Almost seventy years after the battle of Dien Bien Phu, who in France still cares about the lost soldiers of the Indochina war?
After the artillery shelling and assaults by Vietminh troops, suffered from March 13 to May 7, 1954, the dead are now under the threat of bulldozers. Just before the sixty-ninth anniversary of their victory, the Vietnamese are launching, in March, a major project on this site in the northwest of the country, 300 kilometers from Hanoi.
It is a question of widening the airstrip, created by the Japanese during the Second World War and used by the Dakota norias of the French army when the general staff decided, in November 1953, to make this basin surrounded by hills a stronghold, impregnable he thought, against the advance of the independence forces of Ho Chi Minh. The expansion work should last seven months and meet both the needs of the population in an area that has continued to urbanize and the desire to develop memorial tourism in this symbolic place for the nation.
Study of the bones
But, according to Le Souvenir français, an association one of whose missions is to maintain the memory and the graves of soldiers who died for France, between one hundred and two hundred remains of combatants are still buried in the immediate area of the works. The exploratory phase carried out in 2022 has already made it possible to exhume two bodies.
The bones were investigated by the Hanoi Forensic Institute. They made it possible to determine that they were men of the European type, wearing the insignia of the 4e regiment of Moroccan riflemen. Specialists believe that it would be two officers of the battalion of Commander Nicolas. Only their name is missing. The remains, however, have not been claimed by France. They were buried, in two graves, dignified but anonymous, on the spot.
In total, between 1,200 and 1,300 soldiers of the French expeditionary force in the Far East (French, legionnaires or colonial and auxiliary troops) would be buried in mass graves or buried pell-mell on the site of a battle which made 4,000 died in their ranks. Of the 12,000 prisoners taken by the Vietminh, two-thirds died in “re-education” camps and were buried in mass graves. On the side of the forces of Ho Chi Minh, the losses are estimated between 4,000 and 8,000 dead, according to the sources. Regularly, bodies from both sides are dug up, as the neighboring town of Diên Biên expands.
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