Three-Front Fight

BATTLE OF INDOCHINA

In Indo-China one day last week, 2nd Lieut. Francis Marion, armored cavalryman of the Moroccan Spahis, was rolling along Route Coloniale 11 in his tank, far in advance of his column. "Return at once," ordered his superior officer by the radio. "Give me five minutes more," said Marion. In that five minutes the young French reservist uncovered a Communist arms dump: 200 tons of American, Chinese, Japanese, Czech and French weapons, including 1,000 rifles, 60 submachine guns, 22 machine guns, 51 bazookas, 114 mortars, and three Russian-made trucks.

Jammed up on the roads leading southward toward Hanoi last week were scores of similar dumps testifying to the weight and seriousness of Communist General Giap's attack. It was a three-front fight: 1) in the mountainous jungles of the Black River country, where 10,000 Thais, Moroccans and Legionnaires held a 130-mile line against three Viet Minh divisions; 2) in the. Red River valley, where a wedge of French armor, backed by 15,000 Vietnamese troops, linked up with French paratroops dropped in the enemy rear; 3) in the Hanoi delta, where Giap had touched off a 40,000-man guerrilla attack to brake French momentum.

On the Black River, the Reds were using their old shock tactics: waves of expendables in sleeveless, padded green jackets shouting "Hochiminh Muon Nam" (Ho Chi Minh lives 1,000 years), throwing themselves on the French wire with bamboo Bangalore torpedoes and blasting a path for later waves. On the Red River front, Communist resistance, which had faded before the armor, was now reappearing in the rear and extended flanks of the French column, but the French drive itself threatened Thai Nguyen, the reputed Red capital, 44 miles north of Hanoi. In the flat, flooded delta, the brunt of guerrilla attack, directed at the Roman Catholic city of Phat Diem, was taken by Senegalese troops in bitter hand-to-hand fighting. French artillery and a daybreak attack by Hellcats and B-26 bombers came to the rescue of the Senegalese.

In Paris, army chiefs watched the battle with anxious eyes: the coming weeks would tell whether the biggest Communist drive in six years would end in the Communists' biggest defeat.

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