Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (38 page)

Navarre imagined that the battle to come would be a fluid and
mobile affair and so placed a cavalryman—Colonel Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries—in charge of the ground troops. De Castries, from a proud military family and a graduate of the Saumur Cavalry School, set about throwing a ring of seven fortified locations around Dien Bien Phu, and one of the abiding myths of the story is that he named them after his past loves: Anne-Marie, Beatrice, Claudine, Dominique, Gabrielle, Huguette and Isabelle. The fact that those names run in alphabetical order is no doubt neither here nor there, and is certainly less interesting.

The empty buildings of the Vietnamese village that had stood beside the Nam Yum River were dismantled to provide materials for the fortifications. Even the mansion of the French governor was taken apart so that the bricks could be put to use elsewhere. Gone too was every bush and tree in the valley, consumed by the French military engineers as they sought to create an impregnable redoubt.

The preparations had been impressive in terms of the speed of their execution if nothing else—but the ordinary soldiers now hunkered down on that valley floor were filled with foreboding. They were numerous, well trained and well armed—that much was true. The seven fortified positions encircling them housed modern heavy artillery. Numerous tanks and aircraft were at their disposal and they would be supported and supplied by continuous landings by supply planes. Dien Bien Phu had been designed as a porcupine—and the enemy soldiers were expected to throw themselves onto its spines. But there was no doubting one major and deeply worrying fact: they were occupying the low ground and all around them overlooking them were hills and mountains that they did not control.

The army of the Viet Minh had occupied that high ground: in fact Giap had managed to mass at least 50,000 men on those slopes and ridges. The French had believed the terrain was too steep and
thickly forested—and the trackways leading to it too treacherous—for it to pose a realistic threat. Giap had thought otherwise, and had utilized the strong backs and legs of the local peasant population to manhandle more than 200 heavy guns into positions overlooking the French garrison and strong points.

As the Americans would learn later, the landscape of Vietnam was wholly unsuited to the tactics of conventional European armies and warfare. The French build-up at Dien Bien Phu gave them control of…nothing at all. They were entrenched in their position but the army of the Viet Minh moved through the surrounding area like grains of sand through loosely linked fingers. Before the battle itself was even under way, the French would suffer more than 1,000 casualties at the hands of Giap’s regular divisions.

But much worse was to come. Like the British in South Africa 75 years before, the French in Vietnam had misunderstood their enemy. They believed in their technology and tactics and so underestimated the significance of inferior numbers. They did not understand the terrain and so they were ready to fight the wrong kind of war in the wrong place. Worst of all, they thought Dien Bien Phu would be just another battle—and its outcome of limited significance beyond setting the tone for the imminent peace talks. What they could not know was that part of the future of the world, especially their own future, was being written for them in the hills around and above them. Change was in the air, along with the rains of the coming monsoon.

Colonel Charles Piroth, the good-natured, one-armed commander of the French artillery, had guaranteed he had all the guns he needed to destroy, or at the very least contain, anything the Communists might have managed to cobble together in this unforgiving wilderness. He couldn’t have been more wrong, but he wasn’t alone.

By mid-afternoon on March 13, the first real day of battle, the French guns in fortress Beatrice had been utterly destroyed by Giap’s
highly trained and superbly camouflaged artillery high in the surrounding hills. Piroth’s crews had not even been able to exchange fire with their tormentors—since they couldn’t work out where they were—and after less than a single day’s fighting the eventual fate of the French at Dien Bien Phu was already ominously clear.

Piroth was devastated—and humiliated. De Castries’s deputy, he felt responsible for giving his superior officer a false sense of security and by the following day he was broken—just going through the motions. Under his breath he whispered about being personally responsible, and dishonored.

Some time during the night that followed, he went alone into an underground bunker and killed himself by lying down and exploding a hand grenade clutched in his one fist.

