Then followed the catastrophe of Dien Bien Phu; the most humiliating defeat suffered by any Western power since the Second World War and, in its context, as humiliating as 1940 to French army sensibilities in that the victors had been despised “colonials” and “little yellow men”.

XREF: Connects to broader context of French colonial collapse in Indochina and the blow to European imperial prestige that coincided with the 1954 Geneva accords and later US involvement in Vietnam.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 527