The Cold War (46 page)

But the French were not in a position to follow up their victories. They, too, had suffered heavily in the fighting; their forces were stretched to the breaking point, and de Lattre was already dying of cancer. Once again the war in Indochina settled into a stalemate. The French possessed the firepower and training to defeat whatever Viet Minh forces chose to stand and fight. Thus, they dominated the great Mekong and Red River deltas during the day. But the Viet Minh fought a war of subversion—one that aimed to control the countryside politically—and the French could not be everywhere. For the next two years, they pursued the illusion that they could force the Viet Minh into a stand-up battle. Major French offensives, launched from the Red River Delta, drove deep into Viet Minh territory, but they rarely struck anything except empty terrain. The problem lay in extracting such forces, for Giap would rapidly concentrate his reserves and then strike the French as they retreated. He accepted battle only on his own terms. More often than not, the French paid a heavy price to escape. It was like punching a feather pillow and then having a bear trap snap shut. Besides ill-fated strikes against Giap's main forces, the French launched search-and-destroy missions throughout the countryside against guerrillas
who were disrupting political administration even in the Red River Delta. These operations were no more successful in reestablishing control over the countryside than similar American efforts a decade later.

By summer 1953, the French high command in Indochina confronted a number of problems, none of which provided much hope for the future. Admittedly, the United States appeared willing to bankroll the war for an indeterminable period (although, of course, American support brought with it advice from people who had not a clue about the nature of the conflict). But the Korean War was about to end, and that would bring increased logistic support from the Chinese back to the Viet Minh. Moreover, the endless war in Southeast Asia was finally wearing on French patience at home. The French people and their representatives were sick of a war that had obviously deadlocked, even if no conscripts were dying. These factors came together to push French military leaders to make a series of strategic and operational decisions that led directly to the battle of Dien Bien Phu.

Significantly, a fundamental misassumption underlay all French planning. The French high command still did not take the Viet Minh seriously as a military force, or Giap, the former history professor, as a general. At the end of 1953, French planners in Hanoi sought to create a trap for the Viet Minh by launching a significant portion of their reserves at a target they believed to be of considerable strategic significance: a sprawling village in a mountain valley, Dien Bien Phu. There, they hoped the Viet Minh would at last fight in the open, where superior French firepower, training, and discipline would destroy the revolution.

Planning for Dien Bien Phu reflected a number of misassumptions by General Henri Navarre, the new French commander in Vietnam, beyond a mere underestimation of the Viet Minh and the seriousness of the situation.
Time
magazine quoted the general: “A year ago none of us could see victory. There wasn't a prayer. Now we can see it clearly—like light at the end of the tunnel” (a phrase that echoed again and again through this war and the next). Yet the French government had made clear that it would not supply substantial reinforcements. Even more important was the inability of the French high command in Indochina to enunciate a clear rationale for the operation. On the one hand, they argued that possession of Dien Bien Phu would prevent the Viet Minh from moving into Laos, as they had the previous year. On the other hand, they argued that their forces in Dien Bien Phu could serve as a center for strikes into northern Vietnam's highlands to disrupt supplies and foodstuffs from
reaching the Viet Minh. But underneath everything was the hope that the Viet Minh would take the bait.

Thus, Dien Bien Phu was supposed to be a fortress capable of standing up to a full-fledged conventional assault. Given the fact that the French had barely enough troops to protect an airstrip at the center of the valley into which reinforcements and supplies would have to flow, much less the great ring of hills surrounding the valley, it was hard to see how Dien Bien Phu could serve as both a fortress and a base for mobile operations against Viet Minh supply lines. But the real problem was that Dien Bien Phu was indefensible under almost any conditions except absolute superiority. Everything was observable from the heights overlooking the valley, and if the Viet Minh concentrated heavy artillery on those heights, they would dominate the battlefield. The commander of ground forces in northern Vietnam, General René Cogny, was ambivalent about the operation; in the summer of 1953, he had proposed seizing the valley, but by the fall, he was strongly objecting to the plan. Nonetheless, as was to occur with many other commanders in this war, he executed an operation with which he disagreed. Some French officers were suspicious that Cogny's doubts reflected a political ploy in case the plan turned out badly.

