The appeasement, which seemed to have followed the Haiphong affair, was only a facade; attacks followed attacks, every night barricades arose, part of the Indochinese population, out of fear or by order, fled Hanoi, which seemed half-deserted. Everything indicated that a general uprising was preparing.
The exchange of notes, the talks between French and Vietnamese authorities did not bring any valid solution. In France, a new governmental crisis paralyzed the power and left us without instructions or directives; once again, the metropolis seemed to lose interest in a situation whose gravity, however, we did not cease to underline.
On December 12, Léon Blum returned to power and, on the 15th, Ho Chi Minh sent him an urgent message which, "delayed in transmission" in Saigon, did not reach the new head of the French government until the 26th...
On December 19, after blowing up the power station , Vietnam, at exactly 8:04 p.m., went on the attack, repeating to the letter the lesson learned from the Japanese twenty-one months earlier. The war in Indochina, which was to oppose, until 1954, French and Vietnamese, had just entered its irreversible phase.
Certainly, the French forces, warned in time, went little by small loosen the grip of the besiegers, but the alert was warm. French people were taken as hostages, others brutally massacred. For several days, Hanoi experienced a state of siege, terror.
For my part, as I tried, from the start, to reach, aboard an armored car, the citadel where General Morlière was waiting for me, a large caliber mine dislocated the vehicle, which was immediately attacked with grenades. The whole crew was seriously injured; the skipper was shot to death; I myself was seriously affected. The year 1946 ended as the battle raged on all sides.
The French army regained control of Hanoi, where Leclerc and Marius Moutet had come to join me. The Vietnamese forces were quickly pushed out of the delta. These successes will be an illusion for a moment, but it was indeed the Franco-Vietnamese war, a cruel and useless war, which will ruin so many possibilities that remained intact, which had begun.
In Britain, nuclear propulsion studies had been their train until the late 1950s, but progress was slow, and in 1958 an agreement was reached with the Americans for the complete supply of a reactor. This was installed on the Dreadnought which was the first British nuclear submarine, which entered se