The Cold War (47 page)

Not only had the defenses on Béatrice collapsed, but the artillery had neither suppressed the enemy's guns nor held off the attacking enemy infantry. It was not for want of trying; the French fired off no fewer than six thousand 105 shells, one quarter of their stock. But the Viet Minh had too many artillery pieces and were too well dug in for anything other than massive artillery superiority to destroy their positions.

Still worse followed on the heels of Béatrice. Over the night of March 14, Gabrielle's garrison thwarted a Viet Minh attack. In the early-morning hours of March 15, a massive barrage further reduced Gabrielle's garrison; as had happened at Béatrice, one of the Viet Minh shells then hit the command post and wiped out most of the staff. Another infantry assault followed up on the bombardment; the main garrison failed to launch an effective relief effort. By midmorning another position had fallen; a few escaped, but most of Gabrielle's garrison of five hundred men were either dead or in Viet Minh hands.

Béatrice and Gabrielle shattered French illusions. French artillery, for all the bravery of its crews, had failed. Counterbattery work had not silenced Viet Minh guns emplaced in deep revetments (admittedly limiting their targets to a narrow band); nor had it placed sufficient shells on Viet Minh infantry to prevent them from swamping French positions. The shocking failure of French artillery led Dien Bien Phu's artillery commander, Colonel Charles Piroth, to commit suicide on March 15 to atone for the failure of his guns—a suicide that the paratroop commander Langlais may have encouraged by remarking to him that expiation was in order.

Meanwhile, Viet Minh artillery had blanketed all the French defensive positions. It had destroyed French fighter-bombers on Dien Bien Phu's landing strip or driven them off, while the landing of resupply aircraft was rapidly coming to a halt. Ambulance aircraft and helicopters would continue to land until the end of the month, but from that point on, the garrison was totally cut off except for aerial drops. The fall of Béatrice, which was on high ground, brought Viet Minh artillery to positions looking directly down into the central position, while Gabrielle's loss allowed Giap to set antiaircraft positions on the flight path into the airstrip, making aerial resupply a nightmare throughout the remainder of the battle. To compound the problem of using air effectively, the
French remained so dismissive of Viet Minh capabilities that they continued to direct most of the close air support and resupply missions on the radio en clair; the Viet Minh knew what was going on as quickly as did French pilots.

To compound these difficulties in the days after the fall of Béatrice and Gabrielle, most of the T'ai troops on the Anne Marie positions deserted. Nevertheless, there was a slight improvement in the garrison's morale as the legendary Major Marcel Bigeard and his 6th Parachute Battalion dropped into Dien Bien Phu. Bigeard, wrote one American reporter who spent time there, “had the physical presence of a medieval warlord, a tall, lean, hawk-nosed man with a fine disregard for danger and an innate gift for leadership.” But there was little help from Hanoi, where Cogny seems to have spent his time feuding with Navarre and preparing the historical record to show himself in a favorable light. On March 24 he found time to send de Castries the reassuring message that “[T]he rainy season, now close at hand, will compromise [the enemy's] communication lines and will oppose a major obstacle of mud to the development of his field fortifications.” Cogny was wrong on both counts: The bad weather interfered more with French resupply efforts, while Viet Minh defensive positions were on the high ground and thus far less vulnerable to the effects of the monsoon.

But the Viet Minh had suffered heavy losses in the attacks on Béatrice and Gabrielle. With possession of the high ground, Giap turned to strangling the central position. Viet Minh troops began digging approach trenches that would allow them to launch their infantry over shorter distances at the French defenses and therefore suffer fewer casualties. If the Viet Minh were learning, so were the French. Moving out of Huguette and Claudine with support from Isabelle, paratroopers and armor drove to the west of Dien Bien Phu and caught the enemy completely by surprise. Bigeard was at his best; his meticulous planning resulted in a sharp setback to the Viet Minh. But in the end, the French could not take the casualties involved in such ripostes: Aerial resupply was becoming increasingly expensive and less effective, and many of the drops completely missed areas controlled by the French. Their opponents could better bear heavy casualties, and the movement of supplies and reinforcements to Viet Minh forces around Dien Bien Phu continued unabated despite the heavy attacks launched by the French air force.

