Now we will talk about the tragic events of the First Indochina War, during which the Viet Minh patriots led by Ho Chi Minh forced the French colonialists to leave Vietnam. And as part of the cycle, we will look at these events through the prism of the history of the French Foreign Legion. For the first time, we will name the names of some famous commanders of the legion - they will become the heroes of the next articles, but we will begin to get acquainted with them already in this one.
Vietnam Independence League (Viet Minh)
How the French came to Indochina was described in the article "Dogs of War" of the French Foreign Legion. " And after the outbreak of World War II, the territory of French Indochina actually fell under the rule of Japan. The organs of the French administration (controlled by the Vichy government) tacitly agreed with the presence of Japanese troops on the territory of the colony, but for some reason reacted very nervously to the attempts of resistance to the Japanese by the Vietnamese themselves. French officials believed that at the end of the war they would be able to negotiate with the Japanese on the division of spheres of influence. And the Vietnamese, in their opinion, should not have bothered at all with the question of who would then be their masters. It was the French colonial troops who suppressed the two anti-Japanese uprisings of 1940 - in the Bakshon county in the north of the country and in the central Duolong county.
As a result, the Vietnamese, failing to find understanding with the French colonial authorities, in May 1941 created the patriotic organization Vietnam Independence League (Viet Minh), in which the Communists played a key role. The Japanese were forced to join the fight against the Viet Minh partisans only in November 1943 - until then, the French had successfully coped with them.
At first, the weak and poorly armed units of the Vietnamese rebels were continuously replenished and gained combat experience. On December 22, 1944, the first detachment of the Viet Minh regular army was created, commanded by the then little-known Vo Nguyen Giap, a graduate of the University of Hanoi and a former French teacher - later he would be called the Red Napoleon and included in various versions of the lists of the greatest commanders of the 20th century.
Although the officials of the Vichy government of French Indochina actually acted as allies of Japan, this did not save them from arrest when on March 9, 1945, the Japanese disarmed French colonial troops in Vietnam. The vast majority of the servicemen of these units submissively and resignedly laid down their arms. The soldiers and officers of the Fifth Regiment of the Foreign Legion tried to save the honor of France, who, with battles and heavy losses, broke through to China (this was described in the previous article - "The French Foreign Legion in World Wars I and II").
The Viet Minh turned out to be a much more serious rival - his troops continued to successfully fight against the Japanese troops. Finally, on August 13, 1945, the Viet Minh went on the offensive, on August 19, Hanoi was taken, at the end of the month the Japanese were held only in the south of the country. On September 2, at a rally in liberated Saigon, Ho Chi Minh announced the creation of a new state - the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. On this day, the Viet Minh took control of almost all the cities of the country.
And only from 6 to 11 September, soldiers of the 20th (Indian) division of the British began to land in Saigon. The first thing they saw were slogans:
"Welcome British, Americans, Chinese, Russians - everyone but the French!"
"Down with French imperialism!"
But British Major General Douglas Gracie, the commander of the 20th Division, who arrived in Saigon on 13 September, said he did not recognize the Viet Minh national government. The former masters of the country, the French, were to come to power.
Return of the colonialists
On September 22, the liberated representatives of the French administration, with the help of the British, took control of Saigon, the response was a strike and unrest in the city, for the suppression of which Gracie had to re-arm three regiments of Japanese prisoners. And only on October 15, the first French combat unit, the Sixth Colonial Regiment, arrived in Saigon. Finally, on October 29, Raul Salan arrived in Indochina, which was described a little in the previous article. He took command of the French forces in Tonkin and China.
In the second half of October, the British and Japanese drove the Viet Minh detachments from Saigon, capturing the cities of Thudyk, Bien Hoa, Thuzaumoti, and then Suanlok and Benkat. And the French paratroopers of the Foreign Legion, led by Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Massu (whose name we will hear more than once in the next articles of the cycle) took the city of Mitho.
And then, from the north, the Kuomintang army of 200,000 began the offensive.
