by Max Hastings
Throughout the Anglo–American crisis meetings that took place in April 1954, Dulles was obliged to mask his disdain for Britain as a nation, and for her leaders in particular. This sentiment was mutual: Churchill characterised the secretary of state as ‘a dull, unimaginative, uncomprehending man’. In London on 11–12 April, the visitor again rehearsed familiar arguments about the need to fight together against totalitarian threats. Eden was unfailingly courteous, unflaggingly sceptical. It was, of course, a large irony that he should in 1954 reject comparisons with the 1930s to justify Western military action, when two years later as prime minister he would deploy the same analogy to justify Britain’s disastrous invasion of Egypt. As it was, the two men parted with cold civility. The American visitor fared no better in Paris, where foreign minister Georges Bidault declined to agree that France should grant absolute independence to Indochina, an American precondition for intervention. Yet Washington’s hawks remained keen to act. On 16 April Vice-President Richard Nixon told newspaper editors, ‘the US must go to Geneva and take a positive stand for united action by the free world’. Far away in Indochina the French heard of his words, and nursed flickering candles of hope.
2 ‘A TRIUMPH OF THE WILL’
Between 14 and 22 April, the garrison of Dienbienphu lost 270 men. ‘Fragging’ by the disgruntled was not an American invention: one night a soldier tossed a grenade into a bunker full of NCOs, and was summarily executed for his pains. By 14 April, de Castries mustered 3,500 effective infantrymen; two thousand deserters lurked around the fringes of the camp, each night slinking out to compete in a scramble for parachute-landed rations. At the outset the French perimeter extended to twelve hundred acres; this had now shrunk by half. The battlefield resembled a fragment of the 1917 Western Front: a barren, mud-churned wasteland littered with debris, broken weapons and spent munitions, scarred and blackened by bombardment. Few men on either side ventured to expose themselves in daylight. French airmanship remained lamentable. On 13 April de Castries reported to Cogny three bomber attacks on his own troops, together with the parachutage of eight hundred shells into enemy hands. This message ended with a terse, acidulous ‘No Comment.’
The Vietminh displayed marvellous energy and ingenuity in sapping trenches and tunnels into the French positions, together with much courage in their infantry attacks. Yet to the end, the defenders inflicted far more casualties than they suffered. In 2018 Hanoi has still not credibly enumerated its Dienbienphu losses, surely a reflection of their immensity. Prisoners who fell into French hands testified to the dejection prevailing in many Vietminh battalions, among which malaria was endemic. The communist commander’s difficulties were sufficiently serious to cause him to abandon human-wave attacks in favour of more measured tactics, and to stage a succession of propaganda and self-criticism meetings. Political officers sought to inspire their overwhelmingly peasant soldiers and porters by promising that land reform – confiscation of landlords’ holdings – would be imposed in the ‘liberated zone’ within weeks of this battle being won. The most powerful stimulus for these simple men, however, was surely the knowledge that their sacrifices, unlike those of the garrison, were not in vain. They were winning.
On the night of 22–23 April, Giap’s men overran Huguette 1 after bursting forth from tunnels dug into its perimeter. Its senior officer was last seen fighting to the death in the midst of a throng of Vietminh. De Castries demanded a counter-attack, because without Huguette 1 there was little space left for supply drops. Paras were due to start such an operation at 1400 on 23 April, but an hour beforehand it became plain they would not be ready. Chaos ensued: it was impossible to cancel a scheduled air strike by four Marauders and a dozen fighters, which went in at 1345, when most of the available artillery ammunition was also fired off. The Vietminh on Huguette suffered severely, but then enjoyed a forty-five-minute lull during which reinforcements were rushed forward.
By the time two French companies leapt from their positions they met intense fire, exhausted momentum on open ground halfway to their objective, and by 1530 were pinned down and suffering heavy casualties. An hour later survivors withdrew, having lost seventy-six men killed or badly wounded. One of the latter, a Lt. Garin whose legs were mangled, blew out his own brains to forestall an attempt to rescue him. The communists now held half the airfield, and de Castries’ dressing station wrestled with 401 serious cases, 676 less severe ones. An officer told casualties for whom no shelter was available: ‘Those who can’t stand or sit had better lie in their trenches.’
