The bataillon étranger de parachutistes (BEP) eventually established one of the most impressive records of any unit in Indochina. Quickly recognized as one of the French army's elite corps, it was awarded the dubious honor of playing a leading role in the two great French disasters of the war—the debacle on the Route Coloniale 4 in 1950, and Dien Bien Phu. R.C. 4 linked Lang Son with That Khe, Dong Khe and Cao Bang, which guarded the strategically important Chinese frontier. For these isolated posts, crammed with legionnaires and colonial infantry, R.C. 4 was a lifeline, a slender thread that twisted, rose and tumbled through a turmoil of jagged limestone ridges and high needles of jungle-covered rock. These military camps were inserted into narrow valleys carved out of the rock by rivers made blood red by the clay of the terraced rice fields, which followed the water course until it flowed out of view behind an emerald wall of forest. These were remote approaches from China used by brigands and opium smugglers prepared to negotiate the miles of almost trackless jungle that stretched away to the south and west toward Laos or the Tonkin delta.
The 1949 Communist victory in China placed these posts on the very front line of the Indochinese War. China gave Giap a sanctuary in which to train brigade- and eventually division-size forces, which were soon well supplied, largely with American arms collected on the battlefields of Korea in the summer of 1950. Giap also recognized the vulnerability of these posts, many of whose satellites were little more than isolated long bunkers that would not have looked out of place on the American frontier three-quarters of a century earlier. As early as 1949, he began to apply pressure upon the convoys that supplied the garrisons, and soon the struggle to keep these posts alive became a murderous one. A sergeant of the 3e étranger described one such attack, which occurred at a point where the road passed through a narrow gorge, to French journalist Lucien Bodard: “First, the Viets paralyzed the convoy,” he explained.
Mines blew just behind the leading armored cars, separating them from the trucks. As soon as this happened, a dozen impregnable machine guns, perched on the limestone cliffs above, opened fire, enfilading the entire column. Then a hailstorm of grenades came down. Regulars, hidden elbow to elbow on the embankment which dominated the roadway, threw them with precision, a dozen per vehicle. It was a firestorm. Trucks burned everywhere, completely blocking the way. All of that had lasted hardly a minute.
As the Viet Minh attacked, the legionnaires jumped from their trucks and climbed the embankment through a surging tide of Vietnamese, then they grouped to defend themselves. “The Viets proceeded very methodically,” the sergeant continued.
The regulars went from truck to truck picking up the abandoned arms and supplies, then they fired the vehicles. Others attacked the French who still fought on the embankment. The coolies finished off with machetes the wounded who had fallen on the roadway or at the bottom of the bank. It was hand to hand everywhere. There were hundreds of individual fights, hundreds of reciprocal exterminations. In this slaughterhouse, the political commissars, very calm, directed the work, giving orders to the regulars and the coolies which were immediately executed. . . . The red officers circulated in the middle of the battle, crying in French, “Where is the colonel? Where is the colonel?” They were looking for Colonel Simon, commander of the 3e étranger, the man who had a bullet in his head—a bullet lodged there from years ago.... He was in the convoy and Giap had ordered that he be taken alive.
I was in the part of the convoy which was destroyed. I was on the embankment with several legionnaires. We defended ourselves furiously there for a half hour, then we were overrun. I escaped into the forest, I hid in a thicket fifty yards from the road. Just next to me I heard several shots. It was legionnaires who blew their brains out. They had been discovered by the Viets. They didn't find me.
I don't know how this nightmare finished. It seems that Colonel Simon succeeded in assembling around him a hundred of his men. Formed in squares, they fought off the Viet waves with grenades for hours. Three hours later, reinforcements arrived—heavy rescue tanks. A few minutes before one heard the noise of their tracks, the Viets had beat it. At the beginning, to attack, they had blown the bugle charge. They gave the signal for the retreat by a new bugle call. They disappeared into the jungle in perfect order, unit after unit. Special formations of coolies took their killed, their wounded, as well as all the booty they had picked up.