By the end of the year, the French had brought the number of their troops in the south of the country to 80 thousand people. They acted extremely stupidly - so much so that Tom Driberg, an adviser to Lord Mountbatten (who accepted the official surrender of the troops of the Japanese Field Marshal Terauti), wrote in October 1945 about "transcendental cruelty" and "shameful scenes of revenge of opium-smoked French degenerates on defenseless annamites."
And Major Robert Clarke spoke of the returning Frenchmen this way:
"They were a gang of rather undisciplined thugs, and afterwards it came as no surprise to me that the Vietnamese did not want to accept their rule."
The British were shocked by the frankly contemptuous attitude of the French towards the Indian allies from the British 20th division. Her commander, Douglas Gracy, even appealed to the French authorities with the official request to explain to his soldiers that his people "regardless of the skin color are friends and cannot be considered as" black ".
When, shocked by reports about the participation of British units in punitive operations against the Vietnamese, Lord Mountbatten tried to get clarifications from the same Gracie (“couldn't such a dubious job be left to the French?), He calmly replied:
"The involvement of the French would lead to the destruction of not 20, but 2,000 houses and, most likely, together with the inhabitants."
That is, having destroyed 20 Vietnamese houses, the British also rendered this a service to the unfortunate aborigines - they did not allow "French degenerates who had been smoked with opium" before them.
In mid-December 1945, the British began to transfer their positions to the Allies.
On January 28, 1946, in front of the Saigon Cathedral, a farewell joint parade of British and French military units took place, at which Gracie handed over to the French General Leclerc two Japanese swords obtained during surrender: thus he showed everyone that power over Vietnam was passing to France.
With a sigh of relief, the English general flew out of Saigon, giving the French the opportunity to deal with the unexpectedly strong Viet Minh communists themselves. The last two Indian battalions left Vietnam on March 30, 1946.
Ho Chi Minh's answer
Ho Chi Minh for a long time tried to negotiate, even turned to US President Truman for help, and only after exhausting all the possibilities for a peaceful settlement, he gave the order to attack the Anglo-French troops in the south and the Kuomintang troops in the north.
On January 30, 1946, the Viet Minh army attacked the Kuomintang troops, and on February 28, the Chinese fled to their territory in panic. Under these conditions, the French reluctantly were forced on March 6 to recognize the independence of the DRV - as part of the Indochina Federation and the French Union, hastily invented by de Gaulle's lawyers.
It soon became clear that France still regards Vietnam as its disenfranchised colony and the treaty on the recognition of the DRV was concluded only in order to accumulate forces sufficient to wage a full-fledged war. Troops from Africa, Syria and Europe were hastily deployed to Vietnam. Soon hostilities were resumed and it was parts of the Foreign Legion that became the shock formations of the French army. Without hesitation, France threw four infantry and one armored cavalry regiment of the legion, two parachute battalions (which would later become regiments), as well as its engineering and sapper units into the "meat grinder" of this war.
The beginning of the First Indochina War
The fighting began after November 21, 1946, the French demanded that the DRV authorities transfer the city of Haiphong to them. The Vietnamese refused and on November 22, warships of the mother country began shelling the city: according to French estimates, about 2,000 civilians were killed. This is how the First Indochina War began. French troops launched an offensive in all directions, on December 19 they approached Hanoi, but managed to take it only after 2 months of continuous fighting, almost completely destroying the city.
To the surprise of the French, the Vietnamese did not surrender: having withdrawn the remaining troops to the border northern province of Viet Bac, they resorted to the tactic of "a thousand pin pricks".
The most interesting thing is that up to 5 thousand Japanese soldiers, who for some reason remained in Vietnam, fought with the French on the side of the Viet Minh, sometimes occupying high command positions. For example, Major Ishii Takuo became Colonel of the Viet Minh. For some time he headed the Quang Ngai Military Academy (where 5 more former Japanese officers worked as teachers), and then held the position of "chief adviser" to the guerrillas of South Vietnam. Colonel Mukayama, who previously served at the headquarters of the 38th Imperial Army, became an advisor to Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the armed forces of the Viet Minh and later the Viet Cong. There were 2 Japanese doctors and 11 Japanese nurses in Viet Minh hospitals.
