Geneviève de Galard, a French air force nurse in the 1950s Indochina war who became known as the “angel of Dien Bien Phu,” the only woman in an embattled garrison amid wounded and dying soldiers as well-armed guerrilla fighters closed in, died May 30 at age 99.
The death was announced by France’s Foreign Legion, but no other details were provided. She was given an honorary rank of Legionnaire first class in late April 1954, just before the fall of the French stronghold in Dien Bien Phu in what is now Vietnam.
During the battlefield ceremony, she promised a bottle of champagne to the soldier who put her name forward for a place in the storied corps. “If we ever get out of this alive,” she added.
About a week later, on May 7, 1954, the French base was overrun and more than 10,000 French troops, weak from hunger and exhaustion, laid down their arms. The defeat marked one of the final blows for France in an eight-year conflict with Viet Minh forces inspired by pro-independence leader Ho Chi Minh.
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The battles began as an uprising against French colonial rule but became seen in the West also as a stand against communism, including the Soviet Union’s support for the Viet Minh. (Years later, the same Cold War-shaped policies would define the Vietnam War.)
Ms. de Galard and others were soon allowed to evacuate Dien Bien Phu, a strategic foothold near the border with Laos. Her story and sense of duty quickly captivated war correspondents, including as the subject of a cover story in Paris Match as a symbol of French pride even in defeat.
She was a journalistic bonanza: a soft-spoken 29-year-old from an aristocratic French family who worked with medical teams for more than 40 days in an underground field hospital with the crossfire just a meter over their heads. She stashed away first-aid supplies and demanded that she continue to assist the wounded French personnel even after the guerrillas poured into the base, she later recounted.
“I preferred to stay with my wounded,” she told the United Press news agency. “I told [the guerrillas] I wanted to care for them as best I could until they could be evacuated from Dien Bien Phu.”
Within weeks, she was back in Paris to a hero’s welcome and then embarked on a 19-day tour of the United States, which included a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan and a White House Rose Garden ceremony to receive the Medal of Freedom from President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The citation noted that her actions at Dien Bien Phu had “inspired and heartened the entire free world.”
Ms. de Galard had asked to come to the war. The French air force, where she served as a convoyeuse, or flight nurse, no longer sent women into combat zones. Ms. de Galard requested a posting to Indochina in 1953. She was assigned to aircraft transferring wounded soldiers and others from battle areas. In early 1954, Viet Minh forces under Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap began the siege of Dien Bien Phu.
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On March 28, 1954, Ms. de Galard was aboard a Dakota that was making a landing in fog-shrouded Dien Bien Phu. The plane clipped a stretch of barbed wire, tearing into a fuel tank. The Dakota couldn’t fly out without repairs. That night, Vietnamese shells destroyed the plane and left the airstrip unusable.
Ms. de Galard took up duties in the cavelike field hospital, treating the growing number of injuries and health problems from dwindling supplies and nonstop stress. She reportedly lost 18 pounds during the ordeal and got the nickname “Toothpick.” She fashioned a uniform from camouflage fatigues and wore basketball sneakers or sandals. As the only woman on the base (apart from prostitutes brought in for the troops, war historians reported), she rigged up her own quarters using silk parachute material for privacy.
The attacks on the base intensified by the day. “Dien Bien Phu will be your grave,” said messages on fliers from the Viet Minh.
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In the hospital, Ms. de Galard assisted on every level — comforting wounded soldiers and helping with amputations and surgeries for shrapnel and bullet injuries. A paratrooper who lost both his legs, Pierre Fournier, recounted to the magazine American Weekly how Ms. de Galard would often sleep on a cot in the 40-bed hospital.
“In Dien Bien Phu I was a little bit the mother, a little bit the sister, a little bit the friend,” she wrote in “The Angel of Dien Bien Phu: The Lone French Woman at the Decisive Battle for Vietnam,” a memoir first published in France in 2003. “Simply my being there, because I was a woman, seemed to make the hell a little less inhuman.”
French forces tried to push back the Viet Minh in a last-ditch offensive in early May 1954. The attempt failed. Over the next days, the guerrillas pounded the base with Soviet-made Katyusha rockets.
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On May 6, Vietnamese force set off a ton of TNT on a key hillside redoubt protecting the base. A Viet Minh bayonet charge overwhelmed the stunned French defenders. By the next day, all but a few skirmishes were left and the Vietnamese forces had control after months of heavy losses and casualties on both sides.
Ms. de Galard was evacuated on May 24, part of the first group of medical personnel and wounded to leave after negotiations with Giap’s forces. “In a way, I’m glad you’re in Dien Bien Phu,” wrote Ms. de Galard’s mother in a letter she shared with journalists. “That way you didn’t risk one of your planes crashing.”
Peace talks in Geneva in the summer of 1954 divided former French colonial Indochina into Western-backed South Vietnam and communist North Vietnam. With France’s exit from the region after nearly a century, the United States was eventually drawn in — setting in motion the disastrous Vietnam War that culminated with the 1975 fall of South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City.
Noble lineage
Geneviève de Galard-Terraube was born in Paris on April 13, 1925, into a family with a lineage of noble titles dating back to the medieval Crusades, she said. She was 9 when her father died, and she was raised by her mother, who instilled in her daughter an ardent Catholic faith.
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During World War II, Ms. de Galard (the last name style she preferred) took refuge in Toulouse but returned to Nazi-occupied Paris in late 1942. After the war, she studied English at the University of Paris and, seeking a skill to build a career, received a nursing degree in 1950. Two years later, she passed the exam to become convoyeuses de l’air, the nurses who assist the wounded and sick evacuated by plane.
“I feel that in my existence there is a before and an after to Dien Bien Phu,” she told Le Monde.
She left military service in July 1955 and worked in nursing and rehabilitation centers in Paris. In 1983, she was elected city councilor for the city’s 17th arrondissem*nt, holding the position for 18 years. After leaving politics, Ms. de Galard returned to Vietnam on a visit in 2001. She did not want to visit Dien Bien Phu.
“I did no more than any one of my comrades would have done under the same circ*mstances,” she once said, reflecting on her battlefield service.
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She married a French military officer, Jean de Heaulme de Boutsocq, in 1956 and moved with him on various assignments, including to Madagascar. They had three children. The couple lived in Paris. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
In 1963, she followed through with her promise to Col. Marcel Bigeard in besieged Dien Bein Phu when she was made part of the Foreign Legion. She found him and uncorked a bottle of champagne.
