Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

  GENERAL NAVARRE, LEFT, AT DIEN BIEN PHU ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1953. IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT IS COLONEL DE CASTRIES, COMMANDER OF THE GARRISON. (photo credit 17.1)

  It was, in part, an attempt at escape. You had to force yourself to celebrate the festivities as if the mountains shrouded in darkness and fog were not alive with enemy troops bent on your annihilation. You had to forget that you were surrounded on all sides. “There was a strange atmosphere in the camp,” recalled Howard Simpson, the perspicacious USIA correspondent, who was in the camp one or two days earlier. “The officers remained cocky and determined, but the men, particularly the North Africans, Tai, and some of the Vietnamese, seemed to have been affected by the boredom, the lack of movement, and the threat of what was ‘out there.’ A troubled silence fell over the dark valley after sundown. Nervous gunners occasionally loosed a stream of seemingly slow-moving tracers into the night, jeeps with hooded headlights bumped over the rough roads, and the odiferous open latrines glowed with the phosphorescence of seething maggots.”10

  Navarre picked up on this underlying unease, indeed felt it himself. He was sullen and withdrawn on the visit—even by his usual standards. He made no uplifting speech, no effort to put heart into his men. “The military conditions for victory have been brought together,” he assured both de Castries in an early closed-door meeting and a group of officers later on. But his words lacked conviction, for he also expressed worry about the large number of Viet Minh supply trucks reported en route to the area. “We can’t cut the trails,” he told the officers, many of whom disagreed.11 Following mass that evening, Navarre presided over a holiday supper at de Castries’s quarters but left quickly when Lieutenant Colonel Jules Gaucher of the Ninth Groupe Mobile, a burly, no-nonsense veteran who had been in Indochina since 1940 and who during the evening had consumed his share of drink, described in unsparing detail the difficulties of conducting operations even a few miles from the camp. The next day, after the fog lifted, Navarre departed as quickly as he had come.

  Why, in light of his gloomy realism, did he not call the whole thing off, order an evacuation? The hour was late, to be sure—the PAVN 308th and 316th Divisions were already establishing defensive positions to prevent a withdrawal. But Giap did not yet have artillery in place and would not for several weeks. There was still time. An order to evacuate would have been personally embarrassing and would have brought forth charges of weakness, of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, of quitting just when decisive victory was at hand. But it would have generated support as well, including among politicos in Paris who had given him a free hand to act as he wished. History offered many examples of commanders who, when faced with an untenable situation, chose to retreat and were praised for their wisdom, despite fervent initial opposition to the action.

  As a U.S. undersecretary of state would say years later, in arguing vainly against making Vietnam a large-scale American war: “No great captain has ever been blamed for a successful tactical withdrawal.”12

  The idea crossed Navarre’s mind, at least fleetingly. Four days after his Christmas visit to Dien Bien Phu, as reports confirmed the impossibility of maintaining an overland link to the entrenched camp, he ordered René Cogny to prepare top-secret plans for possible evacuation. The two plans—Operation Ariane, providing for the rescue of the withdrawing garrison, and Operation Xenophon, involving a fighting retreat to the south—were to be kept secret from the camp’s commanders and were not to be implemented until the very last moment. But hadn’t that moment arrived? No, the commander in chief determined, not yet. (Or he believed, in his heart of hearts, it had come and gone.) Cogny too, who took several weeks to prepare the evacuation plans, called such thinking premature. Success could still come, the two men said; the valley could still be the setting for a spectacular victory, a bigger, better Na San, one that could allow the civilians in Paris to, as they liked to say, negotiate with honor.

