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The Big Gamble. In mid-January the big test came. In their first frontal maneuver, the Viet Minh, 40,000 strong, stormed the French lines in the Vinhyen area northwest of Hanoi, striking for the rich, rice-growing delta.
Badly outnumbered, De Lattre made a strategic gamble: he stripped the garrisons of southern Indo-China, flying eleven battalions up to Vinhyen in a ramshackle armada of military and civilian aircraft. The defense of the south was left to a handful of regulars and native auxiliaries under able General Charles Chanson, later murdered by Viet Minh terrorists.
Then, with his forces skillfully supported by fire bombing and artillery, De Lattre cut the Viet Minh assault to pieces.
He followed up that victory with others at Dongtriéu, Ninhbinh and the Day River. By the time the rains began last June, bringing major military operations to a halt until the fall, the Communists had taken a severe drubbing. Ho Chi Minh no longer thought of dinner in Hanoi; instead, he ordered a return to guerrilla action.
Uhlans to Panzers. De Lattre and the Americans have been allies in three wars. He was born (1889) in Mouilleron-en-Pareds, the Vendee village which is also the birthplace of Georges Clemenceau, and where De Lattre's 96-year-old father has been mayor for four decades. Young Jean went to St. Cyr, France's West Point, and marched from the classroom into World War I. A lieutenant of dragoons, he won his first citation after a lance-v.-saber encounter with German Uhlans. Though unhorsed and wounded in the chest, he cut down two of the enemy with his sword. Shifted to the infantry, he survived four more wounds before the Armistice.
Between World Wars, he served under France's famed Marshal Lyautey against the Riffs of Morocco. In 1939 he became the youngest (50) French general. In the debacle of 1940, he and his 14th Infantry Division showed up well, holding the German Panzers near Rheims until the line on his left flank disintegrated. Until the Germans marched into unoccupied France, he served the Vichy regime as a military instructor. Then, in a rage, he defied Vichy's orders to keep his troops in barracks ("Never will I receive the Germans at my headquarters!"), and led his men out to resist in a brief, futile battle.
The Vichy regime sentenced him to ten years in jail, but he soon escaped, with the help of his wife, who smuggled into his cell a small metal saw tucked in a bouquet of flowers and a ten-yard rope hidden in a bag of laundry. He made his way to the Free French in London and then Algiers. In 1944 and 1945 he led the French First Army in its landing in the south of France and its proud march northward to the Rhine and Danube. At one time his command included 125,000 U.S. troops. It was in this campaign that American officers got firsthand acquaintance, often startling, with the De Lattre temperament and technique.
Springtime's Victory. Like MacArthur, De Lattre is often impatient with his superiors' recommendations; like MacArthur, he has a flair for the intense dramatic (colleagues have nicknamed him "General de Théátre"), and a precise sense of history. In Germany, De Lattre successfully attacked Ulm against instructions, because he knew that in 1805 Napoleon had executed a similar maneuver.