Marcel Bigeard | French paratrooper, 94

Gen. Marcel Bigeard, 94, who led France's elite parachute forces in colonial wars in independence-seeking Indochina and Algeria after serving in the French Resistance in World War II, died Friday in Toul, France.

"He has been called the best paratrooper in the world, and whatever the truth of that, he most certainly has a claim as the most battle-proven," said Martin Windrow, a British military historian and expert on France's colonial wars.

Gen. Bigeard also was captured by insurgents while fighting in Vietnam, and he was accused of being ruthless against POWs in Algeria, in a conflict his country eventually lost.

Born in Toul in eastern France, he went into German captivity as a warrant officer in June 1940. He escaped Nov. 11, 1942, made his way to Senegal, in what was then French West Africa, and was commissioned into Gen. Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces.

His death came as France was marking the 70th anniversary of de Gaulle's defiant broadcast on BBC radio urging the French people to resist the Nazi occupation.

Gen. Bigeard rose to fame during France's ultimately doomed effort to reassert control over its colony in Vietnam, after it proclaimed independence in 1945. He served three combat tours there, and his crack Sixth Colonial Parachute Battalion became France's spearhead in the war against Ho Chi Minh's nationalist guerrillas.

He was captured with about 12,000 other defenders when insurgents overran the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 - knocking France out of the war.

Within a year of his release, Gen. Bigeard - by then in command of a parachute regiment - was back in action, battling Algerian freedom fighters.

Wounded five times, he emerged from the Algerian war - which France lost in 1961 - as one of the country's most decorated military officers.

He ended his career as a four-star general and went on to serve as secretary of state for defense in the 1970s, and as a legislator in France's lower house of parliament.

- AP