For nearly two months, within the hell of the besieged French army base at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, Geneviève de Galard, a army 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 battle 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 army disasters in French historical past, Ms. de Galard continued to alter the bandages of the wounded, refusing to go away 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 loss of life was confirmed by the French Protection Ministry. No different particulars got.
The battle of Dien Bien Phu ended practically seven a long time of French colonial rule, and for 70 years afterward, Ms. de Galard, a modest aristocrat, asserted, each time requested — and the questions grew to become 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 USA, Henri Bonnet, was “ecstatic” over this uncommon bit of fine publicity for a France in disarray, because the journalist Ted Morgan wrote in “Valley of Loss of life” (2010), his historical past of Dien Bien Phu.
That spirit remained even after her loss of life. 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 evening, 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 Instances on Might 17, 1954, wherein Ms. de Galard was described as “the one girl” at Dien Bien Phu — perpetuate a fable. 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 yr.
Dien Bien Phu, like different French army bases, housed not one however two “army discipline brothels” — army-maintained bordellos that on this case sheltered dozens of Vietnamese and North African ladies. In the course of the siege, with artillery raining down, the ladies “transformed themselves into nurse-assistants,” a army 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 army 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 seen 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 lower to items,’” he wrote.
That’s exactly what occurred. The Individuals had largely financed the French battle effort in Indochina, however they didn’t step in to avoid wasting 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 “in control of emergency care of essentially the most severely wounded,” she wrote.
“I labored below 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 photographs, altering bandages and distributing drugs.”
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 arms “had been wrapped like a mummy’s,” Ms. de Galard recalled. “Quickly the blinded youth, whose morale remained glorious, began spreading just a little 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 is 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 previous household in France’s southwest, and Germaine Suzanne Louise Marie de Roussel de Préville. Her father died when she was 9.
Geneviève attended faculties in Paris and, throughout the first years of World Conflict II, close to her household’s ancestral properties round Toulouse.
After finding out English on the Sorbonne throughout and after the battle, Ms. de Galard acquired 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 battle in French Indochina raging since late 1946, she went there for the primary time in 1953, connected 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 needed it to finish in a different way,” she instructed Le Figaro in 2014.
The Viet Minh freed her on Might 21, 1954, and he or she left Dien Bien Phu on the twenty fourth, not like 1000’s of different French prisoners, a lot of whom died on loss of life marches to prisoner of battle camps. Later that yr, 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 battle that it had vowed to remain out of.
Ms. de Galard left the military in 1955 and the following yr 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 identify was Geneviève de Heaulme de Boutsocq — is survived by her husband, who grew to become a colonel; her sons, François and Christophe; her daughter, Véronique de Heaulme de Boutsocq; and three grandchildren.
Ms. de Galard adopted her husband’s army postings, in Madagascar and elsewhere. Again in Paris, she grew to become a municipal councilor for the seventeenth arrondissement, the place she continued to reside within the condominium she had inhabited as a toddler. She held that submit for 18 years.
She instructed 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 method a mom, a sister, a buddy.”