The Viet Minh artillery pounded away at the French positions with devastating accuracy. Giap’s crews erected dummy gun positions to trick the French gunners—and moved their own pieces around the valley sides to ensure their locations were never fixed or predictable. The French guns were out in the open, the better to provide 360 degrees of fire, and were sitting ducks. The battle that Navarre had imagined as fast-moving, with French soldiers sallying forth to engage the enemy, swiftly degenerated into the kind of artillery duel familiar to veterans of World War I. From the start, the French had to dig in and hide underground in the hope of staying alive long enough for their situation to improve.

For the defenders, Dien Bien Phu was harrowing and horible from the moment the Viet Minh guns first opened fire. The seven forts were picked off one by one. As quickly as the French replaced the destroyed guns, they were hit again. Within weeks the French guns had fallen silent for good. The ground forces had been expecting to see steady landings of supply planes bringing fresh men and materials on an almost hourly basis. As it turned out, the airstrip was utterly destroyed by March 27, and from then on the
men on the ground depended entirely on air-drops. When the fighting started, the defenders of Dien Bien Phu had an estimated eight days’ worth of supplies. They needed to have hundreds of tons of material delivered every day just to keep things ticking over—and the fact that the siege was endured for as long as it was is testament to the organizational talents of the supply bases outside Vietnam and the bravery of the airmen.

Pilots who had to make the runs down the narrow river valley would later say it was as dangerous as over-flying the Ruhr Valley during World War II. As well as guns for attacking the ground forces, Giap had placed anti-aircraft artillery along the valley sides. Strafed from both sides, military and civilian pilots alike ran a deadly gauntlet as they attempted to drop the thousands of tons of materials needed by the defenders. Civilian pilots Wallace Buford and James McGovern became the first Americans to die in war in Vietnam.

Legionnaires besieged within the defended compound found themselves reliving the fate of their predecessors at Camerone, but on a much greater scale. Who can know now if the legend brought them any comfort, or made it any easier to fight and die.

“Faire Camerone”—do as they would have done. And so they did.

It was Legionnaires who were given the job of recovering the air-drops. As the planes flew higher to avoid the guns, so their accuracy suffered. The territory controlled by the French was also diminishing—disappearing like an oasis exposed to constant sunlight. More and more of the parachutes could be seen falling into enemy territory and it was down to the men of the Legion to go out and bring them back. Under withering fire, men crawled on hands and knees in search of the containers under their telltale white parachutes, which now littered the landscape like untimely blooms. True to the reputation of the French, sometimes the life-and-death sorties were
made in search of cases of good red wine. On other occasions it was vital military intelligence that went astray—often never to be seen again. De Castries’s Brigadier General’s stars, sent out to him by his commander, General René Cogny, were lost along with the bottle of champagne sent to help him celebrate his promotion in the field.

By the start of May, the French situation was becoming hopeless. Giap’s strategy had steadily eroded their position until eventually they were in control of a patch of Vietnam not much bigger than a football field. By now the Viet Minh had dug something like 300 miles of trenches around and into the French positions. Giap’s sappers had undermined the French defenses, in the medieval way, so as to blow them sky-high with buried dynamite. He had used modern artillery to knock out virtually every French gun on the ground, and anti-aircraft fire to strangle the compound. His own troops had made countless frontal assaults on every French position. It had been a classic and terrible battle of attrition.

The defenders had been reduced to exhausted, traumatized wraiths. As the siege drew to its close they were existing on a diet of black coffee and cigarettes and getting virtually no sleep while the enemy guns thundered and thundered. Casualties and corpses were piled high and the monsoon rains poured without a halt, creating hellish conditions reminiscent of Passchendaele in 1917. But in among it all there were countless acts of valor. The last medical evacuation by air had been on March 26. Two days later one more was attempted, but the plane was damaged and could not take off again. Genevieve de Galard, a Women’s Air Force nurse, was aboard the stricken flight. She stayed at Dien Bien Phu until the end, and was considered an angel by the sick and the dying.

