Fifties (65 page)

“La guerre sale,” it was called by this time back in France, “the dirty war.” The longer it went on, the less popular it became. As early as 1950 the French parliament voted to stop sending draftees to Indochina; instead, it was to be a war fought by European professional soldiers and poor Asian enlistees. A professional’s war it was: Every year in Vietnam, France lost a third of the graduating class from St. Cyr, its military college. There had always been a wariness on the part of some French officers that Indochina would prove to be nothing more than a quagmire at a time when the colonial impulse was clearly exhausted in France. In 1946 General Jacques Philippe Leclerc had been sent to Indochina by de Gaulle; he surveyed the country and then told Paul Mus, his political adviser, “It would take 500,000 men to do it and even then it couldn’t be done.” By mid-1953 it was clear to most military observers that the French were on the defensive, as the hemorrhaging of French forces continued, and as domestic support for the war continued to shrink.

Some informed estimates placed Vietminh total forces at seven full divisions, in the unlikely event that they chose to mass them. Even worse, there were signs that with the Korean War over, the Chinese Communists (despite historic tension between them and the
Vietnamese nationalists) were supplying heavy weaponry. Navarre was not enthusiastic about his assignment, the less so when his old St. Cyr classmate Gonzales de Linares greeted him by saying, “Henri old boy, what have you come to this shithole for? I’m clearing out.” Even more ominous was a warning from the general Navarre was replacing, Raoul Salan: “General, you must take care, for the Vietminh is organizing its big units and giving them a European character.” “In that case they are done for,” Navarre immediately answered with the arrogance that marked French officers who were
new
in the country. The warning from Salan did not seem to bother Navarre, and later he spoke to his staff about the future with a certain Gallic swagger: “Victory is a woman who gives herself only to those who know how to take her.”

Navarre wasted no time in developing a plan that minimized contact with the Vietminh for more than a year while he rebuilt his forces, with significant reinforcements from France. Starting in the fall of 1954, he intended to strike against the Vietminh with these beefed-up units. Significantly, he did not aim for victory; rather, he hoped to demonstrate a French presence so strong that the Vietminh would finally come to the negotiating table. The Navarre plan immediately ran into trouble as the French cabinet balked at sending additional troops and spending any more money for Indochina. What Navarre wanted would cost an extra $300 million. “Not one sou for the Navarre plan,” Finance Minister Faure told his fellow ministers.

The Americans were becoming extremely nervous that the French would pull out of Indochina. The National Security Council met on September 9, 1953, to deal with the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation to help fund the Navarre plan. Dulles began by giving a fairly pessimistic appraisal: All in all, he thought French chances were poor. But we might as well pay the money, he argued, because the Laniel government was as good as we were likely to get. George Humphrey, the secretary of the treasury, spoke like a small businessman: “Well look, we’ve got a proposition here in which we’ve put an awful lot of money in the past. Mr. Dulles says this is the last hope of salvaging the investment. Therefore I think we should go ahead and make the further funds available.” With that the Americans decided to pay for much of the Navarre plan.

By all rights the Navarre plan should have excluded a battle for a small and not particularly valuable outpost along the Laotian border. Yet a plan for Dien Bien Phu had existed for some time before Navarre arrived. Slowly, almost inevitably, Navarre and his
command incorporated it into his larger plan, deciding to send several French battalions into Dien Bien Phu and hoping that the Viets would attack them there. It would be the set-piece battle the French had wanted for some time; instead of fighting an army of ghosts who disappeared into the night time and again, the Vietminh would be tricked into standing and fighting, and the French would finally be able to use their superior weaponry. The French believed they were setting the trap; the Vietminh would rise to the bait, would attack the well-fortified French position, and in time would be worn down by the superior fire from the well-entrenched French positions. It would be, the French thought, men against boys, professionals against amateurs.

In a way the very concept was a study in Western arrogance, for the war had already been going on for seven years, and even casual study of the other side should have given the French commander a healthy respect for the Vietminh’s bravery, combat skills, and, above all, their ability to conserve resources. Navarre believed that General Giap, the Vietminh commander, could bring at most a reinforced division to bear upon this distant position. It proved to be a terrible miscalculation, one of the worst of many such in this war, for Giap eventually moved three divisions into play. It would be a trap all right, but for which side was the question.

