Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  As for the garrison of Dienbienphu, most of the French units remained staunch, but contempt for their colonial brethren rose by the day. Not only had the Vietnamese paras failed to regain Gabrielle on the 15th, but their French officers ‘had given a deplorable example’, in the words of Pierre Rocolle. An Algerian battalion abandoned its positions and drifted away into the scrub and villages beyond the perimeter, where some hundreds of ‘the rats of Nam Youm’, as they became known, lingered for the rest of the battle, living off pillaged supplies. North African gunners and engineers remained impressively steady, but suffered fifty casualties a day even when no big attack was taking place.

  It was not de Castries who became the soul of the defence, but instead Langlais, who in the words of an admiring fellow-Legionnaire ‘sang the Marseillaise for fifty-six days. He never weakened.’ The colonel, however, was no more a thinking soldier, nor indeed a tactician, than are most career heroes. De Castries confided to Navarre, ‘He has the weaknesses of his virtues.’ On the 16th Langlais was joined by Maj. Marcel Bigeard, a new arrival though an old comrade, who became another legend of the siege. The son of an impecunious Toul railway worker, after one bloody action Bigeard had recommended every para in his unit for a Croix de Guerre. This man of iron was always known by his radio call-sign, Bruno. Yet both Langlais and ‘Bruno’ were better suited to enduring a crucifixion than inspiring a resurrection.

  A couple of successful sorties gave a modest boost to the garrison’s morale, but de Castries was obliged to weigh the gains of such actions, and even of routine patrolling, against the lives they cost. The plight of the wounded worsened: a certain Sgt. Leroy suffered shrapnel wounds on Isabelle on 16 March, and was at the hospital recovering when it was shelled, wounding him again. He was driven back to Isabelle in time to encounter a new bombardment which killed the driver of his truck. After rescue from the wreckage he somehow survived a stomach operation, then spent the ensuing three nights in a drainage ditch before being flown to Hanoi on 25 March.

  Between the 13th and the 27th, 324 casualties were evacuated, but on the 28th Vietminh artillery wrecked a Dakota on the airstrip. Giap’s guns now ranged at will, and Maj. Bigeard led twelve hundred paras in a desperate sortie against them. In that day’s fighting the Vietminh were reckoned to have lost 350 men killed, together with many flak mountings destroyed. But the French suffered 110 casualties – a company written off, for no decisive result – and de Castries had fewer lives to play with. The airstrip’s utility was at an end: the ‘air bridge’, on which the whole Dienbienphu plan had been founded, was rent asunder. Soldiers began to lift pierced steel plank from the runway to roof trenches and bunkers: planes would not again need them.

  Thereafter, the sufferings of the wounded became terrible indeed. Supplies ran short of vinogel, wine concentrate, which provided the stimulant that had been the lifeblood of generations of French soldiers. On 29 March the miseries of both sides were intensified by torrential rain, which persisted through the remaining weeks of the battle: men fought and died in a sea of mud. Now that the garrison was dependent upon parachute-dropped supplies, the inadequacy of air support was laid bare. Flak forced transports to abandon low-level daylight operations, and resort instead to high-altitude night drops, which caused an increasing volume of material to descend into Giap’s hands. The Vietminh commander observed dryly that ‘enemy parachutages constituted a not-negligible source of supplies, which literally fell out of the sky!’

  The most famous French defence of the twentieth century was that of Verdun in 1916, where Gen. Philippe Pétain’s forces were sustained by a single tenuous supply road that passed into history as the ‘voie sacrée’. On 22 March Col. de Castries observed in a personal letter to Gen. Cogny that Dienbienphu was becoming an Indochinese Verdun, with one critical deficiency: there was no voie sacrée.

