Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  Giap boasted, “Our guerrillas and government take over within gunshot of their strong-points.” 95 He wasn’t exaggerating. A Newsweek correspondent reported from the Red River Delta in early 1953 that French forts were attacked almost every night. In the morning the troops had to sweep the roads for mines, which accounted for 60 percent of their casualties. “The French rule by day and the Reds by night,” the article noted, adding that the defenders could not locate elusive attackers who took refuge in tunnels “only to pop up again half an hour after the French have pulled out.”96

  Acutely conscious of their inability to keep the guerrillas out of the villages, a revolving cast of French commanders sought to lure the Vietminh into a conventional battle where heavier French firepower might prevail. This was the genesis of the fateful decision in 1953 to launch Operation Castor by establishing a base at Dien Bien Phu, 180 miles from Hanoi and reachable only by air. Lieutenant General Henri-Eugène Navarre, the senior French commander, hoped that this “aero-terrestrial” outpost, similar to those established by the Chindits, could be used to stop the Communists from infiltrating Laos and from capturing the opium crop, a lucrative source of financing for both sides.97

  In Navarre’s estimation, Giap would then have no choice but to attack this “hedgehog,” leading the Viets to slaughter on the valley floor. What Navarre could not envisage was that the Vietminh would actually have the firepower advantage because they would be able to transport artillery through hundreds of miles of “impenetrable” jungle.98 But that is what happened.

  AS SOON AS he received intelligence in late November 1953 that the French were fortifying Dien Bien Phu, Giap began to marshal his forces. Eventually, on the slopes around Dien Bien Phu, he would assemble four of his six regular divisions, a total of 50,000 combat soldiers and 50,000 support personnel. Transporting their equipment and supplies was a heroic undertaking, with few parallels in modern military history, that necessitated the marshaling of hundreds of thousands of peasants. Roads had to be hacked out of the jungle to allow Russian-made Molotova trucks to move heavy equipment. But most of the supplies were hauled by what Giap described as “an endless, linked human chain,” their loads resting on hand-pushed “pack bikes” or on shoulder-borne bamboo yokes.

  Artillery pieces were disassembled and hauled over many nights up the mountains around Dien Bien Phu, where they were positioned in carefully camouflaged gun pits. One Vietminh soldier recalled, “To climb a slope, hundreds of men crept in front of the gun, tugging on long ropes, pulling it up inch by inch. . . . Whole nights were spent toiling by torchlight to move a gun 500 or 1,000 meters.” When a gun was in danger of sliding into a ravine, one soldier threw his own body under the wheel. Through such heroic exertions, the Vietminh managed to surround Dien Bien Phu with 206 field guns and mortars, including 105-millimeter howitzers and 37-millimeter antiaircraft cannons.

  The French were hardly idle during the Vietminh buildup. Although they had little idea of the size of the threat they would shortly face, they had been working frantically to fortify their own positions under the command of Colonel (soon Brigadier General) Christian de Castries, who was seldom without a flat red kepi on his head and a riding crop in his hand. A cavalryman and world high-jump champion, he had once said he wanted nothing more than “a horse to ride, an enemy to kill, and a woman in bed.” Legend had it that he named various strongpoints located on the low hills around Dien Bien Phu after his current and former mistresses. More likely, if prosaically, he employed random women’s names in alphabetical order.

  Grouped closely around the airstrip and command bunkers were Dominique, Eliane, Huguette, and Claudine. Farther north were Beatrice, Anne-Marie, and Gabrielle. Each “center of resistance” was made up of smaller outposts (Eliane 1, 2, 3, 4) with interlocking fields of fire and protective belts of barbed wire and mines. More than three miles south was an airstrip protected by Isabelle—too far from the others to contribute much to their defense. The French troops, assisted by prisoners who were employed as forced laborers, did the best they could to dig trenches and construct bunkers, but there were not enough engineers or materials to go around, so not all of the entrenchments could withstand a heavy barrage.

