Retreat from Namdinh

INDOCHINA

The Communists last week added 3,000,000 Indo-Chinese to the 800 million people whose destinies they already control. It happened swiftly, and so bloodlessly that the rest of the world hardly noticed. Yet it was a bigger Communist victory than Dienbienphu.

The French simply pulled back from one-third of the Red River Delta, abandoning 1,600 square miles of densely populated rich rice land. Three Communist Viet Minh divisions leisurely followed up the retreating Frenchmen, exchanging only a few desultory shots with the rearguards. In 72 triumphal hours, the Communists marched into Namdinh (pop. 80,000), the biggest Red prize of the eight-year war; Phuly (pop. 5,000), fortress key to the delta's old southern defense line and Phatdiem (pop. 40,000), heart of a Christian district embracing 570,000 Vietnamese Roman Catholics, fewer than 11,000 of whom were able to escape. From Namdinh. in its final hours of freedom. TIME Correspondent Don Wilson reported:

"There was something frighteningly familiar about the evacuation: the crowded, reeking buses, the pushcarts piled high with household goods, the silent rows of shuttered shop fronts waiting for the first Communist soldiers to appear. Namdinh brought to mind hundreds of other cities in China during 1948 and '49, in Korea during 1950 and '51."

Orange Pop & Farewell. "The Boulevard Paul Bert, once the pride of an attractive French colonial town, lay almost deserted. Shops were padlocked. Little bistros with such nostalgic names as Bar Bretagne and Cafe de Paris were tightly boarded. So was the Cinevox Theatre, which still advertised a movie called La Derniee Chance. A big cotton mill, which once employed about 20,000 Vietnamese, was also closed down, but the French mill operators seemed in no great hurry to leave. Said one wrinkled old Frenchman, who had lived in Namdinh for 17 years: 'The Viets will not want to keep our mill closed down. We shall go back to work within 15 days.' Only a day or two before the fall, a couple of soft-drink executives were in Namdinh from Hanoi, making their plans to trade with the Communists. After all, they reasoned, the Viets could hardly do without orange pop.

"In the last hours of Namdinh, the profiteers made big money: bus fares to Hanoi shot up from 80 piasters ($2) to 1,000 piasters ($28); ice-cream men were charging 5 piasters a kilo instead of the customary 1 1/2; and some Vietnamese officials, entrusted with the grave responsibility of determining which citizens should be evacuated by air to Hanoi, were making sure their selections were rewarded. In Namdinh there was also courage: a bunch of Catholic teenagers strapped grenades to their belts and vowed they would start a guerrilla war against the Communists; a Vietnamese priest considered what the Communists might do to him, then calmly decided: 'I shall remain a few more days.'"

Mobility & Debate. Was this tragic withdrawal necessary? Failing heavy reinforcements from France and North Africa, the French command insisted that it was overextended, and had no military alternative. "Extremely grave . . . but absolutely necessary," said the GHQ spokesman. The retreat was indeed in line with General Cogny's long-planned redeployment from fixed pillbox defenses to mobile columns in the open. One tough French colonel last week recalled Namdinh's static warfare, looked approvingly over his newly taut armored task force and said: "Now I am free to move."

Nonetheless, there were doubts. Vietnamese Prime Minister Diem protested the abandonment of his countrymen, his fellow Catholics and "the cradle of our rice." North Viet Nam's able, disillusioned Governor Nguyen Huu Tri charged that the retreat from Namdinh either anticipated or fulfilled a secret French deal with the Communists. And there were officers at the Pentagon in Washington who shared this suspicion. They wondered why the Communists did not severely harass the retreating Frenchmen, why the French did not blow up all the bridges and roadways behind them. In any event, the U.S. (which pays 70% of the war's financial cost) was not informed in advance of the dimensions of the French withdrawal.

The Spreading Conviction. Cabled TIME Senior Editor John Osborne: "If the French intend to fight the Battle of the Delta, the withdrawal must be judged a sound military move, and its execution --with minor losses and perhaps the most effective security blackout of the war--does seem to have been a remarkable performance. But do the French intend to fight? That decision rests not with soldiers like Cogny, but with the politicians of Paris and Geneva. And whatever these politicians may decide, a tragic amount--whether measured by land or resources or people--has already been given away.

"In Viet Nam, as in so much of the world, 'the North' is the home of the hardiest people, and the Namdinh-Phatdiem region abandoned last week contained the best of Viet Nam's potential young soldiers and provincial administrators, the strongest of its committed andCommunists, the most productive of its rice growers. Moreover, the truck convoys moving out of Namdinh and the refugees pouring into Hanoi spell Viet Minh triumph for the Vietnamese who saw them, heard them, or heard rumors of them, spreading the conviction that the Communists are irresistible, that a man had better give up while there is still time to save his life, his family and his home.

"The French command is pretty pleased with itself, as it has every right to be in the strictly military sense. But with many more such accomplishments, the Communists will have the rest of Southeast Asia."

Five French Union officers met the Communists 25 miles northwest of Hanoi last week to work out local arrangements of a ceasefire. Drawn up to greet them near the bamboo conference hut at Trunggia were three captured U.S. jeeps and a couple of weapons carriers with Communist inscriptions painted on their sides: SOUVENIR OF VICTORY AT DIENBIENPHU. 7-5-54.

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