Had the French command been less prejudiced, it would have understood, as others who studied the war did, that the Vietminh boasted a world-class infantry force, extremely well led and accustomed to the difficult natural terrain. The Vietminh soldiers were physically tough, able to travel as much as twenty miles a day. They had the most primitive footwear, often only rubber sandals cut from tires, but “our feet are made of iron,” the soldiers used to say. Like the Chinese who had fought the Americans in Korea, they traveled lightly, carrying only their weapons, some water, and some salt.

Giap would eventually be viewed as one of the two or three greatest military strategists of the twentieth century, but General Salan regarded him, in effect, as a noncommissioned officer who had not even been to a military staff college. When Giap’s name was mentioned in French dispatches, the title “General” was put in quotation marks, as if to mock him. Speaking of the French arrogance, Jules Roy, an officer in and a historian of the war, later wrote, “Navarre should have kept a photograph of Giap before him at all times as Montgomery kept a photo of Rommel before him during the Egyptian campaign ...”

The name Dien Bien Phu means “large administrative center on
the frontier,” and this cluster of villages stretched some eight miles along a north-south axis and about five miles from east to west. It was isolated in the midst of rough mountainous terrain, and thus was hard to resupply and exceptionally vulnerable to attack. Worst of all, it was in a valley, so the French forces there were essentially immobilized. Its original importance to the French had been as an air base used to resupply other points in the area, but as the French need to conserve forces grew, its strategic value had diminished. In fact, at this point it had no strategic value whatsoever.

By no means was the French high command unanimously enthusiastic about engaging the enemy there. General René Cogny, the French commander for the northern part of the country, was well acquainted with the terrain and was absolutely appalled by the idea. In November 1953, responding to warnings from his staff, Cogny sent Navarre a memo suggesting that it was a dubious venture in all ways: “In that kind of country,” he wrote, “you can’t interdict a road. This is a European type notion without any value here. The Viets can get through anywhere.... I am persuaded that Dien Bien Phu shall become, whether we like it or not, a battalion meat grinder, with no possibility of large-scale [French operations] radiating out from it as soon as it is blocked by a single Vietminh regiment.” As Bernard Fall, the historian, pointed out, Cogny felt that the use of his best troops as bait was not merely a military mistake but also a personal betrayal of them. But even if he expressed doubts to his superiors, he never told them an outright no, that he would not do it.

On November 20, 1953, two battalions of French forces parachuted into Dien Bien Phu. The post was notorious for its bad weather, and given a bad forecast, the jump and the entire operation would have been canceled. Years later, Major Marcel Bigeard, a famed French paratroop commander captain who jumped into the post, cursed the good weather: “Oh, why did it not rain that day!” The jump took place as planned. A terrible tragedy was beginning to be unveiled. For weeks before the battle, various visitors to the post noted that the French unit seemed to be encircled and that the surrounding high ground belonged to the Vietminh. When they pointed this out to the garrison’s artillery commander, Colonel Charles Piroth, he treated the idea with ridicule. He claimed the Vietminh could never get their artillery through to this distant outpost, and even if they did somehow manage, they would never be able to supply them with enough ammunition. The French would smash them, he added. Asked a few weeks before the battle began
whether he wanted additional artillery pieces, Piroth scorned the idea; he had all the weapons he needed, he answered. When Navarre himself visited the camp and raised the same question, Piroth reassured him: “
Mon général,
no Vietminh cannon will be able to fire three rounds before being destroyed by my artillery.”

