Download or read book Doctor At Dien Bien Phu written by Major Paul Grauwin and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes 34 illustrations. The searing firsthand account of the horrors suffered by the French paratroops and soldiers during the siege of Dien Bien Phu at the hands of the Viet Minh. During the course of the First Indochina War, the French had established a base at Dien Bien Phu in late 1953. Dr. Grauwin, holding the rank of major, arrived in February 1954 to take charge of the 42-bed hospital unit there, conducting triage for evacuation and operating when necessary. By the end of the battle in May, Grauwin had more than 1,300 wounded in the makeshift wards of his hospital, and deprived by the shelling of electricity, was forced to operate by candlelight. With the fall of the base on May 7, he was taken into captivity by the Viet Minh. Grauwin remained in captivity until June 1, when he and other French medical officers were exchanged for several hundred Vietnamese prisoners.
Download or read book The Angel of Dien Bien Phu written by Genevieve de Heaulme and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geneviève de Galard was a flight nurse for the French Air Force who received the name of the "Angel of Dien Bien Phu" during the French war in Indochina. She volunteered for French Indochina and arrived there in May 1953, in the middle of the war between French forces and the Vietminh. Galard was stationed in Hanoi and flew on casualty evacuation flights from Pleiku. After January 1954 she was on the flights that evacuated casualties from the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Her first patients were mainly soldiers who suffered from diseases but after mid-March most of them were battle casualties. Sometimes Red Cross planes had to land in the midst of Vietminh artillery barrages. On March 27, 1954, when a Red Cross C-47 with Galard aboard tried to land at night on the short runway of Dien Bien Phu, the landing overshot and the plane's left engine was seriously damaged. The mechanics could not repair the plane in the field, so the plane was stranded. At daylight Vietminh artillery destroyed the C-47 and damaged the runway beyond repair. Galard went to a field hospital under command of doctor Paul Grauwin and volunteered her services as a nurse. Although the men of the medical staff were initially apprehensive —she was the only woman in the base —they eventually made accommodations for her. They also arranged a semblance of uniform; camouflage overalls, trousers, basketball shoes, and a t-shirt. Galard did her best in very unsanitary conditions, comforting those about to die and trying to keep up morale in the face of the mounting casualties. Many of the men later complimented her efforts. On the 29th of April 1954 Genevièvee de Galard was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Légion d ́Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. It was presented to her by the commander of Dien Bien Phu, General de Castries. The following day, during the celebration of the French Foreign Legion's annual "Camerone", de Galard was made an honorary "Legionnaire de 1ère classe" alongside Lieutenant Colonel Marcel Bigeard, the commander of the 6th Colonial Parachute Battalion. French troops at Dien Bien Phu finally capitulated on May 7. However, the Vietminh allowed Galard and the medical staff continue to care for their wounded. Galard still refused any kind of cooperation. When some of the Vietminh begun to hoard medical supplies for their own use, she hid some of them under her stretcher bed. On May 24, Gènevieve de Galard was evacuated to French-held Hanoi, partially against her will. The American press gave her the name “Angel of Dien Bien Phu.” She was given a tickertape parade up Broadway, a standing ovation in Congress. On 29 July 1954 President Eisenhower awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. She currently lives in Paris with her husband.
Download or read book Navy Medicine in Vietnam written by Jan K. Herman and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book chronicles the Navy Medical Department's participation in Vietnam, beginning with the Navy's rescue of the French survivors of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and ending with the Navy's rescue of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. When American involvement reached its peak in 1968, the 750-bed Naval Support Activity Hospital Danang (NSAH) was in full operation, and two hospital ships--the USS Repose and the USS Sanctuary--cruised offshore. Whether the situation called for saving the lives of injured sailors aboard a burning aircraft carrier or treating a critically wounded Marine for shock in the rubble-strewn streets of Hue, Navy medical personnel were in Vietnam from the beginning of American involvement to the very end, saving thousands of lives. This book tells the story of the Navy Medical Department's involvement through stark and gripping first-person accounts by patients and the Navy physicians, dentists, nurses, and hospital corpsmen who treated them. More than 50 historic photos document their work.
