“We immediately telephoned our reconnaissance element preparing to go to Lai Chau,” one of the subordinates recalled, “and told them to leave immediately for Dien Bien Phu, to work with local units in the area, reconnoiter the enemy situation, and send daily reports back to the intelligence department.” At the same time, this officer continued, the Viet Minh command directed its technical reconnaissance (radio intercept) forces to continually monitor French activity not merely at Dien Bien Phu but also at Lai Chau and in northern Laos.19
These activities soon yielded valuable information, as did the loose lips of French commanders. It was a constant problem during the war, this habit of senior officers to speak too freely about plans and operations. The French and foreign press, taking good notes on what they heard, dutifully reported that an entrenched camp similar to Na San would be established at Dien Bien Phu and would provide support for a major Tai partisan movement. General Cogny rashly confided to a reporter that “if he could, he would have transported Na San en bloc to Dien Bien Phu.” More damaging still, a series of reports referred to the 316th Division’s progress toward Lai Chau, knowledge that could only have come from radio intercepts. The Viet Minh immediately changed their code for operational traffic, thus frustrating French intelligence operatives in the Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage (SDECE) for the better part of a week.20
Sensing the seriousness of the French commitment, Giap directed three other divisions, the 308th Iron, the 312th, and the 351st Heavy (artillery and engineering), to prepare to move toward Dien Bien Phu. French intelligence intercepted these orders, and its chief estimated that the 316th, already en route, would reach the general area by about December 6; the other three divisions, he anticipated, would arrive between December 24 and 28. Meanwhile Gilles’s paras were encountering problems as they pushed battalion-strength patrols north and south of the camp. The terrain was rough, with heavy tropical growth, steep hillsides, and potentially treacherous stretches of open ground. The jungle guarded its secrets, and in its shadows lurked tigers and—the paras suspected—enemy troops. Sure enough, by November 25, the 148th Regiment as well as advance elements of the 316th Division had been spotted by aircraft on the approaches to the surrounding hills. Not good news, especially to the French officers and tribal guerrillas of the so-called GCMA (Groupement de commandos mixtes aéroportés), a highly secretive commando unit that was to use Dien Bien Phu as a base from which to launch operations in the area. Such action would be well-nigh impossible if the Viet Minh controlled the approaches to the village.
On December 3 Navarre, who knew of the advancing enemy divisions, issued a fateful order to Cogny, in the form of “Personal and Secret Instructions for the Conduct of Operation No. 949.” Following some opening formalities, he came to the point: He had decided to accept battle in the northwest. Dien Bien Phu would be the center of operations and must be held at all costs. Lai Chau was to be evacuated as soon as the threat to it became too great to resist, and ground communications with Lai Chau to the north and Muong Khoua to the south were to be maintained as long as possible. Navarre envisioned a battle involving a movement phase of several weeks while the Viet Minh marched up to the base, followed by a week or ten days for their reconnaissance, and culminating in a few days of battle, resulting in the enemy’s total defeat.21
It was a momentous decision, no less so for going against a core tenet of the Navarre Plan: the need to avoid a major engagement in the current campaign season. The French commander’s calculation, which he knew would be tested soon enough, was that Giap’s logistical problems so far from home would be too severe to overcome. He would not be able to maintain a large body of troops in the area due to the harshness of the terrain and the presence of the French Air Force. The Deuxième Bureau had made clear to Navarre that the PAVN was a real army with trucks and cannons, but how could it transport them as far as Dien Bien Phu? Answer: It couldn’t. Its inherent inferiority in transport means ensured that, try as Giap might, he would not be able to match the weight of French weaponry and hence would be crushed when battle came.
