L’Armée de l’Air en Indochine

The war in Indochina really started at the end of 1946, when Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Viet-Minh, a revolutionary front of communist persuasion which had proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam as soon as the Japanese capitulated in September 1945, launched a general insurrection against the French presence in the country. From the first days of the conflict, the air force, in the absence of any enemy threat from the sky, was engaged in the ground support role for the French troops, this being a not negligible number of units of fighters, bombers, and reconnaissance and transport aircraft. The difficult weather conditions in Indochina together with the enemy gradually reinforcing its anti-aircraft defence caused heavy losses among the French pilots until the dramatic fall of Dien Bien Phu, on 7 May 1954, the date marking the beginning of France’s disengagement in Indochina.
This 200-page book gives an account of this rather badly-known period of the air force’s history, using hundreds of photographs, often unpublished because they came from private collections, all the units implicated in this war being described in detail, including those using helicopters, a type of aircraft still in its infancy but which was to play a preponderant role a few years later in the same region during the Viet-Nam war.