I believe this was mentioned in Apocalypse Now. If this actually occurred, how widespread was it? Was it an organized movement? Did any trade unions or worker groups officially or unofficially endorse it?
This story seems to have grown out of the Martin affair and related events in 1950. There was no widespread sabotage of military equipment to kill or directly impair French Union forces.
Henri Martin was from a working class family and participated in the communist resistance to the German occupation during WWII. After the war he joined the French navy and witnessed the beginning of the Indochina War in 1946. Martin was transferred to the Toulon dockyard the next year. In 1949 he began distributing political tracts against the war in Indochina. The military arrested Martin in early 1950 and brought him before a tribunal, charged with sabotage of a boat and demoralizing the military. Martin denied the sabotage charge, but admitted to the political acts. He was found guilty, and again on appeal, and sentenced to five years in prison. He became a cause celebre of the French Communist Party and an increasingly anti-war movement in France. Pablo Picasso even painted his portrait. Martin was discreetly freed in 1953. There were other notable cases of leftist activist trying to block rail convoys carrying war materiel and mobilizing dock workers to delay shipments bound for Indochina. But consider that much of the political elite and French population was still connected to the empire in a couple years they would fight even harder to keep Algeria, after all). This was not a mass movement, but an isolated incident. The actual ‘sabotage’ was not significant and may not have even occurred. Nevertheless, for many opposed to the guerre sale in Indochina, he was a hero.
But I know of nothing about sabotage of war supplies in reputable histories of the war. There may be some confusion here because those acts were called 'sabotage' by the government, and later by veterans decrying how they were 'stabbed in the back' or that the war was lost at home, not in Vietnam. Certainly you can call delaying war materiel an act of sabotage. But that is quite different from this myth, which I see is well represented in movies, blogs, and wikipedia.
Jacques Dalloz, Dictionnaire de la Guerre d'Indochine: 1945-1954 (Armand Colin, 2006).
Christopher Goscha, Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War, entry for Henri Martin.
