T E E T A B L E T , May 9th, 1953.

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 201, No. 5894

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

LONDON, MAY 9th, 1953

NINEPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1 8 4 0

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

LOYALTIES The Offer of Bribes to Communist Pilots CHANGES IN THE CORONATION SERVICE

Past and Present. By H . P . R. Finberg AUSTRALIAN IMPRESSIONS: I At the National Eucharistic Congress. By Robert Speaight A LETTER FROM ROME EXPLORER AND ECLECTIC

The Communist Attack

By Sir Arnold Lunn

DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES The Men who Imprisoned Cardinal Mindszenty. By Bela Fabian A MEETING AT MERANO FILM FESTIVAL AT CANNES

By Michael Derrick

By Freda Bruce Lockhart

THE MARCH TOWARDS SIAM T HE invasion of Laos, the drive towards Siam and Cambodia, has changed the character o f the war in IndoChina. The Korean aggression, far from being terminated, is continued a t a key centre of South-East Asia. The Communist armies of Viet-Minh are in occupation of over half o f Vietnam, leaving the French to hold the bigger cities, like Haiphong, Hanoi and Saigon, but without their road and railway links. The attack has now been deflected from these heavily protected garrisons, justifying some of the criticism which has lately been levelled against the French conduct of the war. There are not enough troops to garrison all of Indo-China and block off every single point against a possible Viet-Minh advance such as the one into Laos. The French Union forces, as well as the national troops, are excessively hampered by their echelons, and have not been able yet to meet the extraordinary mobility of the enemy forces. The strategic system o f outpost fortifications is being criticised because it enables comparatively few rebel troops to hold down a far larger number of the defenders. Many villages in the Tonkin Delta and elsewhere are in French hands by day and in Viet-Minh hands by night. The rebels emerge in the darkness, mine the roads, besiege isolated posts and hold political meetings in the villages, collecting recruits as well as replenishing their food stores.

observers, and the appointment o f a successor to General Salan, who has been recalled, is being discussed in Paris. General Juin’s name has been mentioned, but he is known to favour sending to the Far East the forty thousand conscript troops now available in France, a measure to which the Ministry of War has declared itself opposed. French Mistakes

The French parliamentary Commission which investigated conditions in the Far East has now submitted its report. It has not been published, but it appears that this document contains some severe criticism of political groups and their backers a t home who are involved in dubious financial and exchange manipulations from which they are alleged to have derived enormous profits. But, wherever the blame may lie, successive French Governments since 1946 have made the overriding mistake in regarding the three new independent states o f Indo-China—Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—as potentially francophil, while the Viet-Minh rebels based their policy on the more realistic conjecture, which events have justified, that their supporters are in all three States.

General Revers, a former Chief o f the French General Staff, whose report on Indo-China caused a sensation four years ago, told the Paris Soir in an interview last week that in his view the Hoa Binh campaign, which the Government had forced upon the late Marshal de Lattre against his advice, had failed, because it permitted the Viet-Minh forces which had been already driven from the Tonkin Delta to return there again. Today this area provides the important supply-line for the southward drive, and the essential link with Communist China. The General also said that the commando tactics in which the new Vietnamese forces were being trained had no other use but to kill and terrorize the coolies of the Communist supply columns, while the Viet-Minh divisions themselves escaped by their fluid movements at night. The lack of a supreme Commander with powers such as General Templer holds in Malaya is noted by all military

The speed of the advance into Laos proves that they were not deceived. Bang Chuan Khu, himself a Laotian, is one of Ho Chi Minh’s closest political advisers. The King of Laos has declared himself opposed to the Communists, but he has always tried to reunite under his crown territories which once formed part of Laos and are now under Burmese and Siamese sovereigns. This aim is naturally supported by the Viet-Minh leader, who last February broadcast over Peking radio appeals to the Laos peasants to take up arms for the cause of their reunited country. The resemblance of these tactics with those practised by Hitler in the Sudetenland and by the Communists in Central and Eastern Europe after the war is obvious. The Success of M. Pinay’s Followers

The emphatic success in the French municipal elections of the Independents and dissident Gaullists representing, broadly, the “Pinay policy,” is likely to have repercussions on the parliamentary situation immediately the National Assembly re-convenes. A considerable measure o f unity among the parties of the majority—Radicals, MRP, ARS