V
THE FRENCH COMMAND KNEW OF THE IMPENDING ATTACK. ON JANUARY 20, intelligence operators intercepted and decoded Viet Minh messages indicating that the assault would commence on the evening of the twenty-fifth, by the light of the moon in its second quarter. Shouts of joy rang out among operational officers in Hanoi and Saigon; at long last, the enemy would emerge and receive the drubbing that was his due. As the news spread among the officers and men at the garrison, again there were smiles and expressions of delight. False bravado? To some extent, maybe, especially among senior officers privy to information about the depth and breadth of Viet Minh preparations. But most everyone was eager to get on with the show. Time and again the soldiers had been told an attack seemed imminent, yet nothing had happened; the succession of false alarms was frustrating and nerve-racking. Ennui was a frequent companion in the remote valley, as the men dreamed of home, of wives and girlfriends, of cold beers at the neighborhood café, of warm baths and favorite meals. The dark rotgut that was issued to them in the form of vinogel—a canned, jellylike wine concentrate to which water must be added—only made them pine harder for real drink; the women in the camp bordellos provided gratification but not love.
The constant flow of aircraft bringing men and supplies was a source of comfort, however, adding to the conviction that the battle, when it came, would surely go France’s way. Every fifteen minutes they landed (weather permitting), day after day after day, U.S.-supplied C-47 Dakotas and C-119s. In due course, this rate of delivery would be seen as far too limited—one postwar estimate said it would have taken twelve thousand flights, or five months of essentially nonstop deliveries, to make the valley into a fully defensible field position—but for the moment, it seemed fully adequate to most. By mid-January, twelve battalions were in place, charged with defending the strongpoints. In the north, Gabrielle had the Fifth Battalion of the Seventh Algerian Regiment and a Legion mortar company; Béatrice had the Third Battalion of the Thirteenth Legion Demi-Brigade; and Anne-Marie had the Third Tai Battalion and a Legion mortar company. There were similar-size concentrations in the center at Huguette, Dominique, Françoise, and Eliane, while in the area of de Castries’s command post, Claudine had the Eighth Colonial Parachute Battalion, two tank platoons, artillery, a Legion heavy-mortar company, and security, intelligence, and medical units. At Isabelle in the south was installed the Third Battalion of the Third Legion Infantry Regiment, the Second Battalion of the First Algerian Rifle Regiment, one tank platoon, artillery, and a Tai partisan company.
January also witnessed a steady flow of visitors to the entrenched camp. Most pronounced themselves pleased with the buildup, with the positioning of the strongpoints, with the presence of twenty-eight guns and sixteen heavy mortars ready to open fire on Viet Minh positions. When someone expressed skepticism that it would be enough, de Castries did his level best to change the person’s mind.25 Cogny and Navarre, for their part, were more cautious than their camp commander as the anticipated Viet Minh attack date approached. The intelligence reports were sobering. As early as December 27, the French Air Force had picked up evidence of the passage of heavy Viet Minh equipment toward Dien Bien Phu. Already then intelligence analysts estimated that Giap would deploy 49,000 men, including 33,000 combatants, figures that would turn out to be within 10 percent of reality. On January 9, aerial photographs showed that 105mm howitzers had left Viet Minh rear-base areas in the direction of the highlands.26
Navarre hedged his bets. He found ominous the news that de Castries’s chief of staff had been killed by a sniper within the perimeter on December 28. On the last day of the year, Navarre confessed to U.S. ambassador Donald Heath that Dien Bien Phu might be overrun despite his best efforts. The Viet Minh, he told the American, now might have the means to move 105mm cannons up on the heights overlooking the approach to the valley. The following day Navarre informed Paris that, “faced with the arrival of new possibilities which very serious intelligence has been announcing for two weeks … I can no longer—if these materials truly exist in such numbers and above all if the adversary succeeds in putting them to use—guarantee success with any certainty.”27
That was the key question: Would Giap be able to put his major weaponry to effective use? Navarre and Cogny in January still clung to the belief that he couldn’t. If he followed the conventional practice of firing his guns from behind the crests, the trajectory would be wrong and he’d be too far away to do serious damage; if he fired them from the forward slope, he would be easily identified and destroyed. The garrison’s artillery commander, the one-armed Colonel Charles Piroth, encouraged them in this belief, insisting that he could handle easily whatever Giap threw his way. Cogny, increasingly fearful that the outlying strongpoints—especially Béatrice and Gabrielle on the north end—would be swiftly overrun in the battle and be almost impossible to retake, hoped he was right. Artillery would be decisive, he knew, one way or the other.
