More About France's Involvement in Vietnam

Qui Nhon is the beginning of Hwy 19 that leads west to An Khe, visible from Vung Chua Mountain, and on westward to Pleiku. It was along this highway that the French Groupe Mobile I tried to make a break for Pleiku to consolidate their forces in 1954 after it was evident that the French stand at Dien Bien Phu was doomed after a 10 month encirclement by the Vietminh, a coalition of Vietnamese nationals led by Ho Chi Minh. General Giap was the architect of the victory at Dien Bien Phu, which led the French to sue for peace and end their occupation of Viet Nam.



The Groupe Mobile I had about 1000 men and they had to go through the Mang Yang Pass to get to Pleiku. The Viet Minh were waiting for them and it was a slaughter as masses of Vietminh came charging out of the steep valley slopes. Less than half of the French made it to Pleiku. Bernard Fall in "Street Without Joy," one of his many books I read when I got back from Viet Nam, says there were so many French dead that the Vietminh had to bury them standing up. It makes me weep at the cost of war on both sides, for do not send to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.



Why in the world did the French want to restore their colony after WWII? First of all, they were humiliated when Germany went through France like merde through a fois gras. Which reminds me, QUESTION: How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris? ANSWER: Nobody knows. It's never been done. So they wanted to restore their self-appointed place as a world power, misguided as it was. Secondly, they practiced the worst kind of racism in their colony because they thought they had a right to dominate the Vietnamese since they considered them less than human. In fact, when the French colonial forces surrendered to the Japanese in the early days of WWII, they turned around and collaborated with them in keeping a brutal control of the Vietnamese, saying, in effect, we know how to handle these people better than you. It was this sort of collaboration with an enemy that served as a model for Pierre Boulle to pen “Bridge Over the River Kwai.”