Download or read book Valley of Death written by Ted Morgan and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-02-23 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ted Morgan has now written a rich and definitive account of the fateful battle that ended French rule in Indochina—and led inexorably to America’s Vietnam War. Dien Bien Phu was a remote valley on the border of Laos along a simple rural trade route. But it would also be where a great European power fell to an underestimated insurgent army and lost control of a crucial colony. Valley of Death is the untold story of the 1954 battle that, in six weeks, changed the course of history. A veteran of the French Army, Ted Morgan has made use of exclusive firsthand reports to create the most complete and dramatic telling of the conflict ever written. Here is the history of the Vietminh liberation movement’s rebellion against French occupation after World War II and its growth as an adversary, eventually backed by Communist China. Here too is the ill-fated French plan to build a base in Dien Bien Phu and draw the Vietminh into a debilitating defeat—which instead led to the Europeans being encircled in the surrounding hills, besieged by heavy artillery, overrun, and defeated. Making expert use of recently unearthed or released information, Morgan reveals the inner workings of the American effort to aid France, with Eisenhower secretly disdainful of the French effort and prophetically worried that “no military victory was possible in that type of theater.” Morgan paints indelible portraits of all the major players, from Henri Navarre, head of the French Union forces, a rigid professional unprepared for an enemy fortified by rice carried on bicycles, to his commander, General Christian de Castries, a privileged, miscast cavalry officer, and General Vo Nguyen Giap, a master of guerrilla warfare working out of a one-room hut on the side of a hill. Most devastatingly, Morgan sets the stage for the Vietnam quagmire that was to come. Superbly researched and powerfully written, Valley of Death is the crowning achievement of an author whose work has always been as compulsively readable as it is important.
Download or read book Dien Bien Phu written by John Keegan and published by . This book was released on 1974-01-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dien Bien Phu written by Howard R. Simpson and published by History of War. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A military classic. Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Guerrilla Surgeon written by Dr. Lindsay Rogers and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Rogers was a New Zealander who, after duty with British troops in North Africa during the early years of the war, made the decision to enter guerrilla warfare in the Balkans and was accepted for training to join the Jugoslav partisans. The account of his experiences, written a decade ago after he had just left the country, has the freshness of recently known people and events and the detachment of a thoughtful mind which could pause to analyse and indicate their meaning for the course of victory and for future Balkan politics. On one level the narrative is full of the scenes of daily life. There are conversations with his aids Bill and Ian (important people in the book), the work in makeshift hospitals, the dangers of movement and escapes and the developing friendships with many of the partisani. But these last, for example, are also geared to show their tendency towards Russian sympathies and the unfortunate handling of British propaganda which made the partisansi think that Britain’s main contribution to the war was in helping Mikhailovich. We see too Dr. Rogers’ concern with medical methods. He was appalled at the rough and unsympathetic operation room techniques he found among German trained doctors; he saw the possibility for a system of evacuating the wounded to Italy. Eventually he became so valuable that Tito commandeered him from the base in Croatia, where Rogers was beginning to feel at home, to start a medical school in Bosnia. A personal history which is exciting and perceptive enough to hold its own in the war annals market.—Kirkus Book Review
Download or read book Analogies at War written by Yuen Foong Khong and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1992-05-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From World War I to Operation Desert Storm, American policymakers have repeatedly invoked the "lessons of history" as they contemplated taking their nation to war. Do these historical analogies actually shape policy, or are they primarily tools of political justification? Yuen Foong Khong argues that leaders use analogies not merely to justify policies but also to perform specific cognitive and information-processing tasks essential to political decision-making. Khong identifies what these tasks are and shows how they can be used to explain the U.S. decision to intervene in Vietnam. Relying on interviews with senior officials and on recently declassified documents, the author demonstrates with a precision not attained by previous studies that the three most important analogies of the Vietnam era--Korea, Munich, and Dien Bien Phu--can account for America's Vietnam choices. A special contribution is the author's use of cognitive social psychology to support his argument about how humans analogize and to explain why policymakers often use analogies poorly.