On the evening of March 30, Giap launched his next series of attacks against the central sector. As had happened on Gabrielle and Béatrice, the Viet Minh began with a heavy artillery bombardment that targeted Dominique and
Eliane, as well as French command centers. Following a rolling barrage, Viet Minh assault waves left their approach trenches, so assiduously dug during previous weeks, and destroyed the defenders on Dominique 1 and 2. But they failed to take the third strongpoint on Dominique. Artillerymen on that position remained with their guns and, firing over open sights, blasted the attacking Viet Minh infantry to pieces. Their stand prevented Giap's troops from breaking into the center of the fortress. At the same time, the Eliane position came under heavy attack from the Viet Minh 316th Division; Eliane 1 fell. But a mixed force of Frenchmen, Foreign Legion paratroopers, and Moroccans counterattacked and regained most of the lost territory.

Late on the afternoon of March 31, Bigeard launched one of his patented counterattacks. His troops regained Eliane 1 and Dominique 1, but at a heavy price in casualties and artillery shells. That day, eighteen French 105s fired off thirteen thousand rounds at the attackers. By this point both the garrison and its tormentors were exhausted. Despite desperate calls by de Castries to Hanoi, Cogny was too busy with social engagements to meet with Navarre. In spite of the availability of a battalion of paratroopers, Hanoi dithered away the chance to reinforce Dien Bien Phu at the moment when the Viet Minh were in serious trouble.

Giap now shifted to the west. While attacking Dominique and Eliane, the Viet Minh were also pressuring Huguette. By early morning of April 2, they had pushed the defenders on Huguette 7 into a small bunker on the corner of the strongpoint; but a French counterattack, supported by tanks, drove the Viet Minh off the position to the northwest of the airstrip. Over the night of April 4–5, it was the turn of Huguette 6, and again Viet Minh regulars gained control of most of the strongpoint despite a steady dribble of reinforcing small units. But in the early-morning hours a French counterattack, supported by all of the remaining French artillery, hit the Viet Minh 165th Regiment before it had consolidated its position. The French had learned that if they were going to regain a position, they had to strike immediately with what was at hand, rather than wait to get everything ready. In this case, what was ready were two companies of Bigeard's paratroops, each with barely eighty men. Nonetheless, their counterattack hit the Viet Minh when they were most vulnerable, and with the support of deadly artillery fire, the French drove the Viet Minh out.

The French had weathered Giap's second offensive. They had lost some of the outer strongpoints of the central position, but they maintained its integrity.
The cost had been heavy, in both reserves of ammunition and the steady attrition of the garrison. The driblets of reinforcements hardly made up for the casualties, especially since the parachute bureaucracy in Hanoi insisted that the resupply efforts adhere to peacetime procedures. On the night of April 3–4, Langlais threw away the rule book and ordered transport aircraft circling above to drop their reinforcements directly on the central fortress rather than on a regulation drop zone. When the drop commander objected, saying that such an action was not in accordance with regulations, Langlais exploded: “
Merde!
You can tell Colonel Sauvagnac that I'll take the responsibility for the drop-zone violations. Drop those men!” The arrival of 305 paratroopers, with only two dead and ten wounded, justified Langlais's gamble. In addition, the garrison was feeling the loss of specialists, such as artillerymen and tankers. Langlais forced the authorities in Hanoi to drop these men in (provided they were willing) without jump training. Again, the losses were small.

If Giap was facing his own problems, most of which arose from the heavy casualty bill, he was not willing to take the pressure off the garrison. He aimed to finish Dien Bien Phu before the Geneva Conference on the future of Vietnam convened in mid-May. That conference, attended by the foreign ministers of China, France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, was supposed to solve the problems raised by the Korean and Indochinese conflicts. In the end, it did nothing about Korea, divided Vietnam, split off Cambodia and Laos, and created the potential for another conflict.