  4

  Bloody Footprints

  1 QUIT – OR BOMB?

  Giap committed three-quarters of his regular troops at Dienbienphu. Even as it was being fought, however, Vietminh regional guerrillas sustained pressure elsewhere, to disperse French strength. There were firefights in the Red River delta and further south in Annam: between February and mid-May, fifty-nine fortified posts were overrun. Much of the Mekong delta fell into communist hands, as French troops quit the region for deployment further north. Navarre and Cogny struggled to defend positions across Vietnam and deep into Laos. While they faced looming disaster at Dienbienphu, French authority tottered across all Indochina. Only one power on earth was deemed to possess the means to avert its collapse: the United States.

  For almost two months in the spring of 1954, President Eisenhower and his foremost policy-makers promoted a military intervention which they were willing, and in some cases eager, to undertake. As would often be the case in Washington’s deliberations through the ensuing twenty years, they were unconcerned with the interests or wishes of the Vietnamese people. They merely perceived looming in Asia a new communist triumph that would raise the prestige of China, while lowering that of the West. Such an outcome must dismay the Republican domestic constituency, rendered fractious and dangerous by McCarthyite fever.

  Debate about options was infused with a new urgency by the arrival in Washington of French chief of staff Gen. Paul Ely on 20 March, a week after Giap launched his first assault at Dienbienphu. Ely delivered a blunt warning: without US succour, the camp would fall. The Americans immediately agreed to provide small change – another score of Marauder bombers and eight hundred parachutes. Ely, however, was looking for much more, and quickly found an enthusiastic interlocutor. Adm. Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff committee, was a hawk’s hawk. He immediately proposed that sixty Philippines-based B-29 Superfortresses should bombard Giap’s besieging army. A Pentagon study group went further, suggesting that three tactical nuclear weapons, ‘properly employed’, could at a stroke eliminate the communist threat. Radford embraced this, too, as a viable option. The State Department, however, urged against even whispering the nuclear word, saying that if the scheme was mooted to the French, it must leak; with tumultuous consequences.

  Gen. Matthew Ridgway, US Army chief of staff and foremost hero of the Korean struggle, persistently, staunchly and presciently opposed any intervention as the wrong war in the wrong place. President Eisenhower, however, saw things differently. He favoured committing American power, subject to two caveats, which proved important and indeed decisive: both congressional and allied support needed to be mobilised. America must rally friends, notably the British. Secretary of state Dulles shared with Radford and Vice-President Richard Nixon an enthusiasm for Operation Vulture – the B-29 proposal. Throughout the weeks that followed, even as de Castries’ men fought, in Washington, London and Paris discussions and indeed fierce arguments took place as the Americans strove to assemble a quorum for a major new strategic commitment.

  On 30 March at Dienbienphu, successive assaults by five Vietminh regiments overran objectives on and around Eliane 1, held by Algerians whose officers were almost unknown to them. Among colonial troops, leadership was all. If men knew and trusted their officers, they would probably fight. If leaders failed or fell, however, soldiers quit. The Vietminh opened a bombardment at their usual hour of 1700, and launched infantry an hour later. Heavy rain had flooded trenches and made air support impossible. Meanwhile further north, Dominique was also beset: Langlais was obliged to watch grimly through his glasses as the position was hacked and harrowed. There were soon four separate infantry battles, in all of which the French were hard-pressed. The Algerian defenders of Eliane 1 began to take flight, prompting a paratroop officer to shoot down several, in an effort to stem the panic. It was all for nothing, and a gaping hole opened in the perimeter. After almost four hours of heavy action, the position collapsed. Similar scenes took place on Dominique 2: some Algerians ran towards the attackers with their hands in the air. By 2200 that position, too, was overrun.

  A few brave men fought to the la
st, among them an eighteen-year-old Eurasian sergeant named Chalamont, who manned a machine-gun until encircled and cut down. Dominique 3 just held, thanks to the efforts of a twenty-seven-year-old officer named Paul Brunbrouck, a veteran of an epic December 1952 defence of Na San, another besieged French base. Now, he repeatedly rallied defenders and kept their 105mm guns in action, finally giving the dramatic order to fire over open sights: ‘Débouchez à zéro!’ Langlais radioed Brunbrouck to abandon his pieces. The young gunner responded: ‘Never!’ Early on the 31st he and his indomitable Senegalese gunners retreated with three howitzers that remained serviceable, having fired eighteen hundred rounds. Brunbrouck was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Legion of Honour; two weeks later he died of wounds after another equally heroic action.

