Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (20 page)

Atlante was a failure on a major scale. It made substantial reinforcement of Dien Bien Phu, then shaping up into a set-piece battle of unprecedented proportion, impossible, and placed great strain on already inadequate FEF air assets. The FEF had only seventy-five transport planes, and by January 1954 this small fleet was the only means of supply for several remote garrisons, of which Dien Bien Phu was by far the largest. Atlante wore down vehicles and equipment that might have been used much more profitably elsewhere. (By this point in the war, PAVN units were often better armed and supplied than the FEF.) Lackluster performance in Atlante had another unfortunate effect. It heightened American skepticism about France’s prosecution of the war, which, in turn, churned up seething resentment of the Americans in the French command.

Less than a week after Atlante commenced, Giap countered with several secondary attacks that he hoped would further disperse French mobile forces and place additional strains on the FEF’s air force. The 803rd Independent Regiment debouched from the mountains in the western Central Highlands, swept over the defenses of Dak To, and seized that town on February 2. Turning south, the 803rd threatened Kontum. Navarre countered by airlifting several mobile groups to its defense. When the 803rd, joined by regional units, surrounded the French forces, Navarre evacuated them, again by air. Heavy fighting then erupted around Pleiku. The French
quickly dispatched Mobile Group 100 to Pleiku, and barely held on to this strategically important town, but Mobile Group 100 lost an entire company in an ambush before the Vietminh withdrew into the mountains.

A few days earlier, on January 27, Giap had ordered the 316th, then bivouacked at Lai Chau, to drive into Laos. En route, the division joined Pathet Lao Communist troops in wiping out a French battalion that was defending the hedgehog at Muong Khoa. The 316th then pressed deep into Laos, within twenty miles of Luang Prabang. Once again, Giap forced Navarre to airlift his mobile reserves to protect the approaches to the city.

Everywhere, Giap seemed to be taking the initiative, forcing Navarre to deploy his mobile ground forces and paratroopers to locales that were far afield from the main battlefield at Dien Bien Phu. After demonstrating conclusively that the FEF at Dien Bien Phu weren’t able to accomplish the very task that had initially spurred their deployment—the defense of Laos—Giap decided to order the 316th to withdraw from Laos and march back to its positions in the hills as the reserve force for the attack at Dien Bien Phu. Giap most likely decided to order this withdrawal because of a development far from the battlefield: he had just learned that the great powers had formally agreed to hold a conference in Geneva in late April, with the fate of Indochina on the docket. The impending battle at Dien Bien Phu was sure to have a crucial effect on negotiations one way or another. It was imperative to maximize his chances of defeating the French in the valley.

By the time the 316th marched into the hills around the valley in early March, Giap had all but completed one of the most impressive feats in the history of military logistics. It had taken three months to position the equivalent of five divisions, both combat and support troops, in and around the valley. Since early December they had traveled down winding roads, sometimes in trucks, but mostly on foot, through trackless jungles, swamps, and mountains.

Giap’s senior supply officers, along with Chinese and Vietnamese engineers, planned and supervised a vast and efficient logistical network, improving several hundred miles of roads for use by 800 2.5-ton Soviet-built trucks, some hauling artillery pieces shipped from China, from as far away as Cao Bang in the Viet Bac. New roads and reinforced bridges, some of them a few inches under water, were built from scratch. Supplying and maintaining the combat troops took stupendous effort. It took a full week
to bring bulk supplies from China to the main PAVN supply base at Tran Giao, thirty-seven miles northeast of Dien Bien Phu. Many of the roads had to be constructed from scratch for the operation. An all-weather road linked the supply base and the valley.

Well over 100,000 coolies and construction workers made indispensable contributions to the vast logistical effort. A host of road maintenance crews, the latter consisting in part of thousands of women stationed at encampments along the route, used wooden shovels, picks, and straw baskets to repair damage inflicted by French air power on the supply routes every day. The flow of Vietminh supplies was hampered by continual air interdiction, but never halted. Late in the battle, PAVN troops were placed on severely limited rice rations, but neither the assault troops nor the artillery batteries suffered serious ammunition shortages over the course of seven weeks of combat. The support effort became a national crusade, built around the slogan, “Everything for the Front!” It was hardly an exaggeration. Virtually the entire regular army was deployed at Dien Bien Phu. The defeat of that army in the looming battle might very well set back the revolutionary cause for a decade or more.