The operation almost did not occur. Bad weather closed in but then cleared at the last moment. The men who jumped in and fought at Dien Bien Phu were to rue the change in the weather. So on November 20, 1953, a force of 1,827 French paratroopers dropped on the valley. They met light resistance, the Viet Minh being content to withdraw and await further developments. The following day, another major drop reinforced the first wave, this one led by the paratrooper commander Brigadier General Jean Gilles, who carefully stashed his glass eye in his combat smock before jumping. The last drop occurred on November 23 and included Brigitte Friang, a woman reporter who had gone through jump school and who already had five combat jumps to her credit. The paratroopers were the French army's elite reserve in Indochina, and having seized the ground, they set about establishing an airstrip and defensive positions so that reinforcements and heavy equipment could be flown in.

The paratroopers, along with legionnaires, would form the heart of the defenses. They were to be reinforced by a mixture of troops drawn from other French units in Indochina, some very good, some of doubtful utility. The North African units of the French army had a long history of exceptional brav-ery—it was they, after all, who made the crucial breakthrough of German lines in Italy in May 1944 that led to the capture of Rome. But already among the Algerians,
the deep frustrations of their countrymen, which soon would result in the Algerian War, were impacting on their military effectiveness. Some Algerians fought well, others not so well. But the real weak link turned out to be the T'ai mountain tribesmen, who made up nearly a third of the garrison. The tribesmen were excellent guerrilla fighters on their own terrain, much of which was now under Viet Minh control. But away from their homeland, they proved unreliable. Besides the infantry committed to the garrison, the French provided substantial artillery and a small force of tanks. The gunners, despite the greater numbers of Viet Minh artillery and their accurate counterbattery fire, stood by their guns to the bitter end. The tankers fought with brand-new M-24 “General Chaffee” light tanks, straight from America. The tanks had been disassembled in Hanoi, flown into Dien Bien Phu, and then reassembled on the spot by their crews.

While the paratroopers had seized the valley, command of Dien Bien Phu fell to a highly decorated fifty-one-year-old cavalryman, Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries—a man who had a reputation for both his dashing bravery and his sexual appetites. The rumor was that he christened Dien Bien Phu's strongpoints with the names of his mistresses. Sadly, under the strain of command and combat, de Castries was to snap, and a hard-boiled, laconic paratrooper officer, Pierre Langlais, would assume de facto control of the battle. He was to be aided by what soon became known as the paratrooper mafia; in the terror and confusion of the collapse of French assumptions, command devolved on the toughest and most competent, while rank counted for little.

Giap was delighted to take up the French challenge. But he refused to play by French expectations. Instead of striking quickly before he was ready, he carried out a careful and meticulous redeployment across the highlands. As Giap recorded: “We came to the conclusion that we could not secure success if we struck swiftly. In consequence … we strictly followed this fundamental principle of revolutionary war: strike to win, strike only when success is certain; if not, then don't strike.”

With the French making the opening move, the Viet Minh shifted their forces to the far western reaches of northern Vietnam. The weather and jungle conditions represented a nightmare, especially when one considers that virtually everything—men, weapons, ammunition—had to move on foot. But Giap and his officers were more than fanatical revolutionaries; by now they were thorough professionals, entirely capable of handling the operational and logistical challenges posed by such a complex redeployment.

Once the Viet Minh had cleared the neighboring highlands, they methodically closed in around Dien Bien Phu until they had it surrounded. Raiding actions by the French brought few results except heavy casualties and, as the Viet Minh arrived in strength on the heights overlooking Dien Bien Phu, the French lost control of everything but the valley. In the valley itself, the garrison continued its desultory work on defensive strongpoints, but the lack of command interest—a reflection of the underestimation of Giap's capabilities—and the macho attitude of elite troops that fortifications were for others hardly made Dien Bien Phu a solid defensive position. Not until March 23 would de Castries ask Hanoi for the basic French engineering manual on the construction of fortified positions. By then the French had already been under attack for ten days. Virtually none of the French strongpoints possessed enough barbed wire to divide their positions into defensible segments. Consequently, when the Viet Minh succeeded in making a breach, the entire position became vulnerable. And the Viet Minh proved very good at exploiting breaches. Further compounding the vulnerability of the defenses was the fact that the French stripped the landscape bare to build field fortifications. Viet Minh observers in the hills now had a clear view of everything that happened in the valley.

