The Fall of Haiphong

In accordance with the terms of Geneva, the French efficiently and soberly pulled out last week from Haiphong (pop. 200,000), their last territorial enclave in northern Viet Nam. Carefully collecting 300,000 tons of military hardware, including salvaged barbed wire and scrap-iron roofs torn from army warehouses, the French evacuated the last of 150,000 troops and 800,000 civilian refugees. Almost all the businessmen left town with them, Frenchmen, Indians, Chinese; those who remained hastily laid out $1.50 apiece for official, handkerchief-sized red-and-yellow-starred Communist flags.

The transfer of power went smoothly, in what the International Control Commission called "an admirable spirit of understanding and tolerance." A Foreign Legionnaire hauled down the Tricolor; a band clanged and rataplanned La Marseillaise; popular Commanding General

Rene Cogny laid wreaths on monuments marked A Nos Marts in the military cemetery and told his troops that it was not they who had lost the war against the Communists, but the politicians at Geneva. Alone, a Vietnamese Nationalist official shoveled North Vietnamese dirt into an urn, wrapped it with a Nationalist-flag, and made off with it to the south.

Communist President Ho Chi Minh took over Haiphong with 10,000 men selected from the elite regiments of Dien-bienphu; frozen-faced, in green uniforms and the inevitable sneakers, they carried identical bouquets of flowers. But when Haiphong was secure and with it the whole of North Viet Nam (pop. 12 million), Ho's orthodox Communist purge got under way.

"All those who collaborated with the French and Vietnamese Nationalists must report at once to the nearest police station," droned unseen men in loudspeaker cars that patrolled the shuttered streets. There would be new taxes, new penalties for opposing the state; there would be meetings in which the people would be urged to denounce their own misdeeds and those of their neighbors. As the curtain of Ho's bloody conformity enveloped Haiphong and the Bay of Along, with their coal mines, docks, cement works and grotesquely jagged offshore islands, Ho Chi Minh made arrangements for a victory parade.

"You may cheer our troops," the unseen men in the loudspeaker cars told the people, "but you may not cross the streets."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.