Download or read book Valley of the Shadow written by Kevin Boylan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the end of World War II, France attempted to reassert control over its colonies in Indochina. In Vietnam, this was resisted by the Viet Minh leading to the First Indochina War. By 1954, the French army was on the defensive and determined to force the Viet Minh into a decisive set-piece battle at Dien Bien Phu. Over the past five decades, Western authors have generally followed a standard narrative of the siege of Dien Bien Phu, depicting the Viet Minh besiegers as a faceless horde which overwhelmed the intrepid garrison by sheer weight of numbers, superior firepower, and logistics. However, a wealth of new Vietnamese-language sources tell a very different story, revealing for the first time the true Viet Minh order of battle and the details of the severe logistical constraints within which the besiegers had to operate. Using these sources, complemented by interviews with French veterans and research in the French Army and French Foreign Legion archives, this book, now publishing in paperback, provides a new telling of the climactic battle in the Indochina War, the conflict that set the stage for the Vietnam War a decade later.
Download or read book Dien Bien Phu 1954 written by Martin Windrow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A highly illustrated study of the battle at Dien Bien Phu, the 56-day siege that eventually led to the surrender of the remaining French-led forces, this iconic battle provided the climax of the First Indochina War. In late 1953, the seventh year of France's war against the Viet Minh insurgency in its colony of Vietnam, the C-in-C, General Navarre, was encouraged to plant an 'air-ground base' in the Thai Highlands at Dien Bien Phu, to distract General Giap's Vietnamese People's Army from both Annam and the French northern heartland in the Red River Delta, and to protect the Laotian border. Elite French paratroopers captured Dien Bien Phu, which was reinforced between December 1953 and February 1954 with infantry and artillery, a squadron of tanks and one of fighter-bombers, to a strength of 10,000 men. Giap and the VPA General Staff accepted the challenge of a major positional battle; through a total mobilization of national resources, and with Chinese logistical help, they assembled a siege army of 58,000 regular troops, equipped for the first time with 105mm artillery and 37mm AA guns. Here, author Martin Windrow describes how from their first assaults on 13 March 1954, the battle quickly developed into a dramatic 56-day 'Stalingrad in the jungle' that drew the attention of the world.
Download or read book Operation Vulture written by John Prados and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the little known story of how the American President and his cabinet carried the United States to the brink of war in Indochina and potentially China—in 1954! Americans and the U.S. were intimately involved in the key battle that ended the French occupation of Vietnam. Operation Vulture tells the story of secret U.S. efforts to sustain the French in Indochina, of the men who labored alongside the French military, of the frantic behind-closed-door meetings and confrontations in Washington as diplomats sought the American’s intervention, and of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s reluctant step back from sending in the Marines and using atomic bombs. Presenting the story from the U.S., French, and Vietnamese points of view, this eBook edition of Operation Vulture is completely revised and rewritten, with new text on almost every international facet of the Dien Bien Phu battle. It provides the most detailed treatment of the secret plan to drop tactical nuclear weapons there. It includes fresh material on American naval and air operations, on the CIA and French intelligence, on U.S. and French efforts to relieve the besieged fortress, on the historical disputes over the diplomacy of Dien Bien Phu and Geneva, and on the cover-up of Eisenhower era records of these events. Also included are new maps specifically prepared for this edition. PRAISE: “A detailed and readable study…” —Foreign Affairs “Dr. Prados’s perceptive...account gains impressive credence from his extensive use of recently declassified material.” —Army Magazine “John Prados is a clever and prodigious digger of historical fact.” —Evan Thomas, New York Times Bestselling Author
Download or read book The Road to Dien Bien Phu written by Christopher Goscha and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multifaceted history of Ho Chi Minh’s climactic victory over French colonial might that foreshadowed America’s experience in Vietnam On May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power and win. After nearly a decade of struggle, a nation forged in the crucible of war had achieved a victory undreamed of by any other national liberation movement. The Road to Dien Bien Phu tells the story of how Ho Chi Minh turned a ragtag guerrilla army into a modern fighting force capable of bringing down the formidable French army. Taking readers from the outbreak of fighting in 1945 to the epic battle at Dien Bien Phu, Christopher Goscha shows how Ho transformed Vietnam from a decentralized guerrilla state based in the countryside to a single-party communist state shaped by a specific form of “War Communism.” Goscha discusses how the Vietnamese operated both states through economics, trade, policing, information gathering, and communications technology. He challenges the wisdom of counterinsurgency methods developed by the French and still used by the Americans today, and explains why the First Indochina War was arguably the most brutal war of decolonization in the twentieth century, killing a million Vietnamese, most of them civilians. Panoramic in scope, The Road to Dien Bien Phu transforms our understanding of this conflict and the one the United States would later enter, and sheds new light on communist warfare and statecraft in East Asia today.
