"Forgotten Army"

INDOCHINA

On a heavily wooded island named Phuquoc in the Gulf of Siam live 25,000 trim, tautly disciplined Chinese soldiers, who drill every day with wooden guns and wait for something to happen. They are Nationalist China's "forgotten army," the survivors of a once-beaten mass which was pushed out of Yunnan Province in the final days of the Chinese Communist victory, and made its way through rough mountain country into French Indo-China. There, three years ago, they were disarmed and interned by the French.

Last week the New York Herald Tribune's Correspondent Homer Bigart became the first U.S. newspaperman to visit the camp on Phuquoc. Bigart reported that the refugee Nationalists have been whipped into a tight, well-conditioned force which, in spite of three years of jungle life and inadequate health facilities, could field some 12,000 combat troops on quick notice.

Their leader is Lieut. General Peng Tso-hsi, a slight, near-bald man of 51, who commanded the Nationalist Twenty-Sixth Army until the Red victory, then crossed with what was left of his troops into Indo-China.

Their camp, guarded by medieval-looking sentries carrying tasseled spears, is divided into streets along which sit neat, wooden barracks with thatched roofs, a big theater, an ambitious hospital building for which there is almost no equipment. Each day General Peng runs his troops through stern drills with dummy guns, tanks and jeeps, subjects them to political orientation lectures as intense as those practiced by the Communists, though with a far different message. There have been few desertions to the Communist Viet Minh forces which rove nearby, and the army has maintained good relations with the surrounding French and Indo-Chinese. The community includes about 100 unmarried women and, reported the French in tones of marvel, not one pregnancy has occurred. "They are very puritanical," said a French officer.

Bigart found the camp excited about President Eisenhower's deneutralization of Formosa, and hopeful that it meant that they now would be allowed to rejoin Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa.

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