Failure
The Sam Neua team, which was in advance, as it was closer to Dien Bien Phu, joined Sassi's GCMA and taped it into the outpost. According to Sassi, the heading commandos were only a few dozens of kilometers from Eliane.
Eliane fell on April 31 but this failed operation was followed by the cancelled Operation Vulture. Eventually, Dien Bien Phu surrendered on May 7, 1954, though Sassi's emergency column found rare Dien Bien Phu survivors who had escaped through the jungle, approximatively 150.
After the war, the military jury charged General Cogny – who ordered the Dien Bien Phu garrison to surrender from his base in Hanoi – for the operation's failure as the "emergency column" GCMA was parachuted too late.
Read more about this topic: Operation Condor (1954)
Famous quotes containing the word failure:
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.”
—William Empson (1906–1984)
“The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)