Epilogue to Dienbienphu

INDOCHINA

Within the straw-matting hut lay one hundred French Union prisoners, their skin drawn taut across their ribs. Their feet were cut and swollen; their complexions were jaundiced; their eyeballs were ghastly white and the men had difficulty focusing their sight. Many of the prisoners had festering sores that crawled with swarming flies. "My God, they look awful," said a French officer who saw them. "They are like men from a second Buckenwald," cried the skipper of a French LSM.

The skeleton-men were 63 French, 27 Foreign Legion and ten Vietnamese survivors of Dienbienphu who were being repatriated under the recent French-Viet Minh agreement. The stories they told were not calculated to increase good will towards the Communist Viet Minh at a moment when the French were trying to conclude peace. The French put on two relays of censors at Hanoi and Saigon to lessen the impact of the last march from Dienbienphu.

The Captivity. After the battle the Communists split their worn-out prisoners into two groups about 3,000 strong: they marched one group northeast towards the Red China border, the second 400 miles southeast to prison camps near Haithuon, on the coast of Red-held Viet Nam. The second group, to which these repatriated prisoners belonged, was ravaged by dysentery and malaria; the marchers got only 800 grams of rice and gruel a day, with occasional dried fish and peanuts. There were no medical supplies, although many of the walking wounded still bore shrapnel within their bodies.

"The strong helped the weak whenever they could," said one young French paratrooper, "but every 500 meters someone fell to the ground." Said a German legionnaire: "Of 400 men in my squad when we left Dienbienphu . . . (twelve words deleted by French HQ censor)." Said a Spanish legionnaire: "There were . . . (three words censored) among 390 men in my squad." And a second Frenchman added: ". . . (two words censored) of 290 in my squad died."

The Release. Just before turning the prisoners over to the French, the Communists gave them haircuts, bars of soap and a meal of pork and chicken. When the French navy put in at Haithuon to take the prisoners away, Viet Minh nurses were conspicuously serving them tea. But the French rescuers still had to carry most of the prisoners aboard the LSM in stretchers, and the prisoners who were well enough tore almost ravenously into a good French meal. When they had finished, some heroes of the great battle came back to the galleys with hands outstretched, pleading for more. One legionnaire carefully stored his bread crumbs in a cellophane bag, and a Frenchman held up a loaf and cried: "Bread! To me, messieurs, this is cake."

Over the Communist radio. President Ho Chi Minh wished the remaining thousands of French Union prisoners the top of the Bastille season, expressing admiration for "the great French Revolution and its noble ideals," wishing his skeletal captives "merry festival and good health."

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