2024-05-05 23:17:17
Bolzano. In these hours, seventy years ago, the French stronghold of Dien Bien Phu. Isabelle, Beatrice, Dominque, Eliane… eight entrenched positions with women’s names. A wide and bare valley surrounded by jungle, crossed by a river that ends in the Mekong. Close to Laos and in the heart of the Viet Minh army in northern Indochina. Ten thousand soldiers of the French Expeditionary Force besieged by 50 thousand men and women of the Vietnam Liberation Army under the command of General Giap and under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, “He who brings the light”. The battle, which began on March 13, 1954, ended on May 7: 56 days of blood and death, thousands of dead, wounded and missing on both sides. Dien Bien Phu thus enters the history books: it marks the end – after 130 years – of French colonialism in Indochina, the division on the seventeenth parallel between the communist north and the Western-orbited south, and the beginning of the American commitment to area that will lead to another horrible war.
The exhibition
At the Rovereto War Museum Tuesday 7 May at 6pm the exhibition “Forgotten Vietnam” is inaugurated on young Italians who fought in the first Indochina war with the French Foreign Legion. It is estimated that there were between seven and ten thousand in the eight years of the conflict (1946-1954). Over a thousand dead and missing. Hundreds of wounded and deserters. The exhibition will display images and testimonies made available by family members of the legionaries, mostly collected by the editor-in-chief of Alto Adige Luca Mopauthor of two books on this topic (Over there where people die e Soldiers of Misfortune published by Athesia). Along with the photos, which come from 21 different personal and family archives, documenting the experience of the Italian volunteers in the Legion, there will be autobiographical testimonies and some objects and documents from the Museum’s collections. A glimpse of removed history that tells the drama of the “lost soldiers”.
The lost soldiers
But who were these guys? It’s too easy to label them with the cliché of the unscrupulous mercenary or the criminal legionnaire on the run from who knows what past. The reality is much more complex. There were the losers of the Second World War, fascists looking for a place to start again. But also communist partisans who were unable to reintegrate into Italian society reduced to rubble. For the most part, however, these legionaries were very young economic migrants, clandestinely expatriated in France in search of work, or fleeing from the mines of the Pas de Calais where the living conditions were horrible. Boys born between 1929 and 1935, who often naively ended up in the Legion shirts. For illegal immigrants, arrested and ended up in prison, the five years of detention in the Képi blanc were presented as an opportunity to avoid prison and repatriation. In exchange, at the end of the employment, they would obtain citizenship and also a job. Many had a romantic and adventurous idea of the Legion. And no knowledge of the fact that France was engaged in Indochina in a ferocious war of colonial reconquest that needed possibly non-French cannon fodder: legionnaires and colonial troops (Senegalese, Moroccans, Algerians).
Dien Bien Phu
There were many Italian legionaries killed, missing or survived in the final chapter of Dien Bien Phu. The exhibition tells the stories of some of them. The Bolzaninsand Rodolfo Altadonna e Alfredo Decarliaged 22 and 19, killed at Easter ’54 the day after being parachuted onto the plain, and two weeks after landing in Saigon.
O Luciano Antonelli, a student at the Galilei high school in Trento, who ran away to France at 17 after a disappointment at school. He survived but without an arm. This is how he told his story to the Alto Adige newspaper in 1955: «As soon as I arrived in the valley, I was immediately placed in command of 24 men. Every day I carried out clearing actions towards China and on the colonial road. I entered the woods: at every step there was a hidden danger. We fought with mud and deadly Viet traps. The rebels dug holes and then placed deadly pikes in them. I had to fight with bladed weapons several times. The ground was strewn with the dead. On April 27th I was ordered to replace a section destroyed by the Viets and retake the position. Six legionaries of the 24 I commanded fell almost immediately. We stuck ourselves in a trench where we positioned the machine guns and waited for the night. At dawn the Viets managed to enter the fort. It was a desperate, hand-to-hand fight. We all remained on the ground. I and four others were wounded, the Viets thought we were dead, the others had been massacred. When the Red Basques, the paratroopers, arrived to retake the position, I was almost bleeding to death. They took me behind our lines, to the hospital. Dr. Grauwin gave me transfusions, clamped my artery but couldn’t extract a bullet from my left arm or operate on the torn tendon. Without medications, I still managed to resist until the capitulation on May 7th.”