  Those Paris leaders understood that it might all come down to this, to a battle royal in the remote highlands of northwestern Tonkin. Other observers grasped it as well, including officials in Washington, London, Moscow, and Beijing. Said a cable from the British embassy in Saigon on New Year’s Eve: “All out attack on Dien Bien Phu now appears likely.”13

  Navarre’s nemesis too sensed that a line had been crossed. As the year turned, and as the Viet Minh forward observers reported back to headquarters that the buildup at the camp was continuing apace, Vo Nguyen Giap announced that he was ready: He would move his command post from Thai Nguyen, three hundred miles away, to the immediate vicinity of Dien Bien Phu. He had to be right there on the scene, he told aides, for the task ahead was huge. Lest there be any uncertainty on that score, a letter from Ho Chi Minh had reminded him: “This campaign is a very important one, not only militarily but also politically, not only for domestic reasons but for international ones as well. So all of our people, all of our armed forces, and the entire Party must entirely unite to get the job done.”14

  III

  THE ATTACK WAS PLANNED FOR THE LATE AFTERNOON OF JANUARY 25, 1954. At five o’clock, the troops would plunge straight into the heart of the French camp. The 308th Division, having massed in the west of the basin, would push as far as the central command post of Colonel de Castries, who on that side was unlikely to be fully garrisoned. The 312th would come from the northeast to cut down, blow by blow, Gabrielle (Doc Lap) and Anne-Marie (Ban Keo) and seize control of the airstrip. Moving out from the center to the periphery, the camp would be cut into pieces and swiftly crushed.

  This operational plan had taken shape over several weeks and was the product of consultation between Vo Nguyen Giap and his Chinese advisers. Giap had left for the Tonkin highlands on January 5. In a departure from previous practice, he traveled much of the way by jeep, with the exception of one night and one day spent on foot crossing over the difficult Pha Din Pass, located between Thuan Chau and Tuan Giao. All along this route, most of it on the new axis of Provincial Route 13, Giap received regular updates on the situation at the front and kept in close communication with Wei Guoqing, the top Chinese representative. The two men shared one principal fear: that the French army would withdraw, as it had at Na San a few months earlier and at Hoa Binh early in 1952. Their concern rose one night as news came in of fires burning near the French camp. Had General Navarre ordered stocks to be destroyed before an evacuation? No, subsequent reports came back; the French were staying put. The fires had been lit to clear away brush on the outskirts of the camp.15

  The details of the discussions between Vo Nguyen Giap and Wei Guoqing in these early weeks of 1954 have been lost to history, but one can guess there were tensions. In recently published memoirs, Giap says he had early doubts about the strategy of “swift attack, swift victory” (danh nhanh, thang nhanh), a clear reference to Chinese wave tactics as used in Korea. Better, perhaps, would be to proceed more slowly, through a method of “steady attack, steady advance,” over a period of several weeks. Pham Ngoc Mau, the Viet Minh head of artillery, described the choice as between eating an orange by using a knife to cut it into pieces, or taking one’s time and peeling the fruit by hand. Wei Guoqing argued for using the knife, and Giap relented, but he secretly asked his closest Vietnamese aides to keep him continually abreast of the pace of French reinforcements. If the January 25 attack failed, he feared, it would inflict huge damage on the People’s Army and hand the French a major military and political victory.16 He had not forgotten Ho Chi Minh’s admonition: Unless you are certain of victory, don’t proceed.

  The journey to the new headquarters took about a week. An advance party selected for the command post a grotto near a waterfall in the Muong Phong hills, about nine miles north of Dien Bien Phu. Surrounded by jungle cover, the cave was under fifteen feet of solid rock, and giant boulders concealed the entrance. About forty-eight hours after arriving, Giap convened a meeting involving all his top commanders, including Hoang Van Thai, his chief of staff, and Le Liem, the political commissar. Almost
certainly Wei Guoqing and other Chinese advisers were present too, although few Vietnamese texts mention them, even as they do note the presence of a Romanian artist painter and two journalists, one Italian and one Chinese.17

  Who was Wei Guoqing, this phantom general whose presence in Vietnamese histories of this period is usually so ill defined? He came from Guangxi, not far from the Vietnamese frontier near Lang Son. A member of the Zhuang national minority, which traced its bloodlines to the Tai stock that one finds at Dien Bien Phu, he had joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1931 and taken part in the Long March. After distinguishing himself in the civil war of 1948, he had become after 1949 the leading figure in his native province and from 1950 directed the Chinese Military Assistance Group (CMAG), charged with overseeing Beijing’s assistance to the Viet Minh. Apart from a year away on sick leave, he had subsequently been a close adviser to Giap and was often present at headquarters.18

