." Next day the French authorities announced that Nghialo had fallen.

Meanwhile De Lattre's successor, sad-eyed General Raoul Salan, had dispatched a battalion of paratroopers to the trouble spot. They were dropped on a hill post near Nghialo but were quickly surrounded. In a heroic, exhausting, five-day march over the high ridges, bypassing Communists in the valleys, they made their way to the Black River. They had started carrying their wounded on bamboo stretchers, but when the litter carriers had no strength left, the wounded were left to their fate. The battalion chaplain stayed behind with them.

The paratroopers picked up stragglers from Nghialo and the smaller outposts, crossed the Black River in pirogues, leaving behind 350 sq. mi. of jungle abandoned to the Reds.

In Paris, while the press fumed, Defense Minister Rene Pleven assured the Assembly that, although the fall of Nghialo was "painful for our prestige and losses we have suffered," neither the "means to fight" the six-year-long war nor the "ability to maneuver" had been lost. But a gloomy reserve officer said: "It looks as though from now on the Indo-Chinese war is to be a permanent nightmare."

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