Doctor At Dien Bien Phu

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.

French army doctor recounts the siege of Dien Bien Phu.

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.

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.

Valérie André is one of the great military aviators of the twentieth century. She was the first woman to fly a helicopter in combat and one of the first three helicopter medevac pilots. Flying more than 150 helicopter rescue missions during the French war in Indochina (including at Dien Bien Phu), and parachuting into the field twice, André was a trailblazer, a pioneer of flying helicopters in combat and an innovator of battlefield medicine, who risked her life to treat the wounded, whether they were French or Vietnamese, whether they were friend, civilian, or foe. Aviation historian Charles Morgan Evans tells her story with verve and pathos. André was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1922. From an early age, she wanted to fly, but as a woman, she faced challenges. While boys could receive government-funded flight lessons, André had to pay for hers by tutoring. During World War II, she left Strasbourg against German prohibitions in order to study medicine in Paris, where she completed her studies under threat of arrest by the Gestapo. Assigned to an army hospital in Saigon in French Indochina in the late 1940s, André trained as a neurosurgeon, performing one hundred procedures per month. When the French medical corps developed mobile surgical units to be air-dropped into military outposts, she quickly volunteered, and then when the service acquired a few primitive helicopters, she volunteered for that, which meant learning to fly helicopters in combat. Flying through bullets and bombs, fatigue, parasitic illness, and mechanical issues with the helicopters— not to mention the French army’s prejudice against a female pilot and surgeon—André nonetheless became a legend in Indochina. The Vietnamese called her “the woman who comes down from the sky” and “Mrs. Ventilator.” On one day in December 1951, she flew her chopper into the teeth of antiaircraft fire to a besieged base, where she performed emergency brain surgeries, then flew the wounded to hospitals in Hanoi, two at a time. After Indochina, she continued to be an innovator in military aviation and medicine as well as an advocate for women’s integration into the French military. In the early 1960s, she flew another 236 missions in Algeria. In 1975, she became the first female general in the French army, and at her retirement, she had flown nearly 500 combat missions, logged 4,000 hours in helicopters, and won the Croix de Guerre five times, the Cross of Military Valor twice, and the Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit. André, who just turned ninety-nine, is still alive and lives near Paris, and this book is based on a series of author interviews with her and comprehensive research in other sources.

The young American who became a living legend to the world tells how as a navy doctor he helped half a million Vietnamese refugees escape from communist terror... This is the true, first-hand narrative of a twenty-seven-year-old Navy Doctor who found himself suddenly ordered to Indo-China, just after the tragic fall of Dien Bien Phu. In a small international compound within the totally Communist-consumed North Viet Nam, he built huge refugee camps to care for the hundreds of thousands of escapees seeking passage to freedom. Through his own ingenuity and that of his shipmates, and with touching humor, he managed to feed, clothe, and treat these leftovers of an eight-year war. Dr. Dooley “processed” over 600,000 refugees down the river and out to sea on small craft, where they were transferred to U.S. Navy ships to be carried to the free areas of Saigon. The “Bac Sy My,” as they called the American doctor, explains how he conquered the barriers of custom, language and hate to become, as the President of Viet Nam said of him, “Beloved by a whole nation.”