A colossal miscalculation in hindsight, it was less so at the time. Giap himself feared that the task before him was too great. Following his defeats against de Lattre in the delta in 1951, the self-taught strategist had vowed never again to underestimate his foe or to fight on the foe’s chosen ground. He had relearned the lesson at great cost at Na San in late 1952. Now again he confronted the choice of whether to accept a set-piece battle against the heart of the Expeditionary Corps. This would be no hit-and-run ambush but a major assault on a fortified French camp, using mobile trench warfare. It would be, to an extent, a repeat of the assaults at Vinh Yen and the Day River in 1951, which had ended disastrously for Giap’s forces. True, those forces were now better trained and equipped, but so were the Expeditionary Corps.22 Most vexing of all, how to bring his army to the battlefield? The troops would have to cover some three hundred miles on foot, and supply lines from China would be still longer, up to five hundred miles. The road system, rudimentary where it existed at all, would somehow have to carry every piece of equipment, every bullet, for thousands of soldiers over that distance. Even then the task was not complete, for these vulnerable supply lines would have to be kept open, in forbidding terrain, over a period of weeks, perhaps months.
Nor was it just a matter of transporting weapons and ammunition. A two-week supply of rice would mean a load of thirty to forty extra pounds per soldier. When added to his other gear, this exceeded the optimum load for a soldier moving by foot in the rugged landscape of the northwest. Porters were thus essential, but a porter too needed to eat. If he started with sixty pounds of rice, at the end of two weeks he would have only enough left to feed himself on the return journey to his starting point. By day fourteen, therefore, he could turn over only enough rice—two pounds—to feed a soldier for a single day. For Giap, there was no way around it: His units, operating at least part of the time without access to motorized resupply, would face immense challenges in a major operation in this area. If Navarre chose to garrison a division or so at Dien Bien Phu, virtually the entire Viet Minh corps de bataille would be required to launch an effective attack.23
Yet it could be done. As he studied his maps, many of them crude and approximate, and analyzed a stream of reports from Viet Minh intelligence sources, Giap came gradually to the conviction that he should accept battle at Dien Bien Phu. He would spring a trap against the trapper. His Chinese military advisers agreed; they saw an opportunity for the Viet Minh to score a major military victory in advance of possible negotiations in 1954.24 Just how large a role the Chinese played in shaping Giap’s thinking is unclear (he alludes to them only vaguely in his memoirs), but certainly there are Chinese fingerprints on the battle plan that Giap endorsed and that was presented to the party Politburo on December 6. The plan’s fundamental premise was that the fortified French camp would be a formidable defensive complex, but that it suffered from a grave weakness, namely its isolation. The French garrison would have to be supplied largely by air, completely so if the People’s Army could surround it. That would be the aim: to encircle the encampment with a ring of steel, and then close in.25
The battle envisioned in the plan would be the largest set-piece engagement of the war and would require the deployment of nine Viet Minh infantry regiments and all available artillery, engineer, and antiaircraft units, for a total of some 35,000 men. Adding in the campaign headquarters (1,850 men) plus 4,000 new recruits (to be sent to the front in separate contingents), plus 1,720 troops who would protect the supply lines, the total number of troops to be utilized was 42,570. The plan also called for a civilian porter force of 14,500 men and women, not including porters used in the rear area. Three hundred tons of ammunition would have to reach the front, along with 4,200 tons of rice, 100 tons of dried vegetables, 100 tons of meat, and 12 tons of sugar. As the essential first task, the plan called for a huge logistical effort to allow motor
ized transport through the mountainous terrain—hundreds of trucks must be able to travel hundreds of miles and reach close to the battle zone. Once under way, the battle could be expected to last forty-five days.26
That day the Politburo decided to launch the Dien Bien Phu campaign and to approve the military committee’s battle plan. Giap would command, backed up in his general staff by his Chinese advisers Mei Jiasheng and Wei Guoqing and his Vietnamese commanders, notably Chief of Staff Hoang Van Thai. Ho Chi Minh, turning to Giap, issued the send-off: “You are the general commanding the troops on the outer frontier.… I give you complete authority to make all decisions. If victory is certain, then you are to attack. If victory is not certain, then you must resolutely refrain from attacking.”27
