Battle of Pho Lu, 1950 Indochina

    Following the fall of China to Mao Zhedong's Communist Revoution, General Giap's Viet Minh forces had been receiving equipment and importantly, training. The ex-history teacher now decided to test his new forces by sending the 308th Division into the Tai's Highlands in February 1950. The small post of Pho Lu was unfortunate to find itself the target of thousands of Viet Minh. Some 150-men made up the garrison, taken from a Moroccan Tabor, mountain goumiers alongside a handful of Tai's partisans. The post located in an isolated valley bisected by the Red River. There was no road or airstrip; only contact was via the river by dugouts or a 20 km hike via mountain tracks! The French certainly knew to to pick isolated garrisons!
    Using 15mm figures (mostly from Eureka Miniatures and Peter Pig) and a scratch built log and mud fort, the first unsuccessful assaults on the position were recreated recently.
   A single company was chosen to make the initial attack at night. creeping quietly from the jungle-covered hills, the leading sappers had nearly reached to cheval de frise when the French put up a flare and the action began:

The Viet Minh 60mm mortars place one of their first shots on the garrison hut while the surviving sappers blasted apart the outer barrier. The assault squad was close at hand with their ladders:

The ladders go up against the 'Japanese Palisade', as they called the woven bamboo fencing. (the French were shortchanged when it came to actual barriers like barbed wire!).

With the garrison hut burning behind them, the goumiers were thinning out the assault troops:

The Moroccans have taken numerous casualties by now as the ladders go up against the wall:

The Viet Minh are decimated leaving one final soldier standing. Viet Minh mortars had unsuccessfully been targeting the French mortar position:

On the final turn, the Viet Minh is taken down as the last VM shell lands in the mortar pit!

A Viet Minh company commander will have some tough questions to answer when his battalion commander arrives!