What were the reasons for the transition of the Japanese military to the side of the Viet Minh? Perhaps they believed that after the surrender they "lost face" and they were ashamed to return to their homeland. It has also been suggested that some of these Japanese had reason to fear prosecution for war crimes.
On October 7, 1947, the French tried to end the war by destroying the Viet Minh leadership: during Operation Lea, three parachute battalions of the legion (1200 people) landed in the city of Bak-Kan, but Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap managed to leave, and the paratroopers and their hurrying to the aid of the infantry units suffered heavy losses in battles with Viet Minh units and partisans.
The two hundred thousandth colonial army of France, which included 1,500 tanks, supported by "native" troops (also about 200 thousand people) could not do anything with the Vietnamese rebels, whose number at first barely reached 35-40 thousand fighters, and only by the end of 1949 increased up to 80 thousand.
The first successes of the Viet Minh
In March 1949, the Kuomintang was defeated in China, which immediately improved the supply of Vietnamese troops, and in the fall of the same year, the Viet Minh combat units went on the offensive. In September 1950, the French garrisons along the Chinese border were destroyed. And on October 9, 1950, in the battle of Khao Bang, the French lost 7 thousand people killed and wounded, 500 cars, 125 mortars, 13 howitzers, 3 armored platoons and 9,000 small arms.
In Tat Ke (post-satellite Khao Bang), the 6th parachute colonial battalion was surrounded. On the night of October 6, his servicemen made an unsuccessful attempt to break through, during which they suffered heavy losses. The surviving soldiers and officers were taken prisoner. Among them was Lieutenant Jean Graziani, who was twenty-four years old, three of whom (from the age of 16) he fought against Nazi Germany - first in the US army, then in the British SAS and finally as part of the Free French troops. He tried to run twice (the second time he walked 70 km), spent 4 years in captivity and at the time of his release weighed about 40 kg (such as he was called the "squad of the living dead"). Jean Graziani will be one of the heroes of the article, which will tell about the war in Algeria.
Another member of the "detachment of the living dead" was Pierre-Paul Jeanpierre, an active participant in the French Resistance (he spent more than a year in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp) and the legendary commander of the Foreign Legion, who fought at the Charton stronghold as part of the First Parachute Battalion and was also wounded was captured. After his recovery, he led the newly created First Parachute Battalion, which became a regiment on September 1, 1955. We will also talk about him again in the article on the Algerian War.
The forces of the Viet Minh grew, already at the end of October 1950, the French troops retreated from most of the territory of North Vietnam.
As a result, on December 22, 1950, the French again announced the recognition of Vietnam's sovereignty within the French Union, but the leaders of the Viet Minh no longer believed them. And the situation on the fronts was clearly not in favor of the colonialists and their "native" allies. In 1953, the Viet Minh already had about 425 thousand fighters at their disposal - soldiers of the regular troops and partisans.
At this time, the United States provided huge military assistance to France. 1950 to 1954 the Americans handed over to the French 360 combat aircraft, 390 ships (including 2 aircraft carriers), 1,400 tanks and armored vehicles, and 175,000 small arms. 24 American pilots made 682 sorties, two of them were killed.
In 1952, US military assistance accounted for 40% of all weapons received by French units in Indochina, in 1953 - 60%, in 1954 - 80%.
Fierce hostilities continued with varying success for several more years, but in the spring of 1953 the Viet Minh both strategically and tactically outplayed the self-confident Europeans: he made a "knight's move", hitting Laos and forcing the French to concentrate large forces in Dien Bien Phu (Dien Bien Phu).