There was little hope of relief from outside Vietnam—the distances and terrain involved made that practically impossible. The only help came by parachute—many untrained men making their
first ever jumps into the blackness of the night skies over Dien Bien Phu. But it would never be enough to turn the tide. Instead the last remaining hope was for a breakout by those soldiers still in a position to make a dash for it.

By May the Viet Minh were using World War II Russian Katyusha rockets for final, terrible assaults on the last of the French strong-points. By mid-morning on May 7 de Castries could see that the last act was being played out in the quagmire conditions all around him, while Stalin’s missiles howled and screamed in the air overhead. Time and again human waves of Viet Minh soldiers flung themselves against the surviving defenders—time and again they were repulsed. But there were always more.

De Castries radioed General Cogny, safe back in Hanoi, and updated him himself. He was going to order the breakout by those few French forces still holding on to defended positions. He would stay behind with the wounded and surrender to the encircling Viet Minh.

“But what you have done until now is magnificent,” Cogny said, horrified by the talk of giving in before the end. “Don’t spoil it by hoisting the white flag. You are going to be submerged, but no surrender—no white flag!”

“All right, mon général,” replied de Castries. “I only wanted to preserve the wounded.”

Cogny told him, “Yes, I know. Well…do the best you can…what you have done is too magnificent to do such a thing. You understand, mon vieux?”

Static crackled over the airwaves while de Castries imagined the consequences of what he was being told.

“Bien, mon général,” he said.

“Goodbye, mon vieux,” said Cogny. “I’ll see you soon.”

The radio operator then took the butt of his pistol to the radio set. There would be no more words from de Castries.

Isabelle, manned by 1,000 Legionnaires, as well as Algerians and French regular troops, was the only strongpoint with any hope of breaking out and trying to fight its way through the jungle to friendly Laos. It was not to be, however. Observers would speak later of seeing massive explosions as Isabelle’s ammunition dumps were detonated. Viet Minh forces were crawling over her defenses like ants. If the men inside had even attempted to start their run, they would surely have been spotted before they could leave the cover of their trenches and walls. In the early hours of May 8 a last message came out of the darkness where Isabelle should have been.

“Sortie failed. Stop,” said a voice. “Can no longer communicate with you. Stop and end.”

Only 70 men out a total of 1,700 ever made it out of Isabelle and through the jungle into Laos.

The final transmission was received from Dien Bien Phu in the early evening of May 8.

“We’re blowing up everything. Adieu!”

It was over.

Into the devastation rushed the massed forces of the Viet Minh at last. They would not be turned back this time. A red flag was raised above the bunker that had been de Castries’s command post. Dien Bien Phu had fallen, but there had been no surrender.

Out of the carnage and the chaos Giap’s men collected nearly 12,000 prisoners. Some 4,500 were too badly wounded to move and were eventually given treatment where they lay by the Red Cross. Those judged able-bodied began a death march toward prison camps waiting for them 300 miles away toward the north and east. Thousands of them died along the way, their corpses as lost and unmarked as those of more than 2,000 men who had died in the fighting. While imprisoned they were beaten, starved and generally abused. Not many more than 3,000 ever saw their homes again. De
Castries was among the survivors. After four months in a prison camp he was returned to his homeland. He retired from the army in 1959 and died in Paris in 1991.

There had been a terrible cost for the Viet Minh. Of the 50,000 men who had assembled at the start of the battle 23,000 were casualties now, almost one man in two. An estimated 8,000 of them were dead. But their spilled blood had changed the color of the map of South-East Asia for ever.

French Indochina was no more and would never be recovered. The French had been on the wrong side of crucial battles before in their history—at Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo—but here in Asia they had felt a shift beneath them like the movement of tectonic plates. Ho Chi Minh had shown his people and the wide world it was no longer necessary to submit to the white man. The time of unquestioned European colonial domination of Asia had been brought to an end in the mud and blood of Dien Bien Phu.

In the Geneva peace talks that followed, Vietnam was split in two, into North and South. By 1959 the Second Indochina War had broken out and before long America was being pulled toward the maelstrom.