As the Geneva conference drew near, once more Dulles flew to Europe, this time accompanied by Adm. Radford, to renew their pleas to the government of Winston Churchill, and to consult with the French. It was becoming clear to the world that without US action Dienbienphu’s fate was sealed, and the Spectator reflected some conservatives’ enthusiasm for such a course ‘if Ho Chi Minh and the Chinese have to be persuaded by military means that peace is desirable’. On 22 April Dulles and foreign minister Bidault met again in Paris to seek a common policy front for Geneva; Ely and Navarre meanwhile pressed for more US aircraft. When the British joined the talks, Bidault became emotional, perhaps influenced by a copious intake of alcohol: he later claimed that Dulles asked him privately whether he thought nuclear weapons would be effective at Dienbienphu; it seems at least possible this issue was informally raised.
Both Eisenhower and his secretary of state were weary of the Europeans: of the French, because they wanted aid without strings; of the British, because they refused to acknowledge the merits of joining the Indochina fight before the French packed their bags. Britain was also considered pitifully nervous about the Chinese threat to its Hong Kong colony. The old prime minister and his foreign secretary Anthony Eden nonetheless stuck to their chosen course. They rejected Eisenhower’s ‘domino theory’, and declined to support any new military action in advance of Geneva, which Eden was to co-chair with Soviet foreign minister Molotov. As for Churchill, when Radford unleashed his personal powers of persuasion on Britain’s leader at a 26 April Chequers dinner, the prime minister told the American: ‘the loss of the fortress must be faced’. After Britain had been unable to save India for herself, he added, it was implausible that she could save Indochina for France.
Dulles cabled home on 29 April: ‘UK attitude is one of increasing weakness. Britain seems to feel that we are disposed to accept present risks of a Chinese war and this, coupled also with their fear that we would start using atomic weapons, has badly frightened them.’ The British contribution was their most influential and benign in the course of all Vietnam’s wars. Had Churchill given a different answer, while it remains unlikely that Eisenhower would have unleashed nuclear weapons, the Western allies would probably have committed forces to support a fundamentally hopeless French position. Eisenhower’s cables to Dulles make plain that, while he declined unilaterally to deploy US might, he was not merely willing but keen to do so if he could secure the political cover Britain could provide, backed by a token commitment of RAF bombers.
Since 1940 the British had engaged in many displays of diplomatic gymnastics to avoid a falling-out with the US. They were most uncomfortable about now disagreeing with Washington on a matter to which the administration attached such importance. Yet it is hard to doubt that London’s caution was well-founded. Churchill is often and justly said to have been a shadow of his old self during his 1952–55 premiership. On this issue, however, he displayed admirable clarity and stubbornness. The British feared that the real objective of any US action would be to punish China. The administration’s indignation about Chinese military aid to the Vietminh seemed bizarre when the US was already providing vastly more weapons and equipment to its own French client. In British eyes the Korean conflict had represented an intolerably protracted mud-wrestling match with the communists. A plunge into Indochina could precipitate something worse – conceivably, a big war. Churchill told the Americans that he declined to collude in misleading Congress by back
ing Western military action that could not save Dienbienphu, but might have untold implications for peace.
Radford was furious, and so was Eisenhower, who wished to see the communists ‘take a good smacking in Indochina’. It is plausible that resentment about what Washington branded as British pusillanimity contributed two years later to the president’s renunciation of Eden in the Suez debacle. Yet no Western action in the spring of 1954 could have saved Dienbienphu, short of unleashing insanely disproportionate conventional or even nuclear firepower. The later American commitment to Vietnam was seen by much of the world as implicitly colonialist: such action in 1954 would have been explicitly so. Almost entirely absent from the Washington debate was an understanding that Indochina’s future would be principally determined by political, social and cultural forces. Discussion focused solely upon what weight of firepower should be deployed. It was taken for granted in 1954, as it would be a decade later, that should the US decide to deploy its might against rubber-sandalled peasants, Giap’s army would suffer defeat, even obliteration.