Whole volunteer bicycle companies of volunteers marched as far as 200 miles, just to begin serving at the front. Bikes were reconfigured with steel rims, and forks were replaced with iron rods. Hard bamboo sticks extended from the handlebars. Teams of five men were assigned to one bike, which could haul up to 400 pounds of rice across mountains, streams, and jungle tracks. Writer Ted Morgan recounts the story of Dinh Vin Ty, a bicycle porter from Hanoi: “At the Ban Phe Pass, the slope was so steep it took six men to push a single bike. One man held the handlebars. Two men ahead of the bike pulled it by a rope. Three men pushed from behind. That day, after hauling fifteen bikes up to the pass, Dinh collapsed from exhaustion.”
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Inside the valley, Chinese engineers supervised the digging of a trench network that could facilitate the rapid movement of infantry units into assault jump-off points with little chance of being attacked by French supporting arms. Many trenches were within one hundred yards of French strongpoint perimeters.

On the eve of the initial attack of March 13, Giap had accomplished the seemingly impossible. He had five divisions in and around the valley, and well over 150 heavy guns in the hills that were so well dug in and camouflaged that the enemy would have great difficulty knocking out many of them with either an air attack or artillery.

Most of the lethal 105mm guns had been moved by truck to Na Nham, some six miles from the rim of the valley. Moving more than 150 heavy guns into positions on the edge of the valley proved to be a feat of human endurance rarely rivaled in modern war. The most challenging guns, of course, were the American 105mm howitzers, which had to be transported all of a piece. They could not be broken down like the 75mm field guns. The 105s had to be hauled to their emplacements by teams of men using block and tackles and oxen on a trail cut through the foothills of several low-lying mountains. It took a team of more than one hundred men a full week to move a single 105 into the forward slope of the hills east and north of the combat base.

From the time of Giap’s cancellation of the January 25 attack, French forces were compelled to remain inside their perimeters or face dire consequences. At the end of January, a regimental-size force of paras and Legionnaires attempted to take Hill 683, 2,000 yards from the northernmost strongpoint at Dien Bien Phu. Here, for the first time, French forces encountered well-fortified Communist positions in combat. The advancing patrols saw nothing until they were suddenly fired on almost directly from under their feet. The Vietminh had built bunkers directly into the ground and underbrush; their firing slits, hardly wider than a mail slot, barely revealed themselves.

In February, a platoon attempting to locate Vietminh artillery stumbled against a well-concealed bunker system. Most of the soldiers in the platoon were killed in a matter of minutes, and the Vietminh captured a large-scale map of the entire base with artillery batteries clearly marked. Now the Communists’ artillery could fix its targets with exceptional precision.

THE BATTLE: PHASE 1

The initial assault came exactly where the French expected—against Beatrice, the northeastern satellite strongpoint—and, although it was defended by a battalion of Legionnaires, the most difficult to defend. Around noon on March 13 the French attempted to clear the PAVN assault troops from their trenches 200 meters from Beatrice’s perimeter, and the Vietminh opened up with a heavy artillery barrage. At 1700 hours, March 13, six battalions of the 312th Division left their trenches and attacked along three axes with bugles blowing. Like many Vietminh assaults, this
one was covered by the partial darkness of early evening under a new moon, which afforded the attackers just enough light to see their targets. The Legionnaires put up a spirited defense despite the death of their commander at 1830 hours, fifteen minutes after he had called in artillery fire almost on top of his own position. The Vietminh took Beatrice around midnight, following several hours of intense hand-to-hand fighting. Fewer than 200 of the 700 Legionnaires manning Beatrice straggled back to the comparative safety of neighboring strongpoints. The 312th suffered some 600 men killed and 1,000 wounded.

On the morning of March 14, a French counterattack against Beatrice was blunted and turned back by powerful PAVN artillery. The charred landscape was strewn with corpses and the wounded of both armies, many of whom were moaning and near death. Giap asked for a four-hour truce to collect the dead and wounded. Castries assented. It was the first and last such truce in a brutal fifty-six-day siege. That night, Gabrielle, the satellite strongpoint with two defensive lines, manned by a tough Algerian battalion, fell to two regiments of the elite 308th Iron Division after a ferocious series of attacks and counterattacks.