  The meeting on January 14 affirmed the plan to unleash a furious attack on the French fortress eleven days thence. The objective would be twofold: to annihilate an important part of the enemy’s force, and to liberate the northwestern sector and create the conditions for a territorial extension of the base of the Pathet Lao. Some weeks earlier Giap had sent seven battalions from his 304th and 325th Divisions slicing into central Laos, linking up with the Pathet Lao and threatening to cut Laos in half at her narrowest point. The offensive took the French by surprise (the Deuxième Bureau temporarily lost sight of the units), and though it ran out of steam, it showed Giap what could be accomplished once Dien Bien Phu had been taken. Just how much the conferees on January 14 revisited the attack-fast versus nibble-away-slowly options is not clear, but we know they came out of the meeting still committed to the former. The French garrison was deemed likely to be still vulnerable on January 25, while the People’s Army had neither the resources nor the experience to engage itself in a lengthy operation.

  IV

  THERE FOLLOWED TEN DAYS OF RELENTLESS PREPARATION, AS ferocious as any in the history of warfare. The general mobilization of labor initiated a month earlier now took on a breathtaking pace. For on this day, January 14, nothing was yet ready. The artillery was not in place on the crests above Dien Bien Phu, and the trails to get it there had not been made ready nor even fully marked out. Farther away, huge tasks remained to get materials to the highlands, from the Chinese border at Mu Nam Quam over Provincial Route 13 to the Red River and thence via Provincial Route 41 to the area of Dien Bien Phu—a total distance of almost five hundred miles. All along this route, engineering crews and soldiers, assisted by porters, worked day and night to clear and widen and repair the roads and to keep convoys moving. The route was divided into eight sections, their endpoints marked by major obstacles such as ravines or waterways where checkpoints were set up. The Russian-made Molotova two-and-a-half-ton trucks, now numbering about six hundred, as well as a smaller number of American Dodge trucks captured by the Chinese in Korea or the Viet Minh in Vietnam, traveled only one section each; at the checkpoints, their contents were taken off by porters and reloaded on the vehicles assigned to the next stretch.19

  French aircraft were a constant menace, and the casualties among the porters, though never published or perhaps tallied, were undoubtedly high. (A particular menace: the new American antipersonnel bombs that spread lethal showers of small steel splinters.) But the work continued, as thousands of porters stood ready to fill in the craters or build bypasses; French crews reported with dismay that the cuts they succeeded in making in roads were often repaired within hours. To complicate the pilots’ task, elaborate efforts were made to camouflage the route wherever possible. Log bridges were constructed just under the surface of a stream to hide them, and treetops were pulled together with ropes and cables to screen the roads. Vehicles were covered with leafy branches, and tire tracks were rubbed out as soon as the trucks had passed. A primitive but effective air-warning system was fashioned, whereby spotters in treetops clanged alarm triangles or blew whistles to warn of approaching planes (none of which were jets and thus could be heard well in advance of arrival). Pilots would report seeing long lines of truck headlights suddenly go dark, long before they reached the target.20

  When bomb damage or natural obstacles proved too great to overcome quickly, porters were called in to carry loads themselves, often over considerable distances. They would don makeshift shoulder pads and bamboo carrying rigs, and frequently they would team up. Photographs exist of four-man teams using shoulder poles to carry the barrels and the breechblocks of 75mm Japanese mountain guns up steep wooded hillsides.

  Bicycles, for years a favored mode of transport for the Viet Minh, were again called into service. Most were French-made, manufactured at Saint-Étienne or in the Peugeot factories. A specially equipped bicycle—with wooden struts to strengthen the frame and bamboo poles to extend the handlebars and the brake levers—could take more than an elephant could carry. “We mobilized all available supply bicycles,” Vo Nguyen Giap would recall, “reaching a total of 20,000.”