By early February the outline of the French defensive system had emerged. In the center, the vital airstrip was surrounded by a series of fortified strongpoints: in the east, Dominique and Eliane; to the north and northwest, Anne-Marie and Huguette; and on the southwest, Claudine. To the north, separated by a considerable distance, lay Gabrielle, while Béatrice, also separated from the center, lay close to the jungle and mountains to the northeast. Finally, six kilometers to the south was strongpoint Isabelle, placed in a swamp that made the living conditions of its garrison miserable. Isabelle provided crucial artillery support for the main French defensive positions, particularly in the killing battles of April, but it lay too far south to support the outer strongpoints in the north, where the first Viet Minh attacks would come. The position in the central garrison consisted of a number of strongpoints that gave 360-degree coverage from trenches connected to a number of bunkers and mortar positions. Each of these defensive bastions—called, for example, Dominique 1 and 2 or Huguette 7—was provided with some barbed wire and mines, but not nearly enough. Moreover, most of the bunkers gave relatively little protection against artillery bombardment.

The basic assumption under which the French fought was that superior firepower—
air as well as artillery—would keep the enemy at bay. Counterbattery fire and air strikes would thus dominate and then eliminate whatever artillery the Viet Minh might drag across the jungle highlands. Aerial resupply efforts would then proceed through the small landing strip. In fact, with more than a three-to-one superiority in artillery, the Viet Minh were able to disrupt the landing strip early in the battle, and only a desperate effort by the Americans, who gathered up virtually all the equipment-drop parachutes in the Pacific and sent them posthaste to Hanoi, allowed the French to turn to resupplying their garrison by parachute. But beyond the Viet Minh's artillery superiority lay the fact that their engineers and artillerymen meticulously sited and dug in each artillery piece. What made even the parachute resupply effort a trial was the fact that, through the help of the Chinese, Giap brought substantial antiaircraft capability to the siege. So dense was the flak over Dien Bien Phu that some French pilots who had flown over Germany in World War II thought the Viet Minh were putting up more effective barrages.

Nevertheless, the French felt confident enough about their “artillery superiority” that throughout January and February, they brought in a series of visiting firemen, including their own minister of defense and Lieutenant General Iron Mike O'Daniel, commander of U.S. Army forces in the Pacific. Most visitors, including apparently O'Daniel, left impressed with what they had seen and with the garrison's confidence. By mid-March, Giap and his Viet Minh forces were ready. By now he enjoyed more than a three-to-one advantage over the defenders (approximately 13,000 French and empire troops—many of doubtful utility—against 50,000 Viet Minh). His artillery, which had been harassing the French with increasing severity over the past month, was in place.

At five P
.
M. on March 13, the Viet Minh artillery opened up with a thunderous roar that not only smashed into Béatrice but blanketed French positions throughout the central sector. Béatrice was of crucial importance, because its possession by the French would keep the Viet Minh artillery and observers back from the airfield. It was defended by the 3rd Battalion of the 13th Foreign Legion Demi-Brigade. Within an hour and a half, the Viet Minh were pressing in on all sides, and the defenders were calling for final protective fire from the main batteries of French artillery (the batteries on Isabelle were too far away to support Béatrice). To add to French woes, Viet Minh artillery destroyed Béa-trice's command bunker and, shortly afterward, the command bunker in the central sector. Of course, one couldn't miss where the main French command posts were, since they had large aerials poking up from the barren earth. By
eight in the evening, Giap's soldiers were inside the position and mopping up the legionnaires. By midnight the fight was over; a few survivors made it back to the main positions at daybreak, but the battle had opened with a disaster for the French.