That Cogny and Navarre actively disliked each other didn’t help French planning. They had never been close, but recently the mutual animosity had become obvious to all, not least to their respective staffs in Hanoi and Saigon. They were, in almost every way, opposites. Whereas Navarre was short and trim, taciturn and socially awkward, and ill at ease around journalists, Cogny was a giant of a man at six foot four and 210 pounds, an extrovert who had a flair for public relations and was a born leader of men. Now forty-nine, he had doctoral degrees in law and political science and had survived the tortures of the Buchenwald concentration camp, emerging at the liberation severely malnourished—he was down to 120 pounds—and with a limp. (He walked with a cane the rest of his life.) Under de Lattre, he had commanded a division in Tonkin, earning raves from his men for wading through waist-deep paddies with them and fording streams to see what was happening on the other side. He had remained in Indochina after the great man’s death. Far more thin-skinned than Navarre, easily wounded by even the slightest criticism, he also had a well-earned reputation for arguing orders, even in front of privates. For all that, Navarre had nevertheless appointed him in May 1953 to command of the key northern region.28
Historians have sometimes made too much of the Cogny-Navarre clash—Cogny, as we have seen, was not hostile to Operation Castor, whatever his postwar claims—but by the middle of January 1954 their feud threatened to become a major distraction. Cogny openly fumed at “the air-conditioned general” moving pins on his wall map in his palatial Saigon office while the real fighters dealt with real problems in the north. The security situation in the Red River Delta was growing more serious each day, he warned Paris, with the Viet Minh maintaining guerrilla activity at a very high pitch and with more and more of its six thousand villages falling out of government hands. (At most, a third of them could now be considered friendly.) The vital rail link between Hanoi and Haiphong was being cut virtually daily, often through the use of new remote-controlled mines, as was the Hanoi-Phu Ly–Nam Dinh road. Cogny’s faith in the Vietnamese National Army (VNA), meanwhile, never high, plummeted in the early weeks of the year, as a result of several alleged acts of treachery—including instances of soldiers allowing Viet Minh commandos to enter French-held compounds under the cover of darkness and massacre the men (often legionnaires) who were holding them. In Hanoi, January witnessed an uptick in brazen grenade attacks on French Union soldiers, notably on the streets around the Citadel.29 Cogny expressed confidence that he could counteract these Viet Minh tactics, but only if he had adequate troops at his disposal.
He was especially incensed by Navarre’s decision to proceed with Operation Atlante, an ambitious strike into Viet Minh–held territory in south-central Vietnam that got under way on January 20. Following an amphibious landing at Tuy Hoa, in which U.S.-supplied Grumman Hellcat fighters tore into the coastline with napalm, more than thirty infantry battalions with supporting artillery and armor swept through a large Viet Minh zone with the objective of securing the coastal area of central Vietnam from Nha Trang to Hue, and seconda
rily to give the new light battalions of the VNA a chance to show their mettle in battle. Cogny questioned the importance of the objective and said the operation was drawing aircraft and troops from his larder. He felt vindicated when Atlante in the early going failed to yield the hoped-for results. The Viet Minh proved elusive as always, fading into the hills, and in one counterattack they wiped out an entire groupe mobile made up of French troops who had fought with the U.S. Second Division in Korea.30
VI
AT DIEN BIEN PHU ON JANUARY 25, EVERYONE IN THE ENTRENCHED camp waited with nervous anxiety. And waited. By nightfall, no attack had come. A Dakota circled above the basin, like some silver metallic hawk, ready to drop flares at the first sight of advancing enemy troops, but none emerged. By sunrise the next morning, all was still quiet. At 1:50 that afternoon, Navarre and Cogny arrived at the camp, along with two other dignitaries: Marc Jacquet, the minister for the Associated States, and Maurice Dejean, the high commissioner for France in Indochina. De Castries, his red scarf blowing in the breeze, was there to meet the plane, as was Piroth, his empty sleeve tucked into his belt. Immediately the group headed to de Castries’s command post, the only dugout protected by steel plates. While Paule Bourgeade, de Castries’s beautiful young secretary (whose lipstick-stained cigarette butts were prized possessions among the paras), prepared coffee, the group grappled with the question: Why had Giap held his fire the night before?
