Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975

Yet Giap chose to persist with his assault in the manner he had started it, painstakingly ensuring the success of each thrust, denying to the French any revival of hope. His 37mm flak guns inflicted a crippling toll on aircraft, so that scarcely one returned from the camp unscathed. Through the days and weeks that followed the fall of three of de Castries’ nine hills, Vietminh artillery harried the airstrip. The landing of each of the diminishing procession of medevac flights precipitated a panic-stricken surge of would-be passengers, wounded and otherwise. Photojournalist Jean Péraud filed a dispatch describing the scene, which he likened to 1945 Germany: ‘Cries. Tears. Stampede of wounded towards the door. Never seen anything like it since concentration camp.’ On the 17th the Vietminh made another skilfully-judged ‘humanitarian gesture’, presenting the garrison with eighty-six wounded prisoners. These, of course, merely increased the pressure on the camp’s overburdened medical facilities: among the doctors’ embarrassments was disposal of a mound of amputated limbs.

French medevac crews earned no plaudits: on 23 March an H-19 helicopter landed against orders on a notoriously exposed site. As it was being loaded with wounded its crew wandered away, thus escaping the destruction by shellfire of their machine and its helpless occupants, including general’s son Alain Gambiez. A French writer observed bitterly, ‘Certainement, the helicopter crews had not been chosen from the best elements of the Air Force,’ and de Castries deplored their lack of guts. Soon, hard things were also being said about fixed-wing aircrew, who were both exhausted and demoralised. American mercenary pilots of the CIA’s airline CAT flew a growing number of resupply missions, displaying more skill and steel than their French counterparts. Especially hair-raising were napalm sorties: as one C-119 roared down the runway towards take-off, its pilot raised the undercarriage prematurely, causing the plane to career on its belly along the tarmac in a cascade of sparks, amid four tons of ‘hell-jelly’ and 1,500 gallons of aviation spirit. By some freak of fortune, the crew survived.

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 (#ulink_a74c87fa-0fd0-5ffc-876e-3162e332e69c)

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 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 declined 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.

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 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.

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.’ His 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?’

Only one in ten of 14,324 Vietnamese troops taken prisoner in French uniform during the course of the war returned alive. In justice to the Vietminh, their own people lacked medical support, and existed on the edge of starvation. It is nonetheless plain that Giap and his comrades were indifferent to the survival or extinction of compatriots who had chosen the losing side. How could it be otherwise, when they had sacrificed an estimated twenty-five thousand of their own followers to secure victory at Dienbienphu? Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan, the mandarin’s daughter who had become a fervent revolutionary, served as a twenty-one-year-old medic in Giap’s army. In the wake of its triumph she was married to Cao Van Khanh, deputy commander of the 308th Division, at a ceremony held in de Castries’ command bunker.