  Every supply bicycle was initially capable of transporting 100 kilograms, and this was later increased to 200 or even 300 kilograms. One civilian coolie laborer from Phu Tho named Ma Van Thang was able to transport a total of 352 kilograms on his bicycle. The carrying capacity of transport bicycles was more than ten times greater than that of porters carrying loads on “ganh” [bamboo or wooden] poles, and the amount of rice consumed by the people transporting the supplies was reduced by a similar amount. The superiority of the transport bicycles also lay in the fact that they could operate along roads and trails that trucks could not use. This method of transportation greatly surprised the enemy’s army and completely upset his original calculations.21

  But the most dramatic feats were accomplished at the end, after the trucks had snaked their way to the endpoint, at Na Nham on Route 41. From here, in order to avoid detection by the French, the artillery pieces had somehow to be dragged to their emplacements, on a trail that ten days before the attack date had still to be blazed. Unloaded from the trucks, the cannons were to be transported through a chain of mountains without going through a valley, in order to cut through the foothills of the 1,100-meter-high Pu Pha Song mountain; then they were to descend again in the direction of the Pavie Piste, which linked Dien Bien Phu to Lai Chau, which they would cross near Ban To; then they were to scale another new height in order to position the battery at Ban Nghiu, from where they would fire on the French garrison at point-blank range.

  A PARADE OF SPECIALLY MODIFIED BICYCLES (MANY OF THEM FRENCH-MADE PEUGEOTS), LOADED WITH FOOD AND MUNITIONS, ON A ROAD TO DIEN BIEN PHU IN JANUARY 1954. (photo credit 17.2)

  It took seven days and nights of nonstop labor to get the heavy guns in place, with the use of block and tackle, drag ropes, and braking chocks to keep them from careening back down the slopes. The half-ton 75mm mountain guns were not the problem; they could be broken down into eleven loads that, while heavy and cumbersome, were manageable. The 105mm howitzers, however, represented an almost absurd challenge on inclines that reached as steep as sixty degrees. Commander Tran Do of the 312th Division was among the infantry pressed into this “silent battle” of “cannon-pulling” of the 105s. “Every evening when the white fog … began to descend over the plains, columns of human beings set out on the road,” he later wrote. “The [six-mile] track was so narrow that if a slight deviation of the wheels took place the artillery piece would have fallen into the deep ravine. The newly-opened track was soon an ankle-deep bog. With our own sweat and muscles, we replaced the trucks to haul artillery pieces into position.”

  Fatigue and lack of supplies were a constant concern, Tran continued. Meals consisted only of rice, often undercooked, as the kitchens had to be smokeless by day and sparkless by night. And yet the work went on: “To climb a slope, hundreds of men crept before the gun, tugging on long ropes, pulling the piece up inch by inch. On the crest, the winch was creaking, helping to prevent the piece from
slipping.” Then it got worse: “It was much harder descending a slope. The sight was just the reverse: Hundreds of men held onto long ropes behind the piece, their bodies leaning backwards, and the windlass released the ropes inch by inch.” In this way, whole nights were spent toiling by torchlight to gain five hundred or a thousand meters.22

  Always there was pressure to do more, to go faster. When a staffer informed Pham Ngoc Mau, an artillery commander, that the 105mm cannon could be moved at a speed of approximately 150 meters per hour, he received a blistering reply. “Speed my ass! You can’t simply say like everyone else that we can’t do a fucking two hundred meters per hour!” The relentless pace inevitably led to accidents and other mishaps, and to questioning. At one point, during a particularly grueling uphill stretch, a cannon began tilting, one wheel sinking into the side of the trail. For a time, it seemed the whole apparatus might thunder down into the ravine, taking the soldier-porters with it. The men moaned. “We’re dying for nothing,” they complained. “What good is it to have trucks if we’re using our own arms as motors?”23 Though such moments of despair appear to have been relatively rare, meetings were organized to boost the morale of the troops and to seek ways to make the labor less excruciating and dangerous. One such improvement: the installation of a device under the beam of the cannons to allow them to slide on the ground without having to be lifted, which both eased the burden on the men and reduced the risk of accidents.24