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For nearly two months, within the hell of the besieged French navy base at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, Geneviève de Galard, a navy nurse, tended to the wounded in a darkish, filthy underground infirmary — males with holes of their backs, abdomens shot out, shrapnel wounds all over the place.
When the combat was over, on Might 7, 1954, after greater than 10,000 troopers had been taken prisoner by the communist Viet Minh insurgents in one of many biggest navy disasters in French historical past, Ms. de Galard continued to vary the bandages of the wounded, refusing to depart their aspect. By then the legend of the “Angel of Dien Bien Phu,” because the American press later baptized her, had been born.
Ms. de Galard died on Might 30 in Paris at 99. Her demise was confirmed by the French Protection Ministry. No different particulars got.
The battle of Dien Bien Phu ended almost seven many years of French colonial rule, and for 70 years afterward, Ms. de Galard, a modest aristocrat, asserted, every time requested — and the questions turned much less and fewer frequent as France sought to place that inglorious episode behind it — that she had merely “finished my responsibility.”
However the French had turned to her gratefully. She was “a legend to wipe out the traumatism of the failure, the horror of a sacrifice,” as Le Monde put it in a profile of Ms. de Galard in 2005. In 1954, after a canopy story in Paris Match journal, a hero’s welcome in France and quite a few medals and decorations, Individuals welcomed her with a standing ovation in Congress, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and a ticker-tape parade down Broadway.
The French ambassador to the US, Henri Bonnet, was “ecstatic” over this uncommon bit of excellent publicity for a France in disarray, because the journalist Ted Morgan wrote in “Valley of Dying” (2010), his historical past of Dien Bien Phu.
That spirit remained even after her demise. In a tribute to Ms. de Galard, President Emmanuel Macron wrote: “For 2 months, the one nurse in that tropical hellhole the place 15,000 males fought and died, she defied, day and night time, the grotesque precariousness of the sanitary circumstances, working, consoling, accompanying the dying. She did extra than simply heal our bodies, she healed souls.”
These phrases although — like a contemporaneous dispatch in The New York Occasions on Might 17, 1954, during which Ms. de Galard was described as “the one girl” at Dien Bien Phu — perpetuate a fantasy. Ms. de Galard was neither the “solely nurse” nor “the one girl” on the base, as some digging by the Le Monde journalist Benoît Hopquin demonstrated final 12 months.
Dien Bien Phu, like different French navy bases, housed not one however two “navy area brothels” — army-maintained bordellos that on this case sheltered dozens of Vietnamese and North African ladies. Throughout the siege, with artillery raining down, the ladies “transformed themselves into nurse-assistants,” a navy physician, Jean-Marie Madelaine, wrote in a letter unearthed by Le Monde, “volunteering for harmful water transport, eliminating the rubbish, the vomit, the excrement, the bandages dripping with blood and pus, giving water to those that now not may use their arms, giving their hand to the dying. They had been admirable.”
Traces of the ladies have been effaced by historical past and a French navy institution not keen to recollect them; the ladies don’t seem in a memoir by Ms. Galard.
In a matter-of-fact tone, the memoir, translated into English as “The Angel of Dien Bien Phu,” recounts her being trapped with the others on the base, remoted 280 miles from Hanoi. In his personal memoirs, Eisenhower considered the institution of the bottom as a strategic blunder by the French, leaving him “horror-stricken.”
“I simply stated, ‘My goodness, you don’t pen up troops in a fortress, and all historical past exhibits that they’re simply going to be reduce to items,’” he wrote.
That’s exactly what occurred. The Individuals had largely financed the French conflict effort in Indochina, however they didn’t step in to save lots of Dien Bien Phu.
Within the months main as much as that remaining battle, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap’s Viet Minh forces had packed the encircling hills with artillery. By March 30, 1954, with the bottom surrounded, the airstrip out of fee and the aircraft that had introduced Ms. de Galard there broken, there was no escape.
Ms. de Galard, who was 29, was put “answerable for emergency care of essentially the most significantly wounded,” she wrote.
“I labored beneath the sunshine of an electrical lamp within the hall, one knee on the bottom, the opposite on the sting of the stretcher,” she continued. “On this underground of struggling, daily I attended to the wounded, giving pictures, altering bandages and distributing medication.”
The physician in cost, Main Paul-Henri Grauwin, wrote in a memoir: “Whereas the shells had been falling, I watched her and was astonished by her calm. She went from wounded man to wounded man, considering nothing of it. She had the gestures that had been wanted, the sweetness, the precision.”
One of many wounded’s face and fingers “had been wrapped like a mummy’s,” Ms. de Galard recalled. “Quickly the blinded youth, whose morale remained wonderful, began spreading a bit laughter round him” by making an attempt to play the harmonica.
On April 29, with the Viet Minh closing in, she was summoned to the underground bunker of the commanding officer, Gen. Christian de la Croix de Castries, who pinned on Ms. de Galard the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian ornament, as shells exploded exterior.
“She’s going to all the time be, for the combatants at Dien Bien Phu,” the quotation learn, “the purest incarnation of the heroic virtues of the French nurse.”
Geneviève Marie Anne Marthe de Galard Terraube was born on April 13, 1925, within the ninth arrondissement of Paris to Henri Marie Oger de Galard Terraube, a reserve military officer and aristocrat from an outdated household in France’s southwest, and Germaine Suzanne Louise Marie de Roussel de Préville. Her father died when she was 9.
Geneviève attended colleges in Paris and, in the course of the first years of World Warfare II, close to her household’s ancestral properties round Toulouse.
After finding out English on the Sorbonne throughout and after the conflict, Ms. de Galard obtained her nursing diploma in 1950. And, after a retreat at a Benedictine convent, she was admitted to the French armed forces’ corps of flight nurses, charged with tending to the wounded who had been evacuated from battlegrounds by aircraft.
With the conflict in French Indochina raging since late 1946, she went there for the primary time in 1953, hooked up to Hanoi’s Lanessan hospital. By the point of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, she had already undertaken quite a few rescue missions there and elsewhere.
“I so wished it to finish otherwise,” she informed Le Figaro in 2014.
The Viet Minh freed her on Might 21, 1954, and she or he left Dien Bien Phu on the twenty fourth, in contrast to 1000’s of different French prisoners, a lot of whom died on demise marches to prisoner of conflict camps. Later that 12 months, France gave up North Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh’s communists, enabling the fateful partition of the nation that led the U.S. right into a conflict that it had vowed to remain out of.
Ms. de Galard left the military in 1955 and the subsequent 12 months married Capt. Jean de Heaulme de Boutsocq, a paratrooper who had been one of many first to greet her on her liberation.
Ms. de Galard — her full married title was Geneviève de Heaulme de Boutsocq — is survived by her husband, who turned a colonel; her sons, François and Christophe; her daughter, Véronique de Heaulme de Boutsocq; and three grandchildren.
Ms. de Galard adopted her husband’s navy postings, in Madagascar and elsewhere. Again in Paris, she turned a municipal councilor for the seventeenth arrondissement, the place she continued to reside within the condo she had inhabited as a toddler. She held that submit for 18 years.
She informed interviewers that her life had been profoundly marked by her expertise at Dien Bien Phu.
“My mere presence, as a result of I used to be a lady, appeared to render this hell rather less inhuman,” she wrote. “In Dien Bien Phu, I used to be in a manner a mom, a sister, a pal.”
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