III
EVEN AS THE TWO COMMANDERS IN CHIEF LAID PLANS FOR A MAJOR and perhaps climactic military showdown in northwestern Tonkin, activity on the political front stepped up as well—in various world capitals. In the four months since the Korean armistice, the Chinese and Soviet leaderships had shown their determination to avoid if at all possible another war against the United States. Both came out of the summer of 1953 professing a desire to solve international disputes by diplomatic means—a preference reinforced on the Soviet side by the popular uprising in East Germany in June. On August 3, the Soviet newspaper Red Star carried an editorial arguing that the truce in Korea should help end the war in Indochina. The same month Chinese premier Zhou Enlai declared that a final conference on Korea’s future should also address “other issues” in Asia. In late September, the Kremlin proposed a five-power foreign ministers’ meeting to address international tensions. China, included as one of the five, endorsed this initiative in early October. Some weeks after that, before a group of Indian diplomats, Zhou spoke in sympathetic terms about the concept of great-power “peaceful coexistence.”28
Georgy Malenkov, who had emerged as the leading figure in Moscow after Stalin’s death the previous March, sought improved relations with the West in part to rein in a burgeoning defense budget and free up funds for needed economic projects. For Zhou and Mao, the Korean truce likewise offered a chance to devote more of China’s resources to domestic concerns. They were contemplating the launching of the first five-year plan, as well as shifting governmental resources to the “liberation” of Nationalist-controlled Taiwan.29 After four years of sharp confrontation with the United States and the West, they sought a break. Korea had been a huge drain on the country’s finances, forcing Beijing to borrow $2 billion from Moscow to cover war costs. But Korea also left a more positive legacy, and this too inclined Chinese leaders toward endorsing a political solution in Indochina. The Korean negotiations had enhanced China’s stature as a world power, for Beijing had succeeded in forcing Washington into a compromise—the Truman and Eisenhower administrations had been compelled to sit at the bargaining table with a government they did not formally recognize. It was an intoxicating feeling for a group of leaders still seeking international and domestic legitimacy, and it made them willing to play—or at least not averse to playing—the great-power negotiating game again.
Accordingly, in the fall of 1953, Moscow and Beijing made clear to DRV leaders that the door to a negotiated solution should be kept open. Ho Chi Minh and his associates were initially skeptical. Earlier in the summer, Ho had warned his colleagues that neither France nor the United States would ever accept major concessions at the bargaining table unless they were defeated on the field of battle.30 Ultimately, however, a rough consensus emerged that there was little to lose and potentially a lot to gain from indicating a willingness to negotiate—while easing up not at all on the military side of the struggle. No less eager than the Chinese and Soviets to avert direct U.S. military intervention, senior DRV officials also were conscious of the fatigue and war-weariness among their people, both soldiers and civilians, and the consequent need to offer them more than the prospect of perpetual war. As a party report of the period concluded, the “struggle to restore peace in Vietnam” had become “the wish of the people.” In late 1953, the Politburo took tentative but important steps to position itself on what another internal party study referred to as a “new front,” that is, the diplomatic one.31
Thus on November 23, at the opening session of the World Peace Council meeting in Vienna, the DRV delegate announced that a Korea-type diplomatic settlement in Vietnam “is completely necessary and also possible.” The Vietnamese people, he went on, “stand for an end to the Viet-Nam war and peaceful settlement of the Viet-Nam question by means of peaceful negotiations.”32
