Viet Minh General Vo Nguyen Giap saw the opportunity, and took it.His men were dragging artillery and anti-aircraft guns through mountainous jungle terrain in what was then the colony of Indochina, and present day Vietnam.They had a plan, and they were executing it.In the last phase of France’s eight-year war the French army was ordered to hold on to Dien Bien Phu at all costs, even though as a remote settlement its military significance was limited.It would be a disastrous mistake.Giap surrounded the encampment and in 50 days of shelling and infantry charges forced the French into submission.Essentially bringing an end to French colonial rule in Vietnam. This week, France mourned one of it's greatest heroes ... a woman named Geneviève de Galard, a French nurse who was dubbed the “Angel of Dien Bien Phu” for her care of wounded and dying soldiers.De Galard, who died at the age of 99, was the only woman nurse tending French casualties inside the doomed redoubt of Dien Bien Phu.She won the adoration of French soldiers and her nation, for her unflinching dedication during more than a month of bloody fighting.Born in 1925 into an aristocratic family in Paris and raised as an observant Catholic, de Galard trained as a nurse after World War Two and joined the army medical service as a flight-nurse, BBC News reported.After several trips evacuating wounded men from Dien Bien Phu, she was marooned there at the end of March 1954 when her plane sprung an oil leak. In the following days, Viet Minh bombardments put the airstrip out of action, the report said.In stifling heat and with rudimentary sanitation, de Galard helped the army surgeons carry out scores of amputations and emergency operations. She comforted the dying and promised to deliver last messages to loved ones.Little did she realize that amid the gloom of the unfolding disaster, the world’s press was writing up the one positive news story about the “angel of Dien Bien Phu” administering selflessly to the wounded..A Time magazine profile was typical: “In Dien Bien Phu’s underground hospital, amid the stench of death, antiseptics and rotting wounds, Nurse de Galard lost 18 pounds in work and worry."“She cut her hair very short; she switched at last to green fatigues, changing sometimes to a paratrooper’s trousers and shirt. She had her own dugout with silk sheets, made from parachutes… but more often she would sleep on a cot beside the wounded," Time reported.“I am glad I am trapped," she once told GHQ. "I am proud to be here.”Captured, then released, by the Communist Viet Minh, she was featured on the front page of Paris-Match magazine. Later she was given a ticker-tape parade in New York and was decorated by US President Eisenhower.In a message on X, formerly Twitter, French President Emmanuel Macron said that “in the worst moments of the Indochina war, Geneviève de Galard showed an exemplary courage and devotion amid the suffering of 15,000 French soldiers.”In November 1953, thousands of French paratroopers dropped into the Dien Bien Phu Valley in the mountainous far northwest region of Vietnam, History.com reported.They took possession of a small airstrip and began creating a military stronghold that included a chain of fortified garrisons on a 40-mile perimeter.The French brought in more than 15,000 troops but this sizeable force was stretched thin defending the large perimeter. The Viet Minh had almost 50,000 troops under the command of Gen. Giap, an ardent Communist considered one of the 20th century’s greatest military strategists, History.com reported.The French underestimated Giap’s leadership as well as the Viet Minh army’s weapons and capabilities. The French forces expected to rely on the airstrip to resupply the bastion, wrongly assuming that the Viet Minh had no anti-aircraft weapons..Giap did nothing to try to stop the incursion. For four months, his troops prepared — setting the trap.They spread out through the steep hills until the army literally surrounded the Dien Bien Phu valley. They dug out well-protected artillery positions and somehow manhandled huge artillery pieces up and down the steep slopes to their positions.On March 13, 1954, under the dark sky of a new moon, the Viet Minh artillery began shelling one of the French perimeter garrisons and the army laid siege to the entire French outpost. It would not end, until the stronghold fell on 7 May.The 57-day battle was a complete rout for the French army, which lost more than 2,200 soldiers killed in action, and almost 11,000 more who were captured, including more than 5,100 who were wounded. Only about 3,300 of the French prisoners of war made it home. Thousands died in captivity as the French negotiated its exit from Indochina during the 1954 Geneva Conference.In her memoirs nurse de Galard said: “In Dien Bien Phu I was a little bit the mother, a little bit the sister, a little bit the friend. Simply my being there, because I was a woman, seemed to make the hell a little less inhuman.”After the war, de Galard married a soldier and eventually returned to live in Paris. She always said she was astounded by the fuss made about her, because she had merely done her duty.She would receive the Military Cross and the Legion of Honour, and made an honorary member of the Foreign Legion.
