The Cold War

by Robert Cowley

  Henceforth, Bernard Fall has written, the Viet Minh would “refuse combat on any terms but their own.” They inevitably chose to strike in places where the French could not use tanks or other heavy equipment; where they could not detect the presence of camouflaged troops hidden under the canopy of the jungle; where the hit-and-run nature of Viet Minh tactics kept them forever off balance. Fall speaks of their “uncanny tactical sense.” They made ambush a fine art. Attacks on fixed positions seemed to come out of nowhere, sudden mortar barrages “smashing barbed wire, ploughing passages through the minefields, and knocking out French gun crews.” Within minutes Viet Minh infantry appeared on top of battered dugouts. French air support often arrived “just in time … to witness the departure of the prisoners, with their hands raised, between a double column of Viet-Minh guards.”

  But the French were in for ruder and more psychologically debilitating shocks. In his extraordinary history/memoir, Street Without Joy, Fall quotes a paratroop commando on a perilous flight through the jungle in October 1952: “You should have seen us. Along the route of retreat of the paratroops, the Viets had planted on bamboo pikes the heads of the soldiers they had killed, like so many milestones. Some of the men went berserk from it, other cried hysterically when they recognized the head of somebody they had known….”

  It was that kind of war.

  Even when they did win engagements, the French lacked the air- or the man power to exploit their tenuous victories. Thrusts at Viet Minh bases that seemed initially promising accomplished little except the siphoning off of mobile reserves from other theaters of war: The enemy would simply regroup and strike elsewhere. All the while the U.S. poured money (but never men) into Indochina, $2.6 billion in 1954 alone. But the U.S. sent mostly World War II surplus, already obsolete. Giap's forces also relied on American equipment, much of it captured in Korea or left behind by the fleeing Nationalists; the Communists sent it south, along with fire-control personnel and artillerymen. The Soviet bloc weighed in with regular shipments of mortars, artillery, automatic weapons, and Molotova trucks. By the end of the war, Viet Minh firepower was actually superior to that of the French—who were, in Porch's words, “outgunned, outmanned, and outmaneuvered.”

  Indochina was a war of little dramas, ending with one big one, Dien Bien Phu. There was a piecemeal quality to French losses, but over the years they added up—as Fall puts it, “one convoy annihilated here, one battalion mauled there, a truck convoy lost in an ambush elsewhere.” The war took an especially high toll on young officers. Lieutenants died by the hundreds, 1,300 in all. (In 1953 alone, more junior French officers were killed in Indochina than were graduated that year from the national military academy at Saint-Cyr.) This was one of those rare wars in which the number of KIAs exceeded the wounded. The French and their Indochinese allies lost 94,000 dead or missing and 78,000 wounded. “To maintain major communications lines,” Fall has written, “cost on the average three to four men per day for every hundred kilometers of road.” The Viet Minh losses were even more appalling. No casualty figures were kept, but estimates go as high as four hundred thousand, with another quarter of a million civilian deaths. Victory would not come cheaply.

  Nevertheless, at the end of 1953, a virtual draw existed. Giap had originally intended to mount a series of attacks in the Tonkin Delta: He hoped to capture Hanoi or Haiphong, preferably both. The Chinese Communists, whose role in the war was becoming increasingly dominant, feared that the French, fighting from interior lines, would hold off the Viet Minh in a series of set-piece battles, just what they had been hoping for all along. The Chinese suggested that Giap strike instead at the Montagnard hill tribes along the Laotian border; they had long presented a significant guerrilla threat to the Viet Minh rear.

  The bait in what they hoped would prove a trap for the French was opium, a largely unspoken reason for one of the major battles of the twentieth century. The Viet Minh wanted the Montagnard opium, much of which grew in the Dien Bien Phu area, because it was one of the principal sources of finance for their war effort. The French wanted the same opium because it paid for their special operations in the back country (and made some members of their secret service wealthy). The French commander in chief, General Henri Navarre, Porch has written, “calculated that he simply could not stand by and allow the Viet Minh to replenish their war chests with Montagnard opium. Therefore, the French occupation of Dien Bien Phu was neither a foolish nor short-sighted decision, as it has often been portrayed.”

  However, when Navarre set up a fortified air-land “hedgehog,” or base aéroterrestre, far from his center of operations in the Tonkin Delta, he was taking a gamble. In addition to protecting his opium supplies and blocking the Viet Minh invasion route to Laos—the more customary explanation for Dien Bien Phu—Navarre was not averse to luring Giap into a set-piece battle. But did he reckon that Giap would respond with a gamble of his own, dispatching a hundred thousand men, or approximately half the force available to him, to the mountains that surrounded Dien Bien Phu? Could he have foreseen that Giap, with the aid of the Chinese, would build up a four-to-one superiority in artillery? Even so, the gamble was one that Giap came close to losing, had it not been for the stiffening the Chinese provided. They not only continued to supply him, especially with artillery, but, more important, they persuaded him to abandon human-wave assault tactics in favor of a tightening web of trenches, reminiscent of the French marshal Vauban's seventeenth-century siege tactics. The result, as Williamson Murray tells it here, was a first, a victory not just of Asians over Westerners—since World War II, that was no longer novel—but of colonial subjects over their former masters. Dien Bien Phu would be the greatest single Communist military triumph of the Cold War.