No obvious answer presented itself. Perhaps, someone offered, he will attack this evening. The moon will still be out, and perhaps he just needed an additional day for final preparations. This seemed as good a theory as any, and the discussion moved on to the state of the garrison’s defenses. De Castries, unflappable as always, calmly announced himself ready for the undertaking. Jacquet took Piroth aside and said, “Colonel, I know there are hundreds of guns lying idle at Hanoi. You ought to take advantage of a minister’s presence [that is, Jacquet himself] to get a few sent you on the side.” Piroth declined the suggestion with the air of a military man having to endure a civilian offering battlefield advice. “Look at my plan of fire, M. Minister. I’ve got more guns than I need.”
Someone asked if he was sure. “If I have thirty minutes warning,” Piroth replied, “my counterbattery will be effective.” The follow-up hung in the air, unasked: What if he didn’t have thirty minutes warning?31
As the afternoon drew to a close, Navarre turned to Jacquet: “We have the impression they are going to attack tonight. I would prefer not to expose a minister to any risks.” Soon thereafter the official Dakotas lifted off and disappeared in the clouds. There would be no attack that night either, or the next night, or the night after that.32
What happened? Why did the Battle of Dien Bien Phu not begin on that moonlit evening in late January 1954? For years, historians aware of the initial plan assumed that the Chinese got cold feet and prevailed on Giap to issue a cancellation. It now appears, however, that the decision was Giap’s and that he made it in the face of opposition, or at best grudging acquiescence, from the Chinese.
There were actually two postponements. The first was issued on January 24. That day a Viet Minh soldier from the 312th Division fell into French hands; under interrogation, he revealed what the French already knew, that the attack would commence the following day at five o’clock. Viet Minh radio monitoring of the French picked up on this leak, and Giap ordered that the attack be pushed back twenty-four hours, to five P.M. on January 26.33
Those twenty-four hours would prove critical. Giap was under pressure from his Chinese advisers, from some of his senior commanders, and from his frontline troops to attack with full force, and to do it quickly. These advocates insisted that everything was ready and that a further postponement would create dissension in the ranks and among the tens of thousands of porters who had given their absolute all to prepare the ground. But Giap was worried. He was not sure all the elements were in place for a successful attack. On the night of the twenty-fifth he was anxious, returning again and again to the question, could his troops prevail? Several things troubled him, starting with the size of the battlefield. Dien Bien Phu was three times larger than Na San, and Viet Minh units were not trained to operate on such a large expanse, against a formidable foe possessing tanks, heavy artillery, and airpower. His own force was huge, at more than five divisions, but were the units capable of the necessary discipline and control? Could his artillery, not used to working on such a major scale, execute coordinated calibration from protected but suboptimal sites? It worried Giap that one artillery regiment commander had recently disclosed that he did not know how to operate his cannon. Finally, there was the question of time. Up to now, battles had seldom lasted longer than twenty hours. Most began at twilight and ended in the early morning. Would the troops be able to handle a drawn-out battle, involving much fighting during daylight hours?34
More basically, Giap sensed that the situation had changed. Tactics approved in December no longer made as much sense in January, for the French were now much stronger. They had doubled in overall strength, and their fortifications were much improved, with barbed wire and artillery. Meanwhile the People’s Army did not yet have all its artillery in place. An attack now, Giap concluded, would be “an adventure.”