  The primary French firepower consisted of twenty-four 105-millimeter guns and four 155-millimeter howitzers, the latter capable of hurling a 95-pound shell more than ten miles. The Vietminh had nothing comparable to the 155s, but in total number of artillery tubes they outnumbered the French by two or three to one.

  Occupying these defensive positions were 10,813 men, a figure that would grow to 15,090 after the siege started and reinforcements, many of them volunteers, were parachuted in. In combat they consumed 180 tons of supplies a day, which also had to be flown in—including wine and cheese. The French even airlifted in two Mobile Field Brothels, “an all-important institution,” staffed by Vietnamese and African prostitutes. Giap, by contrast, lived a Spartan life in his forward command post twelve miles to the north, sleeping on a grass mat and subsisting on rice and a few chunks of meat or fish.

  Almost alone among French officers, Bruno Bigeard, a physical fitness buff, shared Giap’s abstemiousness. Visitors to his mess could expect “a thin slice of ham and one small, isolated boiled potato” washed down with “steaming tea” rather than the multicourse banquets accompanied by copious quantities of wine and brandy that were de rigueur in most French messes.

  INTERMITTENT FIGHTING HAD been going on ever since French forces had first arrived at Dien Bien Phu. Units that ventured outside the wire were mauled. Those on the inside took casualties from intermittent shelling. A thousand men, or 10 percent of the garrison, were killed or wounded during this preliminary skirmishing. The siege started in earnest on the afternoon of March 13, 1954. “Shells rained down on us without stopping like a hailstorm on a fall evening,” recalled a Foreign Legion sergeant. “Bunker after bunker, trench after trench, collapsed, burying under them men and weapons.”

  The fire was especially intense around Beatrice, which was held by 437 legionnaires. In command was Lieutenant Colonel Jules Gaucher, a legend within the legion who had served in Indochina since 1940. Around 7:30 p.m. a shell penetrated his command bunker, smashing his arms and legs and tearing open his chest. He died soon thereafter. The same fate befell many of his officers. The defense was left in the hands of sergeants and junior officers as wave after wave of Viet attackers emerged from surreptitiously dug “approach” trenches. The vanguard employed Bangalore torpedoes to open holes through the barbed wire and minefields. Then came the rest of the Viets with a frenzied disregard for the defenders’ firepower. One Viet squad leader became a legend for throwing his body in front of a bunker’s slit to momentarily block the machine gun, allowing his comrades to advance. The legionnaires fought valiantly, but after midnight a captain radioed, “It’s all over—the Viets are here. Fire upon my position. Out.”

  Within days the Vietminh artillery closed down the exposed airstrip. From then on reinforcements and supplies could arrive only by parachute, and even this was increasingly hazardous—forty-eight planes were shot down. The lack of a safe landing strip also meant that the wounded could not be evacuated. Mutilated men overflowed the aid stations, their misery increased by the heat, stench, dirt, rain, mud, even maggots. A doctor described their “slow, gentle groans like a song full of sadness.” Outside lay a growing pile of amputated limbs—“shriveled legs, arms, and hands, grotesque feet, all mixed up as in some witches’ cauldron.”

  A number of Vietnamese, Thai, and African troops became internal deserters, taking refuge along the banks of the Nam Yum River. But morale remained strong among the paras and legionnaires, the elite forces. Bigeard and his battalion, which had been dropped into Dien Bien Phu for a second time after the siege began, mounted a particularly heroic effort on April 10 to retake Eliane 1. Hobbled by a pulled leg muscle, Bigeard directed the operation from a dugout in Eliane 4 equipped with eight radio sets, which he worked like an orchestra conduct
or.

  The attack began at 6 a.m. with a ten-minute barrage that dropped 1,800 shells on the enemy positions. As soon as the shelling ended, the paras moved up the hill in small teams, going as fast as possible, bypassing pockets of resistance that were to be mopped up by the next wave. A flamethrower finished off the last blockhouse “in a river of flame” that left “the smell of charred human flesh.” By 2 p.m. the attackers were at the summit, having lost nearly half of their ranks killed or wounded—77 out of 160 men. “It was necessary to annihilate the Viets to the last man. Not one withdrew,” Bigeard recalled. “What marvelous combatants, these men trained by Giap.”