Among other things, the French believed that the Vietminh had almost no capacity to resupply their troops. Once again they had made a fatal mistake, even though the French calibrated their capacity to resupply in thousands of tons by airplane while Giap figured “in pounds carried by a single man.” But Giap’s ability was far greater than the French realized, though, thanks to a secret new, if rather primitive, weapon: the bicycle. The Viets had reinforced two thousand of them with extra supports so that peasants could load and push them through the primitive trails to Dien Bien Phu. They could carry up to five hundred pounds, more than five times the weight of most of the peasants themselves and more than twice what an elephant could carry. Resupply was less of a problem for them than the French imagined. Slowly, steadily, usually by moving at night, some 50,000 Vietminh soldiers gathered on the high ground around the French post—four times as many men as the French had assembled and four times as many as Navarre thought they were capable of gathering. An additional 100,000 peasants were there to help supply the combat soldiers. In addition, they had four times the number of heavy weapons, including 105 20 mm howitzers. Pierre de Chevigne, a high official in the French ministry of war, landed at Dien Bien Phu on February 7, 1954, some five weeks before the siege, and he was appalled by the French stronghold. It was nothing of the sort, he decided; rather, it was more like a chamberpot, with the French garrison at the bottom and the Vietminh force poised on the rim above. To Robert Guillain, a
Le Monde
correspondent, it resembled a football stadium in which the French were on the bottom and the Vietminh in the top rows. So eerie was the feeling of the French position that René Pleven, the French defense minister, begged General Pierre Fay, the French air force chief of staff, to evacuate the post.

On March 13 the siege of Dien Bien Phu began. “Hell in a very small place,” Bernard Fall called it. Within two days, Colonel Piroth was desperate; he could not believe that he was so badly outgunned. When one of his superiors asked him where the Vietminh guns were, he pointed to a spot on the headquarters map and said, “They may be there.” Then he quickly pointed to another spot. “Or there ...” Can you silence them? he was asked. He shrugged his shoulders and
refused to eat. “I am completely dishonored,” he told one friend. “I have guaranteed deCastries [the camp commander] that the enemy artillery couldn’t touch us, but now we are going to lose the battle. I’m leaving.” Soon thereafter, Piroth pulled a pin on a grenade and committed suicide.

On the first night a major stronghold on the northeast sector, Beatrice, fell, and on the second night, so did another, Gabrielle. That gave the Vietminh two of three key points on the northern rim of the valley; on the third night they gained the third when the Thai tribesmen deserted at Anne Marie. “Let’s have no illusions,” Navarre told his staff officers the second night. “I hope the Viets aren’t going to start again tonight. We shall have to find some other solution.”

It was to prove a nightmare; there was little in the way of food, water, or medical support, and little cover. The Viets did, contrary to Colonel Piroth’s opinion, know how to use their artillery pieces, and in fact they had positioned them brilliantly. They did not put them on the reverse side of the hills as some of the French officers had expected; instead, by using immensely skillful excavation and camouflage, they placed them under the very noses of the French, facing the garrison. Their gunnery crews had a perfect view of the French, below in the bowl, while they themselves were invulnerable to the French artillery below and to the French bombers trying to protect the garrison. The Vietminh had wrought something of a peasant engineering miracle. As such the battle was over almost before it started.

Suddenly, this war with its thousand little skirmishes was focused on one dramatic and poignant battle. Dien Bien Phu became a household word, and the question of whether the embattled French garrison would survive was taken up as an international issue. The French lacked the resources to rescue the surrounded troops. The only hope was some form of American intervention, but even conservative congressional leaders were wary of getting involved. John Stennis, of Mississippi, a Democrat and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had been very unhappy when we began to send a few ground crew to service American aircraft being used by the French in February 1954. “First we send them planes,” he warned, “then we send them men.”

Here then was the first test of the New Look and of the new Eisenhower-Dulles doctrine, the keystone of which was that no additional Asian country should fall to the Communists. For the next two months John Foster Dulles was a man constantly in motion,
cajoling, pushing, and stroking allies, telling them half truths about each other, almost like a socially ambitious dinner party hostess who tells one prized would-be guest that another (who has not yet accepted) is coming in order to get the first guest to come. Ostensibly, he wanted some kind of joint Allied intervention in Indochina to rescue the French garrison, most likely by pounding the general area with the American Air Force, perhaps even using, if need be, atomic weapons. (At one meeting Air Force chief of staff Gen. Nathan Twining apparently thought that just one atomic bomb might do the job: “You could take all day to drop a bomb, make sure you put it in the right place ... and clean those Commies out of there and the band would play the ‘Marseillaise’ and the French could come marching out ... in great shape,” he later said of the Dien Bien Phu dilemma.)