On the other side of the world, a major policy debate was raging in Washington. The debate was between those who believed that the United States should intervene with airpower to prevent a French defeat at Dien Bien Phu— in particular the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Arthur B. Radford—and those who believed that such involvement would lead to the commitment of ground forces in a war that was not in America's strategic interest. Radford argued that a major raid out of the Philippines by a large force of B-29s would turn the tide at Dien Bien Phu and gain the French the breathing room needed to survive until the peace conference at Geneva convened. The journalist and historian Bernard Fall suggests that at Clark Field the U.S. insignia on some B-29s may have been painted out and replaced with the French tricolor circles.

But to the anguish of the French, Radford's position ran into substantial opposition elsewhere in the American military. In particular, General Matthew Ridgway and Lieutenant General James Gavin (both former commanders of
the 82nd Airborne and among the most outstanding combat leaders of World War II) did not believe that any number of air raids would suffice to bail the French out at Dien Bien Phu, and that the inevitable result of such attacks would be the commitment of U.S. ground forces to Indochina. They argued that the United States should not involve itself in a colonial war, where the costs in lives and treasure would bring no commensurate gain in strategic, economic, or political terms. They felt—to paraphrase Omar Bradley about war with China in 1951—that Vietnam was the wrong war, in the wrong place, and at the wrong time. In retrospect, their strategic calculus was on target, and they did not find it difficult to win over President Dwight Eisenhower. The United States would stand aside as the French garrison went down to defeat. There would be no American strikes in the Dien Bien Phu area until the summer of 1965, when Operation Rolling Thunder began.

Despite the gallantry of their stand, French forces at Dien Bien Phu were on their last legs by mid-April. Major Viet Minh attacks went in on the Eliane positions on April 10; only a desperate last-ditch attack by Vietnamese paratroopers drove the Viet Minh off Eliane 1. In
Hell in a Very Small Place,
Bernard Fall describes the scene:

Now, as the two opposing sides struggled to regain their balance—the French almost out of men and supplies and with a failing airlift, and the Viet Minh forced to use boys in place of the troops devastated by French fire-power—Giap's forces turned to siege tactics as well as direct attacks. They dug their trenches ever closer to French positions, harassed their enemy with constant artillery fire and probing attacks, and did everything in their power to hinder the airlift. Between April 12 and 21, Giap's soldiers drove the French off the Huguette positions to the north and west of the airstrip, thus making airlift operations ever more difficult. The French hung on, but they no longer had the reserves or the ammunition to regain what they lost. Cogny's headquarters in
Hanoi added to the air of unreality by asking de Castries what engineering supplies he needed to protect the garrison from the monsoon rains that were turning its positions into waterlogged swamps—the one advantage being that the mud made the Viet Minh artillery slightly less effective. His request came on April 23, when only thirty-five men arrived to replace the sixty-seven casualties suffered that day.

The final turn on the road to defeat came on April 23. A counterattack by paratroopers to regain Huguette 1 got caught in the open and pinned on the airstrip; the commander of the operation had his radio tuned on the wrong frequency and never picked up that things were going wrong. Bigeard, awakened from a deep sleep, rushed across the central position in a jeep, but too late. A major counterattack had failed with heavy losses (150 men killed or wounded), and Dien Bien Phu's last operational reserve had gone down the drain. The morale of even the best units began to crack. The cost to the Viet Minh in the Huguette fighting had been heavy; they would not launch their final series of attacks until May 1, after a full week of replenishing supplies and bringing up cadres and soldiers to replace their losses.

The end would come with relative suddenness. Astonishingly, as the garrison slowly collapsed under the weight of Viet Minh attacks, legionnaires were still engaged in vigorous patrolling and attacking enemy bunkers, perhaps to pay their eventual captors back ahead of time. On May 5, Cogny, ever the cad, sent a final message to the garrison, undoubtedly for the historical record: “I need not underline inestimable value in every field, and perspectives offered, by prolonging resistance on the spot, which at present remains your glorious mission.”