Dien Bien Phu: Vietnamese trap for the French army
On November 20, 1953, French paratroopers captured the airfield left by the Japanese in the Kuvshin Valley (Dien Bien Phu) and a bridgehead 3 by 16 km, where planes with soldiers and equipment began to arrive. On the hills around, by order of Colonel Christian de Castries, 11 forts were built - Anne-Marie, Gabrielle, Beatrice, Claudine, Françoise, Huguette, Natasha, Dominique, Junon, Eliane and Isabelle. In the French army, it was rumored that they got their names from de Castries' mistresses.
11 thousand soldiers and officers of various units of the French army occupied 49 fortified points, surrounded by galleries of trench passages and protected from all sides by minefields. Later, their number was increased to 15 thousand (15,094 people): 6 parachute and 17 infantry battalions, three artillery regiments, a sapper regiment, a tank battalion and 12 aircraft.
These units were supplied by a group of 150 large transport aircraft. For the time being, the Viet Minh did not interfere with the French, and about what happened next, the well-known stratagem says: "lure to the roof and remove the stairs."
On March 6-7, Viet Minh units practically "removed" this "ladder": they attacked the Za-Lam and Cat-bi airfields, destroying more than half of the "transport workers" on them - 78 vehicles.
Then Viet Minh's Katyushas crashed the Dien Bien Phu runways, and the last French plane managed to land and take off on 26 March.
Since then, the supply was carried out only by dropping cargo by parachute, which was actively tried to interfere with the anti-aircraft guns of the Vietnamese concentrated around the base.
Now the encircled French group was practically doomed.
The Vietnamese, however, to supply their group, without exaggeration, performed a labor feat, cutting a hundred-kilometer highway in the jungle and building a transshipment base 55 km from Dien Bien Phu. The French command considered it impossible to deliver artillery and mortars to Dien Bien Phu - the Vietnamese carried them in their arms through the mountains and jungle and dragged them to the hills around the base.
On March 13, the Viet Minh 38th (Steel) Division launched an offensive and captured Fort Beatrice. Fort Gabriel fell on March 14. On March 17, some of the Thai soldiers defending the Anna-Marie fort went over to the Vietnamese side, the rest retreated. After that, the siege of other fortifications of Dien Bien Phu began.
On March 15, Colonel Charles Pirot, commander of the artillery units of the Dien Bien Phu garrison, committed suicide: he promised that the French artillery would dominate throughout the battle and easily suppress the enemy's guns:
"The Vieta's cannons will fire no more than three times before I destroy them."
Since he did not have an arm, he could not load the pistol on his own. And therefore, seeing the results of the "work" of the Vietnamese artillerymen (mountains of corpses and many wounded), he blew himself up with a grenade.
Marcel Bijart and his parachutists
On March 16, at the head of the paratroopers of the 6th Colonial Battalion, Marcel Bijar arrived in Dien Bien Phu - a truly legendary person in the French army. He never thought about serving in the army, and even during his military service in the 23rd regiment (1936-1938), his commander told the young man that he did not see "anything military" in him. However, Bijar again ended up in the army in 1939 and after the outbreak of hostilities asked to join the groupe franc, the reconnaissance and sabotage unit of his regiment. In June 1940, this detachment was able to break out of the encirclement, but France surrendered, and Bijar still ended up in German captivity. Only 18 months later, on the third attempt, he managed to escape to territory controlled by the Vichy government, from where he was sent to one of the Tyralier regiments in Senegal. In October 1943, this regiment was transferred to Morocco. After the Allied landings, Bijar ended up in a unit of the British Special Air Service (SAS), which in 1944 operated on the border between France and Andorra. Then he received the nickname "Bruno" (call sign), which remained with him for life. In 1945, Bijar ended up in Vietnam, where he was later destined to become famous with the phrase:
“This will be done if possible. And if it is impossible - too."
In Dien Bien Phu, the influence of the six battalion commanders of paratroopers on de Kastries' decisions was so great that they were called the "parachute mafia." At the head of this "mafia group" was Lieutenant Colonel Langle, who signed his reports to his superiors: "Langle and his 6 battalions." And his deputy was Bizhar.
