The Bishop's Soldiers

Across Indo-China's 17th parallel -- the truce line set at Geneva--moved the long, weary procession of refugees from the Communist North. In the South they were received on farms or in improvised tent cities which the U.S. helped supply; most of them will eventually be assigned new land. Among these anti-Communist refugees were 10,000 soldiers of a special type. They looked no different from the other Vietnamese peasants, but they were the remnants of one of the last real church armies in the world: the fighting Catholics of Tonkin, led by round, shrewd Bishop Thaddeus Le Huu Tu.

As they waited in southern Viet Nam for an uncertain new life to begin, their recollections brought to light the story of an extraordinary experiment in fighting Communism.

"You Must Fight." No man in Indo-China was more an uncontested ruler than Bishop Tu, a French-schooled Vietnamese and a onetime Trappist monk. His flock was half a million farmers who lived in the rich Tonkin coastal area. Le Huu Tu dotted his little theocracy with schools, seminaries, orphanages, and cathedral-sized churches. He walked a tricky tightrope of diplomacy, between the Viet Minh revolutionists, the Vietnamese loyalists and the French colonials.

To make his diplomacy stick, Bishop Tu whipped together a tiny army of fervent Roman Catholics, armed with pikes and smuggled rifles. At its head he put Father Quynh, a tough, angular soldier-priest. Father Quynh was no diplomat. "A Catholic in this country betrays his faith if he is not a soldier," he used to say. "To compromise with Communism is treachery. You must fight--it's the only Christian solution."

By 1949 Bishop Tu's private army had become the nucleus of several similar Catholic militias in the Red River Delta. Forty thousand ill-trained and lightly armed peasant-soldiers, commanded by amateur officers, succeeded in maintaining security in 70% of the delta area.

At length Bishop Tu turned to Bao Dai for help, and Father Quynh, now promoted to War Minister, began to get some real arms. Every parish was transformed into a training camp resounding with the call of mot hay, mot hay (one-two, one-two).

Grenades in the Pocket. Three years ago, when the well-equipped and tightly trained Communists launched a big push, they slammed into the Catholic militia (and the other anti-Red forces) like a snowplow. Twenty outposts manned by the militiamen defected within 48 hours.

But later, the embattled Catholics of the Tonkin area gave a better account of themselves, fighting with the kind of religious fervor so often theoretically invoked in the West as the answer to the fanatic fervor of the Communists.

Many French officers had high praise for these tough peasant-soldiers who could fight in waist-deep water, buffeted by wind and rain, living on no more than a slim rice ration and an occasional frog caught in the paddyfields. They moved stealthily in and out of the villages, spotting Viet Minh spies, harassing the enemy by night and playing the part of noncombatant peasants by day. In one sector the sister of a priest led a group of women in dark brown cotton uniforms, their large pockets always containing a few hand grenades.

Sometimes before a night's fighting, the militias would assemble in one of their strange churches with templelike, turned-up roofs and bulbous bell towers, from which a lookout kept watch. Under the slant-eyed gaze of watercolor saints, they would sit holding their rusty rifles, sing hymns, receive a benediction and melt into the darkness.

Moving South. After the fall of Dien-bienphu and the general French collapse, Le Huu Tu and several other bishops forfeited the last hope of maintaining their armies, were evacuated to the South. The Catholic militiamen have been moving south ever since, womenfolk, children and baggage piled high on carts and pedicabs.

The regular Vietnamese army will receive many of them into its ranks. Local Indo-Chinese war lords are competing for their services. As an army of soldiers fighting for their church, the militias are no more, but the bishop's soldiers have left their mark in Asia's bitter history.

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