Counting the Casualties

WAR IN INDOCHINA

The French army in Indo-China is a hard-bitten professional outfit, commanded by first-rate career officers. It has superior equipment. Why then have the Viet minh Communists overrun most of northern Indo-China? Last week General Raoul Salan, capable commander of French Union forces in Indo-China, near the end of his tour of duty, gave an interview explaining how the French operate.

Said Salan: "My decisions are made within a certain framework established in France before I took command. The framework is secret and personal." Salan described how he had stopped the Communists short of the Mekong River in Laos by creating hedgehog positions in the Plaine des Jarres and at Luang Prabang, reinforcing them by air: "The enemy had 40 divisions: I had twelve. I had to wage a cautious war of maneuver."

A correspondent asked: After stopping the Communists, why did you not break out of your hedgehogs and fall upon the enemy rear? Said General Salan: "We studied the question . . . We could not do it. There would have been a disaster." From his desk, General Salan produced two charts, one showing the casualties for the first four months of 1952, the other showing the casualties for the first four months of 1953. "Observe," he said, "our

FRANCE'S SALAN Behind the hedgehogs, a secret.

casualties are only half what they were in the same period last year. I am sending these charts to Paris." What General Salan did not say, being a professionally reticent man, is that the unpopularity of the war back home in France--and fear of its cost in casualties and money--had forced him to wage a war of cautious maneuver, as in Laos, or of static defense, as in Hanoi.

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