The initial PAVN attacks into the northwestern and northeastern slopes of Gabrielle, which occurred at 2000 hours on March 14, made slow progress before stalling after two hours. The Vietminh artillery ceased at 0230 hours on March 15, and the assault troops dug in and regrouped. At 0330 hours, they resumed the assault. At 0400 hours, a PAVN artillery shell landed amid the French command group, severely wounding the commander, his replacement, and his staff. The forces on Gabrielle could no longer wage a coordinated defense on their own.

De Castries then ordered Lt. Colonel Pierre Langlais, who commanded the entire defense of the MCR, to launch a tank-infantry counterattack on Gabrielle. Langlais assembled a tank squadron and a company of Legionnaires, along with an FEF para battalion that was exhausted from a harrowing jump into the base the previous day, to counterattack. The Legionnaires and tankers made impressive progress at first, but the para battalion lost its nerve under Vietminh artillery fire, and the counterattack broke down into a chaotic withdrawal of all French forces in and around Gabrielle at 0800 hours on March 16.

Gabrielle cost Giap at least 1,000 men killed and 2,000 wounded with French casualties about 1,000 in all, making the fight for this strongpoint
among the bloodiest of the battle. But the French could hardly hope to survive long sustaining such frightful casualties, while the Vietminh could do so handily. Gabrielle’s loss, wrote Bernard Fall, “had a disastrous effect on the morale of the [French] garrison.”
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With the fall of Gabrielle, the general pattern of combat at Dien Bien Phu began to emerge. Overwhelmingly superior numbers of PAVN assault troops would attack French defensive positions and overrun them; the French would counterattack with limited success and at frightening cost. Individual positions within strongpoints would change hands. Then the Vietminh would regroup and counterattack, sometimes immediately, sometimes several days later. Finally the French strongpoint would fall, usually for good.

Anne Marie, the last of the three satellite strongpoints forming a semicircle north of the main center of resistance, fell early on the morning of March 17, but in a decidedly atypical fashion. Anne Marie was manned by a battalion of Tais, who performed well in mobile operations in their mountainous homeland but were wholly unsuited to defensive fighting. Giap’s political cadres had been working an effective propaganda campaign against the Tais for weeks, urging them to abandon a fight that was not theirs in the first place, and promising them good treatment if they put down their arms. The hideously destructive combat of the previous few days completely spooked them. On the night of March 17, they deserted their positions en masse. The French officers and the few Tais who remained had no choice but to withdraw into Huguette, where they became part of that strongpoint’s garrison for the duration. The first phase of the battle was over. It had been costly for both sides, but things had gone very much as Giap had planned.

THE LULL

Phase one was followed by a lull that lasted from March 18 until March 30. PAVN troops took up picks and shovels under the direction of Chinese engineers and further developed a massive network of trenches and tunnels, coming in some places as close as fifty yards to the French defensive positions. Digging methodically day and night, often under makeshift covers of beams, wood platforms, and earth, they approached the perimeter, wrote one American correspondent who visited the camp, “like the tentacles of some determined, earth-bound devilfish.”
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By this point, Vietminh guns
in the hills had rendered the airstrip too dangerous for landing reinforcements in any number. The last flights evacuating the wounded departed on March 26. About fifty Communist Chinese gun crews manning lethal 37mm antiaircraft guns ringed the French camp, and even aerial resupply had become extremely hazardous for flight crews. The garrison required 150 tons of supplies a day to fight, but poor weather and Giap’s antiaircraft crews ensured that on many days less than half that amount could be delivered. Thus, the garrison found itself operating under increasingly severe shortages of ammunition, food, and even drinking water.

The lull in the fighting was not uneventful. The French struggled to halt the constriction of the creeping network of trenches with napalm and local ground attacks, but they lacked the air and artillery assets to do more than inflict peripheral damage on the trench network. The Vietminh were able to dig more than 100 kilometers of tunnels before the end of the month. One by one, the gaps in the cordon around the MCR were closed off. A well-coordinated French tank-infantry raid on March 28 caught Vietnamese antiaircraft crews west of the MCR by surprise, knocking out seventeen antiaircraft weapons and killing perhaps 300 PAVN soldiers in the process.