We were masters of the battlefield. The road was a cemetery, a charnel house. The convoy was nothing but a tangle of disemboweled corpses and burned out machines. It already stank. The survivors reassembled. They cleared the road and collected the dead and wounded. The convoy, or what was left of it, left.
That night, at Cao Bang, everyone drank themselves into oblivion.16
By the summer of 1950, Giap had twenty thousand of his best-trained troops, armed with heavy weapons, posed to strike at the French on R.C. 4. The French high command, while recognizing full well the vulnerability of this finger of posts protruding northward from Lang Son, was nevertheless divided on whether to abandon or to defend them. On July 25, 1949, the comité de défense nationale had endorsed a recommendation by army chief of staff General Georges Revers that these posts be evacuated. However, the evacuation, already long overdue, was postponed by two events. The first was one of those bizarre scandals with which French politics appear to abound. On September 18, a fight broke out on a bus in Paris's Gare de Lyon between an ex-legionnaire, Thomas Perez, and two Indochinese students just back from the Communist-sponsored World Youth Congress in Budapest. Perez, who disappeared into the Legion, later claimed that he was hired by French intelligence to expose high level “leaks” in the French government. If that were indeed the plan, it worked, for when the two students were arrested, found in their possession was a copy of the Revers report. French security police later recovered seventy-two copies of the report in one of the students’ flats, but soon discovered that so many printed copies of the Revers report existed that it had become almost the daily reading of Paris's large Vietnamese community.17 The torturous course of what became known in France as “The Generals’ Plot” need not concern us here. Its immediate result was to discredit Revers and his report, several of whose recommendations had been opposed by colonial, secret service and military interests. More important in the long run, it revealed a muddle and indecision over Indochinese policy that stretched to the highest echelons of the French Fourth Republic.
The instability and lack of direction of the government were mirrored in the army. Just at the moment when General Roger Blaizot was preparing to evacuate R.C. 4, he was replaced as commander-in-chief by General Marcel Carpentier. One of the French army's stars, who had risen from major in 1940 to lieutenant general by 1946, Carpentier nevertheless found Indochina complex and disorienting. For this reason, he deferred to the opinions of General Marcel Alessandri, who had immense experience in the Far East and who was a determined opponent of withdrawal. Alessandri offered several excellent reasons for doing the wrong thing—the victory of the Communists in China made the maintenance of the R.C. 4 “barrier” more vital than ever. Revealing a prejudice that was to afflict the French throughout the war, he believed that the Viet Minh lacked the ability to overrun these posts, especially Cao Bang. Last, evacuation would insult the memory of the comrades who had died fighting to defend and supply these garrisons.
While they dithered, Giap stepped up the pressure on the vital convoys and on some of the outlying posts, not so much with a view to overrunning them as to perfect the assault tactics of the five combat divisions of twelve thousand men each that he was training in China. At six forty-five on the morning of May 25,1950, a violent artillery barrage suddenly rained down upon the two companies of Moroccans at Dong Khe. Unobserved by the garrisons, the Viet Minh had succeeded in hoisting five well-camouflaged 75-millimeter cannons onto the heights above the town, where for two days they “fired down the tubes” into the French post using the same techniques they were to employ later at Dien Bien Phu. On
May 27, 1950, after a forty-eight-hour attack, Giap's crack 308th “Iron Brigade,” soon to become the “Iron Division,” overwhelmed Doug Khe in a human-wave assault. In Hanoi, Alessandri reacted immediately, collecting thirty-four aircraft to drop a battalion of French colonial paratroopers upon Dong Khe. The paras took the 308th completely by surprise as they ransacked the town, and, after fierce fighting that cost the Viet Minh three hundred dead, ejected them into the jungle. This action was important, for it confirmed French opinion that one of their para battalions was worth an entire brigade of the Iron Division.
