Just finished “The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam” by Martin Windrow. One of the very best books I’ve read in the last several years; brilliant in fact. Working my way through “The Fight” by John White, on spiritual warfare for the Christian.
“The Last Valley” is very tragic. Before you start reading, you already know what the outcome will be but I found myself (strangely enough) hoping for a different outcome. How terribly the French troops suffered during that siege. I can’t even begin to think of how awful it must have been.
In some respects, I think the decline of France (in the post WWII years) started there. As I once read somewhere “France lost its backbone in Indochina and it lost its soul in Algeria” - or something similar to that.