BATTLE OF INDO-CHINA: Disaster on Route No. 4

BATTLE OF INDOCHINA

Last week the Communist high command, facing defeat in Korea, struck a major counterblow in Indo-China. Within a few days, the Communists forced the French to abandon a whole line of forts and thereby wrecked the French plan of containing and eventually starving out the rebels. At week’s end the Moscow newspapers were giving as much space to Indo-China as to Korea.

Indo-China adjoins Red China, but the border has never been pegged out. The real frontier is a string of French forts and outposts connected by a road called Route Coloniale No. 4 which winds between steep hills and dense forests. The French Foreign Legionnaires who man the forts say: “The Route Coloniale No. 4 is a road a man travels only once alive.” In a bitter five-day battle fought with the Communists last week on Route No. 4, over 3,000 Foreign Legionnaires were trapped.

The forts were to cut off Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh rebel Communist army from the Chinese Communists. The French plan was to isolate the rebels in the wild hilly country which lies between the frontier and the Red River to the west. By holding the frontier and the good rice lands of the Red River delta the French hoped to starve out the Communists. For a while it looked as if the plan might work. Ho’s radio exhorted his supporters to save rice, “every grain as precious as a drop of blood.”

Last June, before the beginning of the war in Korea, documents captured by the French convinced them that Ho was about to receive extensive aid from Communist China’s Mao Tse-tung. Mao, the French said, was training thousands of picked rebel Viet Minh troops in China and was equipping Ho’s forces with heavy weapons. The Ho-Mao objective: the Red River delta. The time: after the summer monsoon and before the November rice harvest.

Soldiers Who Melt Away. A month ago, French fears materialized. Four Viet Minh battalions attacked Dongkhe (see map), a fort at the north end of the frontier, using antiaircraft guns and 105-mm. artillery, none of which they had had before. The French staff decided to withdraw from Caobang, a fort a few miles to the north of Dongkhe.

To cover the withdrawal they planned to attack Ho in his own “military capital,” Thainguyen, a town 40 miles north of Hanoi. On Oct. 1 a combined French force of parachutists, infantry and naval units struck at Thainguyen. The operation was perfectly carried out in Western military style, but after a few skirmishes, the Viet Minh defenders melted away.

Meanwhile, a column of crack French troops was on its way to protect the withdrawal from Caobang. The Caobang garrison had already pulled out and was on its way south through the jungle. The two French columns met on Route Coloniale No. 4 between Dongkhe and Thatkhe. Numbering together more than 3,000 men, they marched southward for two days. Then, in a narrow valley, a force of 20,000 Viet Minh soldiers descended on them. Only about 700 Legionnaires managed to escape the ambuscade. They told of a bloody battle in which over 1,000 were killed & wounded, another 1,000 taken prisoner.

As soon as the news of the rout reached Hanoi, the French pulled out of Thainguyen. They took up positions on a line halfway between Thainguyen and Hanoi in the flat delta country where communications and supply lines would be shorter and where their artillery and tanks could be used to better advantage. One by one the remaining forts on Route Coloniale No. 4 were falling into Viet Minh hands. The border between Ho and Mao was wide open.

At week’s end, Ho’s forces occupied a broad wedge of North Indo-China, with the base of the wedge resting in China, its edge pointing at Hanoi. The French still held important forts on the extreme flanks of the wedge: at Laokay on the upper Red River where the railway between Hanoi and Kunming cross into China; in the south at Langson where the railway between Hanoi and Ningming crosses the border. Laokay was cut off and dependent on supply by air. There were reports of Communist troops regrouping before Langson, from which civilians were being evacuated. Should either flank fold, the Communists would have uninterrupted rail transport to the rice-rich delta. The Chinese Communists were repairing their ends of the two railways.

Intrigues and Balmy Optimism. The story of Route Coloniale No. 4 stunned France. Said Paris-Presse: “Everybody, from our cabinet ministers down to the man in the street, realizes now that the massacre of Caobang is the outcome of five years of neglect, hesitations, intrigues and balmy optimism.” There were caustic remarks about Viet Nam’s Emperor Bao Dai living with his family at the Cháteau de Thorenc above Cannes. Minister of State Jean Letourneau, in charge of Indo-Chinese affairs, on coming out of a cabinet meeting, tried to calm the excitement. Said he: “The French high command has got the situation in hand . . . There is absolutely no justification for any panic or for talk of catastrophe.” The cabinet called on energetic General Alphonse Juin, French Resident General in Morocco, to look into the Indo-China mess. Juin’s first act last week was a telephone call to Bao Dai, after which Bao. Dai announced he would fly to Saigon as soon as possible.

In Washington, Defense Minister Jules Moch and Finance Minister Maurice Petsche asked the U.S. for $300 million worth of arms for Indo-China. Defense Secretary George Marshall assured Moch that the U.S. would make every effort to speed supplies to Saigon.

It would take a lot of U.S. supplies to balance Ho’s victory, his most important advance in two years.