Indo-China War Dead For France

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31119, 23 July 1966, Page 15

Indo-China War Dead For France

—(N.Z.P.A. Reuter—Copyright) PARIS, July 22. A tacit truce in the bombing of North Vietnam took place during the transfer on Wednesday and Thursday of bodies of French Indo-China war dead aboard a French cargo vessel, the French Minister for Ex-Servicemen, Mr A. Sanguinetti, said in Paris yesterday.

He said that General William Westmoreland, com-, mander-in-chief of the United! States forces in Vietnam,) cave the fullest protection to the French cargo vessel,) Moonie, during its three-day

stav in North Vietnam. He said that the North Vietnamese had responded to the French Government's requests for the transfer of the: dead in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement ending the Indio-Chinese war. But he added that the South Vietnamese authorities refused to consider a similar request for men who fell in South Vietnam because they refused to recognise the Geneva Agreements. Military Honours The Moonie dropped anchor in the Red river port of Haiphong on July 17 to take on board the bodies of 350 French soldiers killed during the Indo-China campaign and the bodies of two war heroes killed in the conquest of IndoChina in 1886. They are all being brought back to France for a ceremony with full military honours.

Pending the arrival of the Moonie, the North Vietnamese authorities had placed the bodies in deep underground shelters to protect them from the American bombings. Some 30.000 French officers and men are buried in North

Vietnam. Of these 12,000 are being regrouped in a new war cemetery near Hanoi.