ine 52).
Drake (25) cites France's postwar ambition to reclaim international prestige, which included the vow "to 'bring Indochina back.'" Thus a British-French coalition obliterated the wartime interregnum of Japanese control of French Indochina, heedless of Vietnamese nationalism espoused by the Vietminh and others; however, by 1954 the Vietminh and other Vietnamese nationalists had routed French colonialism from all of Indochina, marked by the famously humiliating (to France) battle of Dien Bien Phu. Even after Dien Bien Phu, France did not receive the news of imperialist decline in North Africa. France's stubborn hold on Algeria after World War II, says Dine (59), can be laid to France's "long[] tradition of intransigence and a specific response to the perceived international weakness of France in the wake of defeat and occupation by the Germans." The French attachment to its image as a world power despite the reality of two world wars, leads to the analysis that the "anti-colonial writing on the wall was not yet clear" to France in Algeria (Dine 5
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