Jean Pouget wrote about Bijar's activities in Vietnam:
“Bijar was not yet a BB. He did not have breakfast with the ministers, did not pose for the cover of Pari-Match, did not graduate from the Academy of the General Staff, and did not even think about the general's stars. He didn't know he was a genius. He was it: he made a decision at a glance, gave a command in one word, carried him along with one gesture."
Bijar himself called the multi-day battle at Dien Bien Phu "Verdun of the Jungle" and wrote later:
“If they gave me at least 10 thousand legionnaires, we would have survived. All the rest, except for legionnaires and paratroopers, were incapable of anything, and it was impossible to hope for victory with such forces."
When the French army surrendered in Dien Bien Phu, Bijar was captured, where he spent 4 months, but the American journalist Robert Messenger in 2010 in an obituary compared him with Tsar Leonidas, and his paratroopers with 300 Spartans.
And Max Booth, an American historian, said:
"Bijar's life refutes the myth, popular in the English-speaking world, that the French are cowardly soldiers," cheese-eating surrender monkeys "" (raw foodists who surrendered to monkeys).
He also called him "the perfect warrior, one of the great soldiers of the century."
The Vietnamese government did not allow Bijar's ashes to be scattered in Dien Bien Phu, so he was buried in the "War Memorial in Indochina" (Frejus, France).
It was Bijar who became the prototype for the protagonist of Mark Robson's film Lost Command, which begins in Dien Bien Phu.
Now look at the funny 17-year-old sailor smiling at us from this photo:
In 1953-1956. this goner served in the navy in Saigon and constantly received orders out of turn for gross behavior. He also played one of the main roles in the movie "The Lost Squad":
Did you recognize him? This is … Alain Delon! Even a rookie from the first photo can become a cult actor and sex symbol of a whole generation, if at the age of 17 he does not "drink cologne", but instead goes to serve in the navy during a not-so-popular war.
This is how he recalled his service in the Navy:
“This time turned out to be the happiest in my life. It allowed me to become who I later became and who I am now."
We will also remember about Bijar and the film "The Lost Squad" in an article dedicated to the Algerian War. In the meantime, take another look at this gallant parachutist and his soldiers:
Catastrophe of the French army at Dien Bien Phu
The famous 13th Foreign Legion Semi-Brigade also ended up in Dien Bien Phu and suffered the largest casualties in its history - about three thousand people, including two lieutenant colonel commanders.
The defeat in this battle actually predetermined the outcome of the First Indochina War.
Former sergeant of the Legion Claude-Yves Solange recalled Dien Bien Phu:
“It may be immodest to talk about the legion like that, but the real gods of war fought in our ranks then, and not only the French, but also the Germans, Scandinavians, Russians, Japanese, even a couple of South Africans. The Germans, one and all, went through the Second World War, the Russians, too. I remember that in the second company of my battalion there were two Russian Cossacks who fought at Stalingrad: one was a lieutenant in the Soviet field gendarmerie (meaning the NKVD troops), the other was a zugführer in the SS cavalry division (!). Both died defending the Isabel strongpoint. The communists fought like hell, but we also showed them that we can fight. I think that not a single European army in the second half of the 20th century happened - and, God willing, will not happen - to conduct such terrible and large-scale battles hand-to-hand, as we do in this damned valley. Hurricane fire from their artillery and torrential rains turned trenches and dugouts into mush, and we often fought waist-deep in the water. Their assault groups either went to a breakthrough, or brought their trenches to ours, and then dozens, hundreds of fighters used knives, bayonets, butts, sapper blades, and hatchets."
By the way, I don’t know how valuable this information will seem to you, but, according to eyewitnesses, German legionnaires near Dien Bien Phu fought silently in hand-to-hand combat, while Russians screamed loudly (possibly with obscenities).
In 1965, French director Pierre Schönderfer (a former front-line cameraman who was captured in Dien Bien Phu) shot his first film about the Vietnam War and the events of 1954 - Platoon 317, one of whose heroes is a former Wehrmacht soldier and now a warrant officer of the Legion Wildorf.
