French cemeteries have a space to honor the fallen in the two world wars, two conflicts – especially the second – about whose moral reason there is no doubt. It is also remembered, although in a more discreet way, "the dead in Indochina and North Africa (avoid mentioning Algeria)." They were wars that, due to a bad conscience, the collective memory tends to erase.
As the 70th anniversary of the humiliating defeat of Diên Biên Phu approaches, which marked the end of French colonialism in Indochina after almost a century, several media have done educational work towards the young generations. The documentary Indochina, the forgotten war, from the public channel France 3 stands out, broadcast last Wednesday in prime time and available on the internet. It is a chilling testimony, with filming of the situation of semi-slavery in which the Vietnamese population lived and the scandalous exploitation of resources by French companies, including Michelin, which relied on rubber. The very crude images of the war show the brutality of both the French troops and Ho Chi Minh's communist guerrillas. The French planes unleash an inferno of fire with the napalm bombs supplied to them by the Americans, elderly people and children flee villages in terror. In one case, decapitated heads appear nailed to stakes. Against that, the contrast of scenes of refined social life and leisure among the French colonial elite in Saigon.
Diên Biên 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 reconquered the territory it had owned since 1858 (present-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), in the era of Napoleon III. Still clinging to its imperial dream, Paris seemed oblivious to the anti-colonial winds that were already blowing strongly and that were going to lead the British to grant independence to India and Pakistan.
Former air base, Diên Biên Phu was a plain of 65 square kilometers, surrounded by mountains and inserted in territory controlled by the Viet Minh. The French wanted to turn it into a trap to attract the communist guerrillas and deal them a fatal blow. They sent thousands of paratroopers, built a landing strip, a hospital and even a field brothel. But the enemy, in greater numbers and with enormous sacrifice, prepared an attack that overwhelmed the French. It was a disaster, which ended on May 7, 1954. Even the brothel's prostitutes, Vietnamese, ended up acting as nurses. There were 3,500 dead and missing, and some 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 massive arms aid to France, even proposed launching two atomic bombs. The idea came from 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, at the same time, a colonial and independence war, a civil war and an episode of the Cold War that overlapped with the Korean conflict and Mao's rise to power. in mainland China. The Americans would relieve the French in Vietnam, making very similar mistakes. They also ended up suffering a perhaps even more traumatic setback.
In his recent book Diên Biên Phu, les lessons d'une défaite, Pierre Servent, colonel in the reserve historian and analyst, speaks of “innocence” and “blindness” of French political and military strategy, especially for underestimating the enemy and the ideology that pushed him, for allowing himself to be fooled by Ho Chi Minh's personality and rhetoric. In a conversation with La Vanguardia, Servent explained that the same mistake was made, in part, in the subsequent Algerian war and even in the face of the threat of jihadist terrorism, ignored or undervalued for too long, as well as in the face of the danger that Putin represented. .
“In war, mental ubiquity is very important, the fact of getting into the other's head,” Servent added. In Indochina, as happened later with jihadism and also with Putin, we have spent too much time projecting our mental schemas onto others.”
