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 Café de Paris were tightly boarded. So was the Cinevox Théátre, which still advertised a movie called La Dernièe 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 1½; 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.'"