Nevertheless, Carpentier was not blind to the danger he was running on the R.C. 4. Convoys could no longer travel beyond That Khe, leaving Dong Khe and Cao Bang as islands in a Viet Minh sea. Furthermore, since August 1949, French intelligence had been tracking Viet Minh battalions as they traveled north into China to be retrained and reequipped. French historian and veteran of the Indochina War Colonel Henri Jacquin writes that the subsequent disaster at Cao Bang did not result from a failure of French intelligence.18 French military archives tell a different story. In the light of the attack of North Korea on the South on June 24, 1950, Carpentier predicted on August 18 that the Viet Minh were preparing “with Chinese collaboration, on the other side of the frontier, a general counter-offensive to be carried out with numerous well-armed infantry supported by artillery and eventually by armored groups, in any case by quality fighter aircraft.” The objective of the offensive would be to roll up the frontier posts from Cao Bang to Lang Son. For these reasons, the frontier posts “will be defended without thought of retreating.”19
It is clear that French intelligence made several mistakes. First, they confess in an after-action report that, although they could track Viet Minh units to the Chinese frontiers, they had no idea what was going on once they arrived in China. Next, while on September 8 they predicted imminent attacks, they were not precise on the objectives. While they listed Dong Khe as a primary objective, That Khe was also believed to be under threat. Furthermore, Lang Son was also listed as a primary objective, a miscalculation that contributed to the evacuation in panic of that outpost. Expert concealment and camouflage of Viet Minh units caused them to underestimate seriously enemy strength: Instead of eighteen to twenty battalions including three heavy weapons battalions as predicted, the Viet Minh produced thirty to thirty-two battalions including six to seven heavy battalions and numerous artillery. Finally, intelligence like everyone else desperately underestimated the Viet Minh ability to move rapidly and maneuver, and their willingness to take heavy casualties. Carpentier confessed in a report to the French prime minister that the complete transformation of the Viet Minh “in three or four months” from a rag-tag maquis into a modern force had caught him completely by surprise.20
Nevertheless, growing Viet Minh strength caused Carpentier to reverse himself and to order in early September an evacuation of Cao Bang “before 15 October.”21 But even before his order was issued, it was already desperately out of date. At seven o'clock on the morning of September 16, another hail of artillery and mortar shells pummeled Dong Khe, this time held by two companies of the 3e étranger. After the by-now familiar two days of softening up, a human-wave assault overran the post at dawn on September 18. A week later, an officer and thirty-one legionnaires appeared out of the jungle near That Khe, the only survivors of Dong Khe.
Giap had probably only wanted to put pressure on the French, to make them fight and die, gradually to weaken them. What he had not counted on was that the French command, which had declined to abandon these posts when it enjoyed the relative freedom to do so in 1949 or even early 1950, now decided to bolt in conditions that invited disaster. It no longer made any sense to evacuate the Cao Bang garrison by way of R.C. 4 with Dong Khe strongly held by the Viet Minh. It would have been logical to opt for either an air evacuation or a retreat down the R.C. 3 toward French forces moving upon Thai Nguyen from the Tonkin delta. However, Carpentier did neither. Instead, he reinforced Cao Bang by air with a tabor, or battalion, of North Africans while he assembled a force of three Moroccan tabors and the crack 1er BEP, in all about 3,500 men, at That Khe. This force, code-named Task Force Bayard, was placed under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Marcel Le Page. Carpentier's plan was for Bayard to seize Dong Khe and hold it for the Cao Bang garrison coming down the R.C. 4, although he failed to communicate this information to Le Page, or to coordinate attacks by the two columns simultaneously upon Dong Khe.
