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
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 last, 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