Antonelli was taken prisoner. «Lined up with seven thousand other men, I walked for 47 days. Meanwhile, my left arm was developing gangrene. In a re-education camp, Viet officers taught us communist doctrine. The armistice and the exchange of prisoners favored my fate. On August 1st ’54 I was put on board a French lookout and on September 19th I arrived by plane in Paris. I underwent several surgeries. The left arm is now almost useless, but on the other hand the ordeal is over. Indochina left scars on my body and soul.”
The Merano area Emil Stocker it was in the Beatrice redoubt, the first to fall into Viet hands on 13 March 1954. «We were being hammered by Ho Chi Minh’s 312th division – he recalled -, one of the most cruel and vindictive. I arrived in Dien Bien Phu in December ’53. We deforested everything. We had to bring everything from heaven. By land it was impossible. The forest was infested with Viets. Even the caterpillars arrived by parachute. Our planes bombed with napalm. Bombs weighing 250 kilos each. The French used it in massive doses. It was all American stuff. For us it was normal to see the jungle burned by napalm. My battalion was disbanded after Dien Bien Phu because it no longer existed. Out of 120 of my company, twenty of us survived.”
Bruno Pasquali, Trentino from Romagnano, who joined the Foreign Legion after being arrested for escaping from the coal mines, described his experience to the Alto Adige newspaper in 1989: «It was a valley that looked a bit like ours in Trentino, surrounded by low mountains covered in jungle. The Viet Minh, carrying mortars on their shoulders through paths cut into the jungle, had us completely surrounded. During the day we were the masters, but at night it was hell. On May 7, the Vietnamese disarmed us, made us undress, gave us a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and, barefoot, we walked for days and nights to the prison camp. After a month I was lucky enough to be exchanged with Vietnamese prisoners: one of us against ten of them.”
The South Tyrolean Leopoldo Solvaparachutist legionnaire, Medal of Valor, escaped miraculously: «On April 21st we took off on the Dakotas from Hanoi for Dien Bien Phu. I was already on my hundredth throw, but when it was time to jump, I was scared. We all saw death before our eyes. I thought: “What an idiot, why didn’t I stay at home?”. But then the warning bell rings. And down from 1200 meters in 180 men right on the Viet Minh lines. It was hell in the air. In the darkness nothing could be seen except the tracer bullets of the machine guns. When I got to land, I didn’t understand anything, I didn’t know where I was. I hid in a hole, protecting myself from the cold with a parachute. I stayed there, alone, all night. In the morning, finally, my section chief arrived to pick me up together with fifteen men. They were all my old comrades. They asked me if I was crazy to go back to that hell. Of my unit, made up of 1,000 men, 170 were still alive; the rest dead, or worse still, prisoners. The same day we launched a counterattack from the Isabelle redoubt together with the colonial paratroopers, the red berets. In a couple of hours we had 16 dead and 40 injured, including the lieutenant captain who jumped on a mine. General Giap’s great attack was expected from moment to moment. It was the night of May 2nd. After four hours of artillery bombardment, the Viet, the death volunteers, arrived in their thousands. There was nothing to be done, we defended ourselves desperately, killing them like ants, but they always advanced…”.
The Italians with the Viet
In Dien Bien Phu there were also Italians fighting against the French, like the Bolzano native Beniamino Leoni and Friulian Derino Zecchino. Both former partisans (Leoni of the Piacenza Division, Zecchini of the Garibaldi), had defected from the Legion. He remembered Derino Zecchini: «I brought supplies for the troops and dug the tunnels. We were constantly moving around North Vietnam, North Vietnam. It was a mountainous area near the border of China. The commands and all the structures of the Viet Minh army were located there, naturally there were no barracks, otherwise it would be easy for the French helicopters to hit them, they lived with the farmers.” Once the war was over, Leoni, after a year in China with the hope of returning to Italy from the communist countries, handed himself back to the French. He was convicted of desertion and served his sentence at the Baumettes prison in Marseille. Zecchini remained in Vietnam for a few more years before returning thanks to the intervention of the Italian council authorities in Hong Kong.
2024-05-05 23:17:17