Sampans glide silently in the darkness over an inland waterway in North Vietnam’s Red River Delta. Five Frenchmen and 120 Vietnamese commandos are on their way to make a deep behind-the-lines raid on Ho Chi Minh’s communist Viet Minh guerrillas. Their mission involves collecting intelligence, seizing prisoners for interrogation, and sowing confusion behind enemy lines. Among these nocturnal predators are many former Viet Minh fighters captured by the French. The lone French officer and his NCOs operate in the knowledge that they may be killed by their own men at any time. This was life for the French commandos in North Vietnam from 1951 to 1954, predecessors of the American Green Berets.
When Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny became commander-in-chief of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps in December 1950, French forces had been struggling for nearly six years to reestablish control over the Indochina colonies. Japanese forces had destroyed the French occupation army in 1945, leaving a postwar power void exploited by Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh. The arrival of de Lattre, a legendary French soldier known to his men as “King Jean,” reinvigorated the badly demoralized Expeditionary Corps.
Realizing the futility of following the old rules of combat, de Lattre cleared out incompetent officers and introduced new ideas, weapons, and tactics, including a plan to create a series of new commando groups for use in northern Vietnam. Composed almost entirely of Vietnamese troops with a few French officers or NCOs in command, these units took the war to the Viet Minh using ruthless methods and intimate knowledge of the terrain. It was a war of no quarter, fought almost exclusively at night with knives as much as submachine guns by men disguised as the enemy—men with a special gift for killing in the dark.
Even before the World War II liberation of Paris, Free French leader Gen. Charles de Gaulle planned to reestablish French control (wild buffalo), were dropped into Japanese-occupied Laos. Torture was inevitable in cases of capture, and cyanide pills were issued regularly. Some commandos were highly trained veterans of the Free French companies of the British Special Air Service (SAS) and continued to wear the regiment’s berets.