If the French were then losing in Indochina, the Americans reasoned that this was because they were – well, French. Bernard Fall recoiled in disgust from a US official who dismissed France’s presence in Indochina: ‘The whole damn country is degenerate, admit it. And the French are scared of the Germans, and the whole damn French Army is in Indochina just to make money and they have no fight left in them anyway.’ Since no US military commitment was made in the spring of 1954, events in the remote north-west of Vietnam ran their course. A cartoon in Le Figaro was captioned ‘The Final Redoubt’. It depicted government ministers in Paris using their last bullets to kill themselves. If most French people had become resigned to the fall of Dienbienphu, among the elite this was thought to signify the end of France as a great power.
Navarre and Cogny clung to hopes either that worsening monsoon weather might render Giap’s assaults logistically unsustainable, or that a ceasefire-in-place might be imposed by the Powers meeting in Geneva. The two generals urged Paris that further reinforcements would improve the garrison’s chances: ‘As well as military honour, there is at least hope of a favourable outcome that justifies additional sacrifices.’ This was absurd, of course. Aircrew, few of whom made any pretence of exerting themselves, were pushing supplies out of their planes from ten thousand feet, so that almost half fell into Giap’s hands. Much of the bombing was conducted blind, through cloud. On 28 April one wing, Groupe Franche Comté, reported the claims of its commanding officer, his adjutant and eight pilots to be medically unfit to fly. Their colonel said defiantly: ‘My refusal to send them [over Dienbienphu] in daylight, at low altitude, to certain death, is a matter between me and my conscience. The sacrifice would be futile.’ De Castries complained bitterly to Hanoi about aircrew who flinched, while his own soldiers were passing the stations of the Cross: ‘There cannot be a double standard.’
Among the American mercenaries who performed more creditably than did the French over Dienbienphu was the huge, bearded figure of CAT pilot James McGovern – ‘Earthquake McGoon’ to his buddies. On the last of countless missions to the camp, his C-119 was hit as he approached the drop zone with a load of ammunition. He turned away with one engine out, rejecting a bail-out: he had once performed an epic hike after coming down in China, and declined now ‘to do all that walking again’. This time around, his efforts to nurse the plane to safety failed: McGovern crashed into the ground, precipitating a spectacular explosion.
With reckless disregard for security, on 24 April Le Monde revealed the launch of Operation Condor, a ‘forlorn hope’ jungle march by three thousand men who set out from Laos to relieve Dienbienphu. It quickly became plain that Condor had no chance of success in impossible terrain and against Vietminh opposition, though rumours of such succour kept alive among a few optimists a vestige of hope. Most of the garrison, by contrast, were now resigned to death or capture. There was a distinction only between a minority who faced their doom with stoical courage, and those who succumbed to rage or despair. Men holding positions near the centre of the shrunken perimeter continued to receive rations to eat and wine in which to drown their sorrows. Others in outlying bunkers sometimes passed days without resupply, and spoke later of subsisting on stale bread and tomato sauce. In the hospital, Dr Grauwin reassured men who recoiled from the maggots in their wounds, saying that the creatures fed only on decayed tissue. On 26 April Algerians panicked during a struggle on Isabelle – then mutinied. Their colonel wished to shoot the ringleaders, but de Castries overruled him. On 30 April the Legion solemnly celebrated the anniversary of its 1863 fight to the death at Camerone in Mexico, now drenched by rainstorms that intensified the miseries of the exhausted, filthy, half-starved garrison.
On the following night of 1 May, Giap’s infantry assaulted Eliane 1, which they overran after ninety minutes of close-quarter fighting. Meanwhile on Dominique 3, Thai and Algerian defenders put up a tough fight before succumbing. In the Eliane 2 battle, de Castries lost 331 men killed or missing and 168 wounded, and now fielded not much above two thousand infantry against Giap’s fourteen thousand. The Vietminh showed off new weapons: Soviet Katyusha multiple rocket-launchers, formidable in their screeching moral impact. As the relationship between Navarre and Cogny became ever more sulphurous, the commander-in-chief threatened his subordinate with a court of inquiry, charged with leaking defeatist gossip.
The shades closed in upon Dienbienphu, where the stench of excrement, unburied corpses and decaying humanity was becoming intolerable. A trickle of reinforcements, volunteers to embrace catastrophe, continued to parachute into the camp, for the sole purpose of enabling the French delegation in Geneva to dispute the inevitability of defeat. Walking wounded were invited to rejoin their units: more than a few defenders manned trenches wearing mud-caked bandages. Langlais and Bigeard discussed a scheme whereby dispersed columns might break out through the jungle: they concluded, inevitably, that any sortie was doomed.
