"Your Chêt hôn the chiu nhuc!" (Rather death than shame)
Roger Vandenberghe:
Born on October 26, 1927 in Paris, orphan in state care.
He takes an active part in combat of the 1939/1945 war, initially as a very young resistant, then combatant FFI with the French Underground Pommiès, then still in Alsace and Germany with the 1ere Armée.
He then fights in Indo-China, as chief of the Commando 24 '' the Black Tigers", where he is in the center of the fiercest combat, in particular in North-Vietnam.
Chevalier of the Legion of Honour
Military medal-holder
Military Cross 1939/1945
Military Cross of the TOE
Roger Vandenberghe accepted 15 "decorations au feu", including 6 palms, and was 8 times wounded. The General of Lattre will say of him '' it is the best soldier of Indochine''.
The Vietnamese soldiers had put a price on his head. At twenty-three, Vandenberghe frightened them. He took up the challenge, surrendered himself, then took his captors as prisoners. He had a taste for short actions and force, operating at night with a handle of men, sowing panic behind enemy lines. In three years, with the head of his commando "Black Tiger", he had inflicted more losses to the enemy than a division of infantry. His tactic, to use against the Vietnamese soldiers, was other Vietnamese soldiers who followed him blindly. He improvised his war like others improvise music. In three years, he had crossed all levels of the hierachy, and become the familiar of the General of Lattre who quoted him as an example within the French Task force. The Gulf of Tonkin was his field. More still, his kingdom. A secret, strange and attractive man, he left for long patrols in the jungle, the rice plantations, the unfavourable zones refuges. Always in front. He had been wounded eight times in hand to hand combat. His life was that, a terrible and dangerous play that he carried out with violence, in a constannt bet with death. For the Vietnamese soldiers, he was an enemy impossible to overcome of face. Al this led to treason and finally, assassination. He died, at twenty-four, already legendary among the warriors of Indo-China. After Vandenberghe, the last of the solitary warriors, the war in Indo-China was no longer to be the same.
Vandenberghe's assistant Tran Dinh Vy, later a colonel in the Foreign Legion.