  More “marvelous combatants,” two thousand of them, attacked again within hours. Bigeard, in turn, committed his only reserves—a few hundred legionnaires and Vietnamese paratroopers. The former advanced singing a German marching song, the latter the “Marseillaise.” By 2 a.m., after hours of hand-to-hand fighting in trenches “filled with rotting corpses,” amid “an overpowering stench,” “blinded by dust and deafened by artillery fire,” the Vietminh had been forced to retreat, leaving behind at least four hundred dead. Eliane 1 would be held for the next twenty days against relentless, World War I–style attacks that chewed up company after company of defenders.

  Bigeard’s hard-earned triumph only postponed for a bit the garrison’s slow strangulation. The strongholds with their feminine names fell one by one, as if each were a virginal maiden succumbing to the advances of a brutish paramour. Each advance allowed the Vietminh to edge their artillery closer to the main camp. By early May, with, in the words of the historian Martin Windrow, “one-legged French soldiers manning machine guns in the blockhouses, being fed ammunition by one-armed and one-eyed comrades,” the end was in sight. The last French hope was that the U.S. Air Force would come to the rescue (there was even talk of using atomic bombs), but President Eisenhower refused. On May 7, 1954, with Giap’s troops nearing his command bunker, Castries received permission to stop fighting. The last message from the main camp went out at 5:50 p.m.: “We’re blowing everything up. Adieu.”99

  FOLLOWING THIS FIFTY-FIVE-DAY siege a total of 10,261 defenders out of 15,090 were still alive to surrender. Many of them were in bad shape, weakened by weeks of reduced rations and nonstop exertion. More than half would not survive a hellish captivity during which they were forced to march five hundred miles, subjected to political indoctrination, and denied by Western standards adequate food and medical care—which, in fairness, were also denied to the Vietminh’s own troops. In all the eight-year war cost French forces 92,000 men killed, while the Associated States lost another 27,000. The Vietminh suffered even more heavily, losing an estimated 25,000 regulars killed and wounded at Dien Bien Phu and perhaps 250,000 men during the entire war.

  In theory the French could have continued fighting, having lost at Dien Bien Phu only 3 percent of the total strength of the French Union armies in Indochina. In the same way the British could have continued fighting in North America after the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 or in Northern Ireland notwithstanding Michael Collins’s success in blinding their intelligence apparatus by 1921. But politically the continuation of these unpopular wars was impossible for parliamentary governments that depended for survival on the approval of the voters. Even before the fall of Dien Bien Phu, a May 1953 poll in France had shown that only 15 percent of those surveyed wanted to stay in Indochina.100 Part of the reason for the war’s unpopularity was its financial cost: it consumed fully a third of the entire French defense budget.101 For an impoverished, war-weary nation, the loss of Dien Bien Phu represented the breaking point. It was a crippling psychological blow and one that resonated far beyond Southeast Asia. The worst defeat suffered by a modern Western empire in a colonial war—the equivalent of Custer’s Last Stand fifty-seven times over—it confirmed the lesson of Singapore’s fall by showing that “black,” “brown,” and “yellow” combatants were no longer inferior to the Caucasians who had dominated them on the assumption that they were a “superior race.” The bluff and bluster that had underpinned European empires, which allowed them to be maintained on the cheap (the only way they would be tolerated by domestic public opinion), had now been exposed once and for all. The remaining colonial holdings, beginning with French Indochina, could not last much longer. The age of Western empire, which had begun in the fifteenth century, was nearly over.

  Ho Chi Minh had foreseen the eventual defeat of his enemies in 1946 when he told a French diplomat, “You will kill ten of my men while we will kill one of yours. But you will be the ones to end up exhausted.”102 His prophecy had now come true. In a development reminiscent of the Whig takeover of Parliament after the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, a new French prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France, took office in June 1954 committed to leading a humiliated nation into a new era of peace. The following month an agreement was reached at Geneva under which Vietnam would be split, at least temporarily, along the seventeenth parallel with the Vietminh in control of the north and a new, noncommunist government under Ngo Dinh Diem in the south.