“I couldn’t close my eyes,” Giap recalled of that night, spent in his one-room hillside hut with its small cot and bamboo table overlaid with maps of the valley. “I had a terrible headache. Thuy, a medic, wrapped a mugwort compress around my forehead.”
The next morning Giap summoned Wei Guoqing, who was surprised to see the compress. “The battle is about to begin,” the Chinese adviser remarked; how did Giap think it would likely unfold? “That’s the issue I’d like to discuss,” came the reply. “From observing the situation, I believe the enemy has moved from a temporary to a solid defense. For that reason, I think we must not follow our agreed plan. If we fight, we lose.”
“How should we solve this?” Wei Guoqing responded.
“My thought is immediately this afternoon to order a delay in the offensive, withdraw our soldiers to their training positions, and prepare again under the directive, ‘Steady Attack, Steady Advance.’ ”35
Wei Guoqing, depending on which source one consults, either supported the delay or grumbled that Giap lacked “Bolshevik spirit.” Perhaps he did both. Regardless, that afternoon a contentious meeting at the Viet Minh commander’s post—during which several subordinate Viet Minh commanders pressed for going ahead with the attack that evening—ended with a postponement of the operation and a switch to the “steady” directive.36 Several more weeks would be taken to get everything into place, to study the French defenses more thoroughly, and to make sure not a single ingredient for victory had been left out. Nothing would be left to chance. The orange would be peeled by hand, slowly.37
“In taking this correct decision,” Giap later wrote, echoing Ho Chi Minh’s words to him in December 1953, “we strictly followed [the] fundamental principle of the conduct of a revolutionary war; strike to win, strike only when success is certain; if it is not, then don’t strike.”38
What if he had chosen differently? What if he had bowed to the pressure and launched the attack? It’s a tantalizing counterfactual question. No one can know the answer with any degree of certainty, of course, but it seems impossible in hindsight to argue against the veteran commander’s reasoning. The fact is that Giap’s forces were not yet prepared for the immense task at hand; an attack on January 25 or 26 could easily have ended in disaster. From this perspective, neither Navarre’s original conception regarding Operation Castor nor de Castries’s and Piroth’s confidence before Jacquet and Dejean on the twenty-fifth seems so absurd. The People’s Army came much closer to military failure at Dien Bien Phu than is generally believed.
CHAPTER 18
“VIETNAM IS A PART OF THE WORLD”
BEYOND THE VARIOUS MILITARY CONSIDERATIONS, ONE OTHER factor may have contributed to Vo Nguyen Giap’s decision to call off the
January 25 attack. The Berlin conference of foreign ministers was scheduled to open at this very time, and Indochina would certainly come up for consideration. An unsuccessful attack upon the French garrison could have an enormous impact on the tenor of that discussion, and on any decisions reached by the four powers (France, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union) regarding Indochina’s future. At this stage of the game, General Giap and Ho Chi Minh knew, all military plans had to be considered in light of their international diplomatic ramifications, and vice versa. As Ho had put it in his report to the DRV National Assembly a month earlier, in December 1953, Vietnam had become “a part of the world.”1
Ho Chi Minh remained suspicious of great-power negotiations concerning Indochina, as did his top lieutenants. The timing was not yet right. If there were to be talks, Ho wanted them to be bilateral discussions between the DRV and France. Even these should be entered carefully, and there should be no letup in military pressure. But Viet Minh officials also understood that they might be powerless to stop the convening of a five-power conference of the type Moscow proposed and to which Paris and Beijing seemed receptive. If the other leading powers, and especially the United States, agreed to such a meeting, it would be held, whatever the Vietnamese might have to say about it.
And on this point, available DRV internal sources are clear: At the start of 1954, it was American policy more than French policy that was of chief concern to Ho Chi Minh and the Politburo. The United States was now the principal enemy, not France.2 Should President Dwight Eisenhower choose to further increase his involvement in the French cause, perhaps by sending ground troops to the war theater, or by ordering air strikes on Viet Minh positions, it would have enormous implications for the balance of military forces. Conversely, should the American president alter his hostile attitude toward diplomacy and come out in favor of a negotiated settlement, that too would change the dynamics in a fundamental way.
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 49