Death of groupe mobile 100 (scen#97)

[wulfir]

Regarding GM100, stumbled across this:

One series of battles in particular stood out from all the rest, epitomizing the French experience in American eyes.


Entitled "End of a Task Force," Chapter 9 of Fall's widely read book traced a six-month period in the final struggles of a French mobile striking force, Groupement Mobile 100. The vivid and terrifying story of this group's final days seemed to many to describe the fate in store for any armored unit that tried to fight insurgents in the jungles.


Actually Groupement Mobile 100 was not an armored unit at all, but an infantry task force of 2,600 men, organized into four truck-mounted infantry battalions, reinforced with one artillery battalion and ten light tanks. Restricted to movement on roads, deploying to fight on foot, it was extremely vulnerable to ambush, and, indeed, a series of ambushes finally destroyed it.


Because most readers did not take the time to understand the organization and actions of Groupement Mobile 100, its fate cast a pall over armored operations in Vietnam for almost twelve years. The story of this disaster became a major source for unfavorable references to French armored operations in Vietnam, and contributed much to the growing myth of the impossibility of conducting mounted combat in Vietnam.


In fact, the myth was so widely accepted that it tended to overshadow French successes as well as some armored exploits of the Vietnamese Army, and it actually delayed development of Vietnamese armored forces.


Unfortunately, U.S. commanders were to repeat many of the mistakes of the French when American armored units were employed

CMH