  That the French lost despite having considerably more resources than the Vietminh should hardly be surprising. Their war effort, like that of the Americans who fought in Vietnam a decade later, violated nearly every precept of what became known as population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine by adopting a conventional, big-unit, firepower-intensive strategy that alienated the populace while failing to trap the Vietminh. Moreover they could not cut off the insurgency from outside support—perhaps the most reliable indicator of an uprising’s prospects. Its importance was underlined by the fact that in 1948, following his break with Stalin, Tito closed Yugoslavia’s territory to the Greek Communists. They were soon defeated. By contrast, Mao stepped up his support to the Vietminh the following year. They were soon victorious.

  As part of the Geneva Accords, the Vietminh returned 3,900 prisoners taken at Dien Bien Phu. After only four months’ captivity, they already resembled concentration camp survivors. But most remained defiant—determined, as Bigeard said, to “continue the struggle” and do better “next time.”103 That opportunity was to arrive sooner than they could have imagined in, of all places, Algeria, a part of France since 1830.

  46.

  “CONVINCE OR COERCE”

  The Algerian War of Independence, 1954–1962

  THE USE OF torture is older than civilization itself, but its form has changed over the centuries. The Middle Ages were the heyday of elaborate instruments for inflicting pain such as the rack, a wooden machine with rollers and ratchets that was used to pull legs and arms out of their sockets; the iron maiden, an iron cabinet in which the victim stood while a torturer stuck spikes or knives into his body; and the head crusher, a metal vise used to compress a cranium. The harnessing of electricity, and specifically the development of a device called the magneto, in the late nineteenth century created new opportunities for ruthless security services.

  The magneto was a small generator capable of producing a high-voltage spark. In the early twentieth century a hand-cranked version was used to start cars, movie projectors, airplane propellers, and other devices. It was also useful for powering field telephones of the kind that became ubiquitous among the world’s armies. By the 1930s the French investigative service, the Sûreté, and the Japanese secret police, the Kempeitai, were using alligator clips attached to field telephones to aid in the interrogation of suspects in Indochina and Korea, respectively. Each crank generated a shock; the faster the operator turned, the more voltage came out. By the mid-1950s this device, nicknamed the gégène, had migrated to Algeria, where among the French forces it won favor over more traditional methods of torture such as the local version of waterboarding—a practice that dated back to at least the fourteenth century—known as the tuyau (water pipe). Of course less elaborate methods of coercive interrogation, such as beating, food and water deprivation, and exposure to heat and cold, remained in widespread use as well. The advantage of the gégène was
that it was quick, left no marks, and was not likely to kill the subject prematurely unless he happened to have a heart condition.104

  Henri Alleg was to learn firsthand of the gégène and the other fiendish tools of the interrogator’s trade after his arrest on June 12, 1957. A “very nervous” detective held him at gunpoint until the arrival of the soldiers from the Tenth Parachute Division who had taken responsibility for security in Algiers after the start of a terrorist campaign by the National Liberation Front (FLN). A Sten submachine gun jammed against his ribs, Alleg was driven to the local “clearing center,” where he was hailed as a “prize catch.” A French Jew as well as a Communist Party member, Alleg had been the editor of the Alger Républicain, a newspaper that had been banned for supporting the struggle against French rule.

  “Ah! So you’re the customer? Come with me!”

  Alleg followed a paratrooper lieutenant into a small room. He was told to get undressed and then was tied with leather straps to a wooden plank. Another paratrooper asked, “Are you afraid? Do you want to talk?” They wanted to know who had hidden Alleg while he was on the run. He refused to say. “You’re still playing at heroes, are you?” the paratrooper said. “It won’t last long. In a quarter of an hour, you’ll talk very nice.”