Word: tu
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...anti-Communist refugees were 10,000 soldiers of a special type. They looked no different from the other Vietnamese peasants, but they were the remnants of one of the last real church armies in the world: the fighting Catholics of Tonkin, led by round, shrewd Bishop Thaddeus Le Huu Tu...
...Must Fight." No man in Indo-China was more an uncontested ruler than Bishop Tu, a French-schooled Vietnamese and a onetime Trappist monk. His flock was half a million farmers who lived in the rich Tonkin coastal area. Le Huu Tu dotted his little theocracy with schools, seminaries, orphanages, and cathedral-sized churches. He walked a tricky tightrope of diplomacy, between the Viet Minh revolutionists, the Vietnamese loyalists and the French colonials...
...make his diplomacy stick, Bishop Tu whipped together a tiny army of fervent Roman Catholics, armed with pikes and smuggled rifles. At its head he put Father Quynh, a tough, angular soldier-priest. Father Quynh was no diplomat. "A Catholic in this country betrays his faith if he is not a soldier," he used to say. "To compromise with Communism is treachery. You must fight-it's the only Christian solution...
...Bishop Tu's private army had become the nucleus of several similar Catholic militias in the Red River Delta. Forty thousand ill-trained and lightly armed peasant-soldiers, commanded by amateur officers, succeeded in maintaining security in 70% of the delta area...
...length Bishop Tu turned to Bao Dai for help, and Father Quynh, now promoted to War Minister, began to get some real arms. Every parish was transformed into a training camp resounding with the call...