Then, three days later, the Swedish newspaper Expressen published Ho Chi Minh’s answers to questions posed by the paper’s Paris correspondent, Svante Löfgren, who had heard Premier Joseph Laniel on the floor of the National Assembly express openness to peace proposals emanating from “Ho Chi Minh and his team.” The resourceful Löfgren decided to test the proposition. He wrote to the Viet Minh leader and, to his surprise, got a response. Should France express a sincere willingness to “negotiate an armistice in Viet Nam and to solve the Viet Nam problem by peaceful means,” Ho wrote, “the people and Government of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam are ready to meet this desire.” Presumably the negotiations would be bilateral, involving the DRV and France, but Ho said he would also be open to having a third-party mediator. Significantly, Löfgren had cabled his questions through Beijing, and the Chinese in all likelihood conferred with Moscow on the benefits that could come from the interview. Two days before Expressen printed Ho’s answers, the Kremlin accepted a long-standing Western proposal for talks on the German question involving the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union; by implication, the discussions would be expanded to include Indochina. A few days after the article appeared, Beijing used an editorial in People’s Daily to indicate its explicit approval of Ho’s offer.33
Following the Expressen interview, Ho explained his policy to the DRV National Assembly, which was meeting for the first time since 1946. Framing the matter entirely in terms of stopping America’s aggressive designs, and echoing fully the line out of Moscow and Beijing, he noted that just as Indochina influenced world events, so the world affected the situation in Vietnam. Washington was sabotaging “the convening of political conferences,” rearming Japan while keeping China out of the United Nations, and building up West Germany to prevent a reunification of that country. “Our camp is becoming stronger and stronger, more united and single-minded within the front of democracy and peace headed by the Soviet Union. Our present goal is to relax international tensions and to solve all the disputes in the world by means of negotiation.”34
The word must have gone over well, or well enough, for two weeks later, on December 19, the Politburo discussed and approved a resolution concerning DRV policy toward “negotiations and talks.” “A new front had been opened,” a party account said of the thinking at this meeting. “Our Party believed that a diplomatic front that was initiated at the correct time and that was closely coordinated with our military operations on the battlefield would be an intelligent strategy to use to gradually, step by step, attain the fundamental goals of our nation.” Not quite acknowledged in the account but plainly a subtext in the Politburo deliberations that day was that eight years of war and sacrifice had taken their toll, requiring a new approach.35 That same day Ho delivered a radio address to the Vietnamese people, commemorating the seventh anniversary of the “Nationwide Resistance War.” The veteran revolutionary vowed to continue the struggle to final victory but said again that his government stood ready to negotiate a cease-fire and a resolution of the war. But was France willing to bargain in good faith?36
More than willing, many in Paris would have replied. Ho Chi Minh’s Expressen interview, reprinted in Le Monde on December 1, caused a sensation. Was this the opening to meaningful dialogue leading to an end to the disaster, an end to seven years of bloody and stalemated warfare? Yes, much of left-wing opinion answered. Earlier in November, the Social
ists had forced a major debate in the Assembly, on the proposition that since France could no longer claim to be fighting to preserve the French Union (in light of the Bao Dai Congress in October) or to defeat the Asian Communist crusade (in light of the Korean armistice), the only thing to do was to end the war through direct bilateral talks with Ho Chi Minh. Ho might not be a genuine nationalist, Socialist deputy Alain Savary allowed, and his Viet Minh might not be all that popular, but neither was it correct to call Ho “Peking’s puppet.” He was no more China’s puppet than Mao Zedong was the Soviet Union’s puppet. Nor, Savary added, were French soldiers “American mercenaries.” Édouard Daladier, meanwhile, complained of France’s “deplorable complacency,” if not “servility,” toward the United States, while Jean Pronteau warned, with notable foresight, that Vietnam could be a thirty-year war.37
The Assembly ultimately rejected (by a vote of 330 to 250) a Socialist motion for immediate negotiations with the Viet Minh. Opponents prevailed by arguing that an affirmative vote would undermine morale among French troops and Bao Dai’s ministers, and embolden the enemy. Laniel and Bidault breathed a sigh of relief, only to be rocked by Ho’s offer in Expressen. Hitherto the two men had been able to maintain, as Laniel did on November 12, that their expressed support for negotiations—“une solution honorable … une solution diplomatique du conflit”—had elicited no response from the other side. That argument no longer worked, though Laniel could still insist that Ho’s proposal was a nonstarter in that it failed to take the Associated States into account.38
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 46