The French command contrived to turn a bad plan into a catastrophic one. The staff work was appalling, in part the product of confusion and disagreement between Carpentier and Alessandri, who exploded with rage when ordered to organize the retreat. Although the French were outnumbered almost eight to one, no one bothered to organize an intervention force of paratroopers as insurance against misfortune. La Page dithered at That Khe until September 30, when his force finally set out for Dong Khe, still without intelligence of the garrison or even aware of the aim of his mission. The coordination between the two columns was to be provided by a colonel at the end of a telephone line at Lang Son, almost a hundred miles away. Nor was either column provided with security on their flanks—the Viet Minh were only capable of guerilla action, after all!22
The French plan called for Bayard to seize Dong Khe on October 2, the day on which Legion Lieutenant Colonel Charton, Commander at Cao Bang, would blow his magazines and strike out down the R.C. 4 to march the thirty-three miles between Cao Bang and Dong Khe. On the evening of September 30, Le Page left That Khe to march the eleven miles to Dong Khe. Surprise was his best ally. But when advanced elements of the 1er BEP hit opposition as they neared Dong Khe, Le Page rejected the furious pleas of the Legion paras that they be allowed to punch through to Dong Khe. Instead, he postponed the attack until the following morning, by which time, as the legionnaires had predicted, the Viet Minh had brought up reinforcements. As a consequence, Le Page's two-pronged advance upon Dong Khe sputtered on the limestone ridges that surrounded the town. This hardly improved the disposition of the paras, whose open contempt of Le Page's leadership and of the fighting abilities of the Moroccans, while perhaps justified, helped to undermine cohesion in a heterogeneous force whose morale was already fragile.
THIS NEED NOT have been fatal, as Charton had not yet left Cao Bang. But the French command failed to realize that the pressing need was to save their troops from catastrophe. Le Page should have withdrawn to That Khe. Instead, a letter was dropped from a plane to Le Page on the afternoon of October 2 that, for the first time, explained the purpose of his operation. Le Page was ordered to bypass Dong Khe to the west and return to the R.C. 4 at Nam Nang, about eleven miles north of Dong Khe. This order was issued in Lang Son, where it was believed that Le Page confronted only three Viet Minh battalions. Leaving a rear guard of the BEP and a tabor of Moroccans to hold a ridge line to prevent Viet Minh forces from advancing upon him from the east, Le Page plunged into the jungle. As he struggled through a country of tangled vegetation and limestone cliffs, the BEP and the Moroccans were hit by assault waves well supported by artillery and mortar fire. It was painfully obvious to the legionnaires in the rear guard that their commanders had underestimated the numbers, skill and quality of armament of their enemy. In fact, the French discovered to their dismay that they were outgunned by the Viet Minh.
From six o'clock on the morning of October 3, the Moroccans and the BEP began to fall back after destroying their mules and heavy equipment. Their march was a calvary. “We plunged into the mountains, on a ‘trail’ which was a trail only in name,” wrote Kemencei.
Several of our wounded died that night. They could not take falling every ten or twenty yards with their porters. We were all beat, for we had practically not slept since we left our base. Climb, descend several times each day on these abrupt slopes loaded to the maximum with packs and equipment was backbreaking. At each stop for several minutes, everyone slept.23
By October 5, after great sacrifice and effo
rt, Le Page had managed to lead his troops into the valley of Coc Xa, where they were encircled by the Viet Minh. Without food or water, almost without ammunition, Le Page settled down to await Charton. At five o'clock on the evening of October 6, Le Page made radio contact with Charton. He grasped at the prospect of a meeting with Charton as if it were salvation itself.
Charton's column, which departed Cao Bang at high noon on October 3, looked more like a gypsy migration than a military expedition. His force contained a large number of civilians, including the town's numerous prostitutes, as well as the third battalion of the 3e étranger. This, as well as the fear of ambush, caused the column to move at a snail's pace down the R.C. 4. At ten o'clock on the morning of October 4, as the head of his column completed the eighteen miles between Cao Bang and Nam Nang, a radio message informed Charton of Le Page's failure before Dong Khe. He was ordered to move off R.C. 4 along the Quang Liet Trail, where, he was told, Le Page awaited him on the ridges to the east of Coc Xa. While the Quang Liet Trail was perhaps marked on the maps at Lang Son, it was much more difficult to locate on the ground. Local scouts discovered a track that led off into the jungle, and after blowing up their trucks and heavy equipment, the group set off along it only to discover that the trail soon vanished into thick bush. Progress became terribly slow as scouts hacked a path through the dense vegetation, and the column soon strung out over four miles.
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