  Eliane 1 fell quickly, along with a position proudly named Champs Elysées. Morning found both sides exhausted. One attacking Vietminh regiment was so depleted that it had to be withdrawn from Giap’s line. The French lost a substantial part of their artillery and exhausted half their remaining ammunition stockpile, five hundred tons. Navarre arrived in Hanoi from Saigon to learn of these new misfortunes – and to discover that Cogny had been absent from his headquarters throughout the night, probably with a woman. This precipitated a slanging match between the two generals, whose predicament was now unenviable. The US Army’s Mike O’Daniel advanced a preposterous suggestion, that the French should dispatch an armoured force westwards from Hanoi to relieve the camp. This ignored both the wild country intervening, and the Vietminh’s record of savaging French road columns. President Eisenhower nonetheless later expressed surprise that the O’Daniel scheme was not attempted.

  Navarre and Cogny embraced more futile gestures: that morning of the 31st, another para battalion jumped into the camp. Even now that it was plain the garrison was doomed, among such forlorn hopes was a procession of volunteers – Capt. Alain Bizard, for instance, abandoned a pampered existence as aide to the army chief of staff in Paris to join de Castries’ garrison. It seems fair to speculate that young career soldiers sought to atone for the shame of their nation’s collapse in 1940; to show that a new generation of Frenchmen possessed a willingness for sacrifice such as some of their fathers had lacked.

  Late on the 31st, French counter-attacks briefly regained Dominique 2 and Eliane 1, only to see them fall to renewed Vietminh assaults. Enemy night attacks were repulsed on 1 and 2 April, but on the morning of the 2nd Huguette 2 was abandoned by the French, who now tardily laboured to strengthen the defences of their remaining hills. The defenders’ faith in the Foreign Legion received a blow on 3 April, when twelve of its men, survivors from Béatrice who had had enough, abandoned strongpoints to surrender. Like all deserters who fell into Giap’s hands, they were promptly set to work digging and carrying for his army. By 7 April, the garrison’s surgeons were struggling to care for 590 casualties. The Legion and para battalions mustered fewer than three hundred men apiece. Giap ignored a French request for a truce to allow aircraft to evacuate the wounded – and why should he have done otherwise?

  The debate in Washington about a possible US commitment – not to rescue the French, but to humble the communists – became much more important to history than was the fate of Dienbienphu. From late March onwards, Dulles conducted a media blitz designed to rouse the American people. The secretary of state characterised the enemy as catspaws of the Chinese. The US government, he said, would not stand idly by while Reds triumphed, though he remained studiously vague about what action might follow. Front-page stories prepared readers for intervention. US News and World Report said: ‘Blunt notice is given to communists that [the] US does not intend to let Indochina be gobbled up.’ Most of the world still supposed that, at Dienbienphu, superior firepower would ultimately prevail: the British Spectator observed on 19 March: ‘The French ought to be able to win this battle, and if they do win, it may for the first time be possible to see light at the end of the Indochinese tunnel.’ The magazine editorialised again on 9 April: ‘In spite of the terrible unpopularity of the war, the siege of Col. de Castries and his eleven thousand men has reminded France that she can still fight and still be the admiration of the world.’ Such remarks reflected both wishful thinking and extravagant francophilia, but emphasise that nothing about the battle seemed inevitable until its outcome.

  On 3 April the US secretary of state presided over a meeting of congressional leaders including Democrats Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Richard Russell of Georgia, Earle Clements of Kentucky; Republicans Eugene Millikin of Colorado and William Knowland of California. Radford briefed them on the dire predicament of Dienbienphu. Dulles said that the president wanted a joint resolution of Congress endorsing the deployment of American air and naval power. Radford said that if Indochina was lost, ‘it was only a question of time until all of Southeast Asia falls, along with Indonesia’. Under sceptical questioning from the politicians, the admiral was obliged to admit that he was alone among the chiefs in favouring military action. One of the visitors demanded, why so? Because I know more about Asia than my colleagues, responded Radford, who, though not the sharpest knife in the box, never lacked self-assurance.

