Sixty years ago, on May 7, 1954, dead soldiers and scorched military equipment littered the fields around the town of Dien Bien Phu, Hoang Dang Vinh told Agence-France Presse.
“The sky was filled with tall columns of black smoke from burning vehicles,” said Vinh, now a 79-year-old retired colonel and one of only a few surviving Vietnamese veterans of the battle.
After nearly two months of relentless fighting in Vietnam’s Muong Thanh valley, Viet Minh forces had encircled the French troops in Dien Bien Phu.
The humiliating French defeat came after "56 days and 56 nights of noise and fury," said filmmaker Pierre Schoendoerffer, who was taken prisoner at Dien Bien Phu.
A few French soldiers waved a white cloth parachute, Vinh said, and he entered a French fortified bunker to find Commander Christian-Marie de la Croix de Castries.
Vinh took Castries prisoner, ending the battle, and — unbeknown to either — precipitating the collapse of France's colonial empire and Vietnam's emergence as an independent nation.
Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap could not believe the news when it was first relayed by radio, Vinh recalled. “Is it true that you have captured General de Castries?” the master military strategist, who died late last year at 102, kept asking over and over again.
While Castries, according to a former Reuters correspondent, had stashed 48,000 bottles of fine vintage wine in his camp before the battle, General Giap kept his troops supplied by paring his supplies down, including his artillery, so they could be transported by hundreds of Peugeot bicycles through the jungles.
In contrast to Giap's low-tech but sturdy bicycles, the U.S. contemplated helping the French with nuclear weapons, according to the BBC.
But without American intervention, the French were roundly defeated by the Viet Minh. It was a milestone in the history of liberation movements.
Dien Bien Phu "was the first time that a non-European colonial independence movement had evolved through all the stages from guerrilla bands to a conventionally organized and equipped army able to defeat a modern Western occupier in a pitched battle," wrote British historian Martin Windrow, the author of “The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam.”
“The fighting was extremely bloody,” Vinh told AFP, his voice trembling as he described the bodies covering the battlefield, their arms and legs torn off.
Some 3,000 French soldiers and at least 10,000 Vietnamese died at Dien Bien Phu, according to the AFP.
Vinh, like many of his comrades, never received much training: a month of practice using firearms and explosives.
Five of the Viet Minh’s seven divisions were concentrated around Dien Bien Phu, and most of the troops’ time was spent in the dank, uncomfortable trenches.
“They were hiding in the trenches for months ... We did everything there, including all medical services,” he said. “I weighed only around 40 kilos . Life was very difficult,” he said
After the war, Vietnam was split into the communist north and the French-supported territory in the south proved tenuous. It provoked another war that brought in hundreds of thousands of American troops into South Vietnam and only ended in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and the deaths of nearly 50,000 U.S. troops and as many as three million Vietnamese. Vietnam's long-deferred reunification followed.
For the French, the Viet Minh victory, however, marked not just the end of French dominance in Indochina but the beginning of its decline as a colonial power.
Inspired by the Viet Minh, many Algerians, a few of whom had even fought next to the French in Vietnam, began demanding their own independence. About six months later, Algerians would begin their own successful independence movement, though only a bloody war that lasted over seven years.
red salute! to the glorious victory at dien bien phu. down with imperialism! down with exploitation! down with capitalism! long live the victory of people's war!
red salute
lollin @ ur dumb face if you don't think revolution is inevitable and that it will definitely succeed
TheIneff posted:i've gotta pass intro to algebra
talk about class struggle lol
notciaNOTjew posted:They've killed a lot of people for being paper tigers op
Just as there is not a single thing in the world without a dual nature (this is the law of the unity of opposites), so imperialism and all reactionaries have a dual nature - they are real tigers and paper tigers at the same time. In past history, before they won state power and for some time afterwards, the slave-owning class, the feudal landlord class and the bourgeoisie were vigorous, revolutionary and progressive; they were real tigers. But with the lapse of time, because their opposites - the slave class, the peasant class and the proletariat - grew in strength step by step, struggled against them more and more fiercely, these ruling classes changed step by step into the reverse, changed into reactionaries, changed into backward people, changed into paper tigers. And eventually they were overthrown, or will be overthrown, by the people.
TheIneff posted:q: what do i do if my coworker constantly goes on about how the USG does what it does out of the purest humanitarian concerns and the ungrateful savages muck up these efforts cuz they're culturally allergic to freedom
sabotage your employer's operations and declare a wildcat strike in your industry