Then came another Vietminh attack. On the morning of 4 May the garrison’s wireless-operators heard a grim succession of voice messages from a lieutenant who had assumed leadership of the Moroccan unit on Huguette 4 after his company commander was hit: ‘There are only ten of us left around the CP … We are waiting for reinforcements … Where are the reinforcements? … Les Viets attaquent … I hear them … They are coming towards me down the trench … They are here … Aaah!’ On the evening of the 5th Cogny sent the hapless de Castries an imperious signal demanding ‘a prolonged resistance on the spot which now remains your glorious mission’.
During the ensuing twenty-four hours the garrison received a further air-dropped reinforcement of 383 men, of whom 155 were Vietnamese. On the morning of 6 May, intelligence warned de Castries to expect a big attack that night. Capt. Yves Hervouet demanded that Dr Grauwin cut the casts off his broken arms so that he could once more man his tank. At 2130 a Vietminh mine exploded beneath Eliane 2, which was then overrun in a brisk action fought in torrential rain; Capt. Jean Pouget led an unsuccessful counter-attack. Savage melees also took place on Eliane 4 and Eliane 10, which caused Langlais and Bigeard to radio aircraft overhead, cancelling a reinforcement jump: the perimeter was now so tight that parachutists were likely to land in the arms of the Vietminh. The last message from the officer commanding Eliane 4, lost soon after 2100, urged against shelling the fallen position, because every trench was crowded with French casualties. Meanwhile around the dressing station, in addition to the wounded and dead, clusters of men lingered slumbering through the long hours because – lacking weapons or a military function – they could do nothing else.
At 1700 on 7 May de Castries radioed to Cogny’s headquarters, saying, ‘We have done all that we can. At 1730, I shall send out emissaries.’ Cogny himself came up on the circuit, seeking to prevent a formal capitulation: ‘You must not raise the white flag. You should let the fighting die out of its own accord.’ De Castries professed to assent: ‘Bien, mon général.’ Hi
s commander said: ‘Allez, au revoir mon vieux.’ Then, from the dank, sultry bunker, de Castries passed orders to destroy as many weapons as his survivors could contrive before the formal surrender. Capt. Pouget wrote: ‘under the harsh, naked electric light, he looked ten years older than he had done in March’. Dienbienphu’s commander, seldom visible to his men, had shown none of the qualities that might have made him a hero. But it would be quite mistaken to hold him responsible for the fall of the encampment, ordained from the moment that its garrison was deployed so far beyond sustainable support. The Vietminh staked many more chips than the French could match, and now swept the board.
The battle petered out slowly. A ground operator aborted an incoming fighter-bomber strike, radioing call-sign César 5: ‘We’re blowing up everything – goodbye to our families … Adieu César.’ One position, Isabelle, held out for some hours more: its twelve hundred men attempted a sortie which ended with two companies cut to pieces in a chaotic night fight. A Moroccan gunner named Mohammed ben Salah is thought to have been the last man to die, manning a 105mm howitzer hours after de Castries quit. The Vietminh found themselves with 5,500 prisoners, of whom all but a thousand were wounded. The French command had formally recorded 1,161 deserters, who now joined the ranks of the PoWs: in all, sixteen battalions of French and colonial troops were wiped off Navarre’s order of battle. The Vietminh cadre and musical bard Van Ky said wonderingly: ‘This was an unbelievable victory, something beyond the bounds of our imaginations. No one could figure out how we could have defeated such a powerful force.’ Col. Tran Trong Trung justly asserted that the victory was above all ‘a triumph of the will’.
More of de Castries’ men perished in captivity than had died in action. Once in a communist PoW camp – and some never got that far – a commissar addressed the French officer prisoners in characteristic fashion: ‘You are here for an indeterminate period, to be re-educated by work. You will live the same life as those whom you have oppressed, you will suffer like them, come to understand them. We shall guide you in your search for truth.’ Some 3,900 members of the French garrison were eventually returned to their own people, 43 per cent of those captured. Sixty Thais and nineteen Europeans escaped from the battlefield and hacked through a hundred miles of jungle to safety. De Castries’ first question to the naval officer who received him on his release late in 1954 was: ‘Is it true they want to shoot me?’