  Then they addressed the key issue of unilateral versus multilateral action. Lyndon Johnson said: ‘We want no more Koreas with the US providing 90 per cent of the manpower.’ The domestic lesson of the 1950–53 war that wrecked Harry Truman’s presidency was that, though Americans were willing to pay other people to die combating ‘Reds’ in faraway Asian countries, they resisted seeing their own boys sacrificed. Dulles was asked explicitly: would the British associate themselves with a US operation in Vietnam? He admitted this was doubtful. The meeting’s outcome, unwelcome to the secretary of state and the president, was that they could secure their congressional resolution only if other nations signed up too. At the White House on the following evening of 4 April, Eisenhower said it had become evident that the British attitude would be decisive. Late that night, the French formally requested US air power for Dienbienphu. Navarre helpfully suggested that planes thus employed could be unmarked or wear French roundels, which emphasised his diminishing grasp upon reality.

  On the evening of 5 April, Winston Churchill received an impassioned personal letter from Eisenhower, evoking the familiar spectres of Hitler, Hirohito, Mussolini – ‘May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?’ – in support of a request for British participation in an Indochina intervention. The following day Eisenhower told the National Security Council that the struggle was still ‘eminently winnable’. At a 7 April press conference, the president for the first time publicly articulated what became notorious as ‘the domino theory’. If Indochina was lost, he said, the rest of South-East Asia would ‘go over very quickly’. The French had already voiced their own variation – the ‘ten-pin’ theory, as in bowling.

  The carriers Boxer and Essex were dispatched to the Tonkin Gulf, to be on hand if Eisenhower acceded to France’s pleas. Yet there were still plenty of doubters. On Capitol Hill the young Democratic senator from Massachusetts urged that it was time to tell the American people the truth: no US intervention could achieve anything useful, said John F. Kennedy, unless France conceded full independence to her colonies: ‘To pour money, materiel and men into the jungles of Indochina’ would be most unlikely to deliver victory against a guerrilla enemy which was everywhere yet nowhere, and ‘has the sympathy and covert support of the people’. Eisenhower nonetheless remained game to fight – if others would do likewise. Impatiently, testily, he awaited the outcome of deliberations in London.

  At Dienbienphu, yet more reinforcements were committed. A dramatic decision was taken, to dispatch volunteers without parachute training. It is hard to imagine a more terrifying introduction to airborne warfare than a night jump into a tight perimeter encircled by the enemy. As planes approached the drop zone, men were told there was time for only six to exit on each pass. Tracer streamed up from communist flak guns, and one soldier in ten declin
ed to jump – refusals are infectious amid the roar of engines, shouts of dispatchers, blind uncertainty below. Nonetheless, most of the battalion sprang courageously into the darkness, and landed in the French lines with surprisingly few losses. By a monumental act of bureaucratic meanness, survivors were subsequently denied paratroopers’ badges, on the grounds that they had not completed the prescribed course.

  It was now 1 April, an appropriate date for another of Navarre’s black-comic gestures: an orgy of promotions for officers of the garrison, including the advancement of de Castries to brigadier-general’s rank. While Giap’s besiegers continued to dig furiously, advancing trenches and tunnels towards their next objectives, on the morning of 10 April the newly-made Col. Marcel Bigeard directed a counter-attack on Eliane 1. The men advanced singing, spearheaded by a flamethrower-carrier escorted by two sub-machine gunners, into a storm of communist fire. At 1130, after bitter fighting they reached the hill crest – then stuck, having suffered sixty casualties. At dawn on 18 April the hundred-strong garrison of Huguette 6, which was now thought indefensible, leapt from their trenches and ran for their lives, leaping over Vietminh foxholes towards the French lines. Sixty made it.