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 backing 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.
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