The French cemeteries have a space to honor the fallen in the two world wars, two conflicts – especially the second one – about which there is no doubt in terms of moral reason. It is also remembered, albeit in a more discreet way, “to those who died in Indochina and North Africa” ??(Algeria is avoided). They were wars that, out of bad conscience, the collective memory tends to erase.
As we approach the 70th anniversary of the humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu, which marked the end of French colonialism in Indochina after almost a century, various media have made a didactic task towards the younger generations. Of particular note is the documentary Indoxina, la guerra oblidada, by the public channel France 3, broadcast on Wednesday in prime time and available on the internet. It is a chilling testimony, with footage of the semi-slavery situation in which the Vietnamese population lived and the scandalous exploitation of resources by French companies, including Michelin, which thrived on rubber. The prints of the war, very crude, show the brutality of both the French troops and the communist guerrillas of Ho Chi Minh. The French planes unleashed an inferno of fire with the napalm bombs supplied by the Americans, elderly people and children fled in terror from the villages where they lived. In one case there are decapitated heads impaled on stakes. In front of this, the contrast of scenes of refined social life and leisure among the French colonial elite in Saigon is shown.
Dien Bien Phu was a desperate attempt to reverse the course of a war that had begun in 1946, after the end of the Japanese occupation and France’s reconquest of the territory it had held since 1858 (present-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia ), at the time of Napoleon III. Still clinging to its imperial dream, Paris seemed oblivious to the anti-colonial winds that were already blowing strongly and that would lead the British to grant independence to India and Pakistan.
A former air base, Dien Bien Phu was a plain of 65 square kilometers, surrounded by mountains and inserted into territory controlled by the Viet Minh. The French wanted to turn it into a trap to attract the communist guerrillas and deliver a fatal blow. They sent thousands of paratroopers there, built an airstrip, a hospital and even a campaign brothel. But the enemy, in superior numbers and with enormous sacrifice, prepared an attack that overwhelmed the French. It was a disaster, which ended on May 7, 1954. Even the Vietnamese brothel prostitutes ended up working as nurses. There were 3,500 dead and missing, and about 11,000 prisoners, many of whom would not survive. The Viet Minh lost many more men, but emerged victorious.
Before the operation failed, the Americans, who had become involved in the war with a massive aid of armaments to France, went so far as to propose the launch of two atomic bombs. The idea came from the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Paris refused for fear that it would cause many casualties among its own troops.
The conflict in Indochina, 9,000 kilometers from the metropolis, was both a colonial and independence war, a civil war and an episode of the cold war that overlapped with the Korean dispute and the rise to power of Mao in mainland China. The Americans would relieve the French in Vietnam and make very similar mistakes. They also ended up suffering a perhaps even more traumatic slap.
In his recent book Diên Biên Phu, les leçons d’une défaite, Pierre Servent, colonel in the reserve, historian and analyst, speaks of the “innocence” and “blindness” of the French political and military strategy, especially for having underestimated the enemy and the ideology that pushed him, for having been deceived by the personality and rhetoric of Ho Chi Minh. In a conversation with La Vanguardia, Servent explained that the same mistake was made, in part, in the subsequent war in Algeria and even in the face of the threat of jihadist terrorism, ignored or underestimated for too long, as also the danger represented by Vladimir Putin.
“In war, mental ubiquity is very important, the fact of getting into each other’s heads – added Servent-. In Indochina, as happened later with jihadism and also with Putin, we have spent too much time projecting our mental schemes onto the other”.