Download or read book How Presidents Test Reality written by John P. Burke and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1989-09-19 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as famines and plagues can provide opportunities for medical research, the unhappy course of United States relations with Vietnam is a prime source of evidence for students of American political institutions. How Presidents Test Reality draws on the record of American decision making about Vietnam to explore the capacity of top government executives and their advisers to engage in effective reality testing. Authors Burke and Greenstein compare the Vietnam decisions of two presidents whose leadership styles and advisory systems diverged as sharply as any in the modern presidency. Faced with a common challenge—an incipient Communist take-over of Vietnam—presidents Eisenhower and Johnson engaged in intense debates with their aides and associates, some of whom favored intervention and some of whom opposed it. In the Dien Bien Phu Crisis of 1954, Eisenhower decided not to enter the conflict; in 1965, when it became evident that the regime in South Vietnam could not hold out much longer, Johnson intervened. How Presidents Test Reality uses declassified records and interviews with participants to assess the adequacy of each president’s use of advice and information. This important book advances our historical understanding of the American involvement in Vietnam and illuminates the preconditions of effective presidential leadership in the modern world. "An exceptionally thoughtful exercise in what ‘contemporary history’ ought to be. Illuminates the past in a way that suggests how we might deal with the present and the future." —John Lewis Gaddis "Burke and Greenstein have written what amounts to an owner's manual for operating the National Security Council....This is a book Reagan's people could have used and George Bush ought to read." —Bob Schieffer, The Washington Monthly
Download or read book A Doctor s Vietnam Journal written by Carl E. Bartecchi, M.D. and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2020-02-26 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Merriam Press Military History. A history of military and civilian medicine in Vietnam from World War II when the Japanese occupied Indochina through the French occupation after World War II and the American involvement in Vietnam, up to the present day. It is also a journal of the author's service as a doctor in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and later when he organized humanitarian aid for the Vietnamese and in particular assisting one hospital and its staff with training, equipment and supplies. Foreword by Patrick Brady MG, USA, Ret, who served as a Dustoff helicopter pilot in Vietnam and recipient of the Medal of Honor. 63 photos, 2 illustrations, 5 maps.
Download or read book Navy Medicine in Vietnam written by Jan K. Herman and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Navy Medicine in Vietnam begins and ends with a humanitarian operation-the first, in 1954, after the French were defeated, when refugees fled to South Vietnam to escape from the communist regime in the North; and the second, in 1975, after the fall of Saigon and the final stage of America's exit that entailed a massive helicopter evacuation of American staff and selected Vietnamese and their families from South Vietnam. In both cases the Navy provided medical support to avert the spread of disease and tend to basic medical needs. Between those dates, 1954 and 1975, Navy medical personnel responded to the buildup and intensifying combat operations by taking a multipronged approach in treating casualties. Helicopter medical evacuations, triaging, and a system of moving casualties from short-term to long-term care meant higher rates of survival and targeted care. Poignant recollections of the medical personnel serving in Vietnam, recorded by author Jan Herman, historian of the Navy Medical Department, are a reminder of the great sacrifices these men and women made for their country and their patients.
Download or read book Modern Warfare written by Roger Trinquier and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1964 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book French Foreign L gionnaire vs Viet Minh Insurgent written by Martin Windrow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French Indochina War (1946–54) was the largest of the first generation of post-World War II wars of decolonization as Vietminh insurgents sought to topple their French colonial masters. It was also unique in that the insurgency evolved from low-level guerrilla activity to mobile operations by a large conventional army which finally defeated a large European-led expeditionary force, supported by artillery, armour and airpower. The war's progress was almost entirely dictated by the extreme terrain, and by the Chinese support enjoyed by the Vietnamese insurgents. The actions explored in this study cover three contrasting phases of the war in Tonkin during 1948–52, setting both sides on the path that would lead to the conflict's climactic encounter at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Featuring specially commissioned artwork and drawing upon a range of sources, this meticulously researched study casts new light on the troops who fought on both sides in this evolving and momentous conflict.