This film remained in the shadow of his other grandiose work - "Dien Bien Phu" (1992), among the heroes of which, by the will of the director, was the captain of the Foreign Legion, a former pilot of the squadron "Normandie-Niemen" (hero of the Soviet Union!).
Stills from the film "Dien Bien Phu":
And this is a front-line cameraman Pierre Schenderfer, the photo was taken on September 1, 1953:
Realizing what they had gotten themselves into, the French decided to involve their "older brother" - they turned to the United States with a request to strike the Vietnamese troops that surrounded Dien Bien Phu with an airstrike with a hundred B-29 bombers, even hinting at the possibility of using atomic bombs (Operation Vulture). The Americans then prudently avoided - their turn to "get in the neck" from the Vietnamese had not yet come.
Plan "Condor", which involved the landing of the last parachute units in the Vietnamese rear, was not implemented due to the lack of transport aircraft. As a result, the infantry units of the French moved to Dien Bien Phu by land - and were late. The plan "Albatross", which assumed the breakthrough of the base garrison, was considered unrealistic by the command of the blocked units.
On March 30, Fort Isabel was surrounded (the battle for which was recalled by Claude-Yves Solange, cited above), but its garrison resisted until May 7.
Fort "Elian-1" fell on April 12, on the night of May 6 - fort "Elian-2". On May 7, the French army surrendered.
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu lasted 54 days - from March 13 to May 7, 1954. The losses of the French in manpower and military equipment were enormous. 10,863 soldiers and officers of elite French regiments were captured. Only about 3,290 people returned to France, including several hundred legionnaires: many died from wounds or tropical diseases, and citizens of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe were carefully removed from the Vietnamese camps and sent home - "to atone for their guilt with shock labor." By the way, they were much more fortunate than the rest - among them the percentage of survivors was much higher.
At Dien Bien Phu, not all French units surrendered: Colonel Lalande, who commanded Fort Isabelle, ordered the garrison to break through the Vietnamese positions. These were legionnaires of the Third Regiment, tyraliers of the First Algerian Regiment and soldiers of Thai units. Tanks, cannons, heavy machine guns were thrown into the fort - they went into battle with light small arms. The seriously wounded were left in the fort, the slightly wounded were offered a choice - to join the assault group or stay, warning that they would stop because of them, and, moreover, no one would carry them. Lalande himself was captured before he could leave the fort. The Algerians, having stumbled upon an ambush, surrendered on 7 May. On May 8-9, Captain Michaud's column surrendered, which the Vietnamese pressed against the cliffs 12 km from Isabelle, but 4 Europeans and 40 Thais, jumping into the water, through the mountains and jungle, nevertheless came to the location of the French units in Laos. A platoon, formed from the crews of abandoned tanks, and several legionnaires of the 11th company left the encirclement, having covered 160 km in 20 days. Four tankers and two paratroopers of Fort Isabel escaped from captivity on May 13, four of them (three tankers and a paratrooper) also managed to get to their own.
Already on May 8, 1954, negotiations began in Geneva on peace and the withdrawal of French troops from Indochina. After losing a long-term war to the Viet Minh patriotic movement, France left Vietnam, which remained divided along the 17th parallel.
Raul Salan, who had fought in Indochina since October 1945, did not experience the shame of defeat at Dien Bien Phu: on January 1, 1954, he was appointed Inspector General of the National Defense Forces and returned to Vietnam on June 8, 1954, again leading the French troops. But the time of French Indochina has already expired.
On October 27, 1954, Salan returned to Paris, and on the night of November 1, militants from the National Liberation Front of Algeria attacked government offices, army barracks, the homes of the Blackfeet and shot a school bus with children in the city of Beaune. Ahead of Salan was the bloody war in North Africa and his desperate and hopeless attempt to save French Algeria.
This will be discussed in separate articles, in the next we will talk about the uprising in Madagascar, the Suez crisis and the circumstances of the gaining independence of Tunisia and Morocco.