  WILLIAMSON MURRAY, a senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses, is a professor of history emeritus at Ohio State University and, with Allen R. Millett, the author of A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War.

  THE BATTLE OF DIEN BIEN PHU in the spring of 1954 ended a century of French rule in Indochina. It represented the triumph of an indigenous Nationalist movement, one completely dominated by fanatical Communists. It also confronted the United States with the question: Should it attempt to rescue a French garrison that was clearly going down to defeat? The American decision was a cold, rational statement that Indochina was not worth the price of success—that the conditions under which American land forces would have to fight in Southeast Asia were far worse than they had been in the just concluded Korean War.

  How had the French found themselves in a major battle in a gloomy valley in one of the most isolated parts of Indochina? What were the strategic, political, and operational factors that drew French military leaders in Hanoi to stake all, far from their centers of power, with tenuous lines of communications, and in an area of no great strategic significance?

  The French had colonized Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) in the nineteenth century. Utilizing the weapons of the industrial revolution, they easily dominated the locals and established a colonial regime that represented both the strengths and weaknesses of the French empire. They brought a modern, relatively honest administration, technological and medical benefits, and French education. Not surprisingly, they also administered Indochina for their own economic benefit and ruthlessly suppressed any signs of dissent. But Vietnamese Nationalism smoldered under the surface.

  Ironically, the schools the French established were to play a crucial role in their eventual defeat. In the early 1990s, an American-Vietnamese filmmaker interviewed Vo Nguyen Giap, who had played such a major role as the military leader in the wars against the French and Americans. Giap chose to speak in French, not Vietnamese, and in the film From Hollywood to Hanoi, he conveyed the fanaticism of the French Revolution. He was the very embodiment of Robespierre: ice-cold, passionate, doctrinaire, prepared to make any sacrifice for the cause. In fact, he had received an admirable education at Quoc Hoc, one of the best lycées in Vietnam, where he had drunk deepl
y the lessons of the French Revolution. Giap had been second only to the man who would take the nom de plume of Ho Chi Minh and who would lead Communist forces in two wars.

  In March 1945 the Japanese destroyed the pro-Axis French colonial administration in Indochina that had cooperated with them since 1940. Within six months, the Japanese themselves would surrender. Thus they provided Ho and his nascent Communist-Nationalist movement with a political vacuum, which Ho's movement eagerly sought to fill. In the immediate postwar period, Ho and his followers seized and then consolidated a tenuous hold over most of Vietnam, particularly over the northern sections. The French deployed major forces to Vietnam to suppress what they regarded as a local insurrection. These forces were led by a military embittered by the catastrophe of 1940 and never really controlled by the constitutional authorities in Paris. The war for Vietnam began in 1947—a war that lasted until 1975, at a terrible cost to all involved, with the greatest price paid by the Vietnamese themselves. Initially, French forces in Indochina received almost no aid from the United States, which regarded the struggle with considerable distaste because of its colonialist nature. The French government exhibited similar ambivalence and refused to allow conscripts to participate in the war. The result was a stalemate: The French dominated the countryside where their troops happened to be, while the Viet Minh tightened their hold when the French moved on.

  The nature of the war changed in 1949, when the Chinese Communists arrived on Indochina's frontier after having chased the Chinese Nationalists to Taiwan. Supplied with substantial amounts of weaponry—much of it American, captured from the Nationalists—Ho's Viet Minh launched a series of attacks against French bases along the frontier in the fall of 1950. The garrison towns of Dong Khe, Cao Bang, and Lang Son fell in rapid succession. The French seemed on the brink of collapse. But the international situation again shifted. Far to the north, Kim Il Sung had unleashed the Korean War, and the rapid escalation of that conflict had a profound effect on the war in Indochina. Suddenly, the Americans loosened the purse strings to support the French struggle against international Communism; American suspicion of colonialism disappeared in reaction to the desperate struggle in Korea. Now, at last, the French received massive amounts (at least in their terms) of weapons and ammunition to fight the Viet Minh. At the same time, Chinese aid to the Viet Minh substantially decreased as Mao concentrated on the war in Korea.

  But their victories in the fall of 1950 led Ho and Giap to believe that success was around the corner. Early in 1951 they threw their forces against French positions in the Red River Valley in an all-out bid for victory. Giap even predicted that Ho would arrive in Hanoi in time to celebrate the lunar new year, Tet. But the French had received more than an infusion of American weaponry. They had a new commander, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, one of the outstanding soldiers in the French army. Lattre infused his troops with a new enthusiasm; in one case he flew into a beleaguered garrison and then radioed out to his forces to “come and get me.” The first Viet Minh offensive came in January 1951; the French held, while the Viet Minh suffered more than 6,000 killed and 8,000 wounded out of 20,000 attacking troops before Giap broke off the attack. By early summer the Viet Minh had withdrawn from the delta and were licking their wounds in the jungles that surrounded the Red River Valley.

  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 wa
r, 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.