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

by Fredrik Logevall

  The senior officers had a more sober view of the prospects, but even they entertained the hope that one or more of these deliverances would come to pass. Late each afternoon they would gather, in a dugout by the central command post, with de Castries’s principal subordinates Colonel Langlais and Lieutenant Colonel Bigeard summing up the situation. (All three men had won promotion on April 16, with de Castries now brigadier general.) Some days earlier Langlais had estimated effective combat strength of the garrison to be 2,400 men, down from 11,000 men available at the start of the battle plus four battalions parachuted in after it began. Someone asked how this could be: There had not been 12,000 dead or wounded. Langlais replied that he counted only soldiers, not shadows. Many hundreds of men had stopped fighting and indeed at night went to pillage the air-dropped supplies. Should there be a punitive expedition against these slackers, the so-called Rats of Nam Youm? No, Langlais had determined. There were already so many dead, so many wounded, what good would it accomplish? The matter could be pursued later, if anyone made it out.4

  Outside the valley, meanwhile, French morale was low and going lower. In Saigon and Hanoi, Generals Navarre and Cogny, their mutual animosity stronger than ever, understood what the commanders in the fortress did not yet (happily for them) fully grasp: that there were hardly any additional resources available to commit to the battle.5 Only one strong airborne battalion, the First Colonial, remained in reserve, and the nonairborne mobile troops were already too committed to ongoing ground operations in the Red River Delta and the Central Highlands to create diversions that would draw Giap’s units away from Dien Bien Phu. Was there no way, then, to change the strategic climate in France’s favor? The prospect of massive American aerial intervention a fading hope, there remained but one possibility. In order to create a threat to the rear of Viet Minh positions around Dien Bien Phu, Navarre and Cogny considered an approach from Laos. Code-named Operation Condor, the plan appeared promising on paper yet faced two major problems. First, transporting and supplying the eight battalions called for in the plan would mean reducing by as much as a third the number of aircraft available to Dien Bien Phu—this at a time when the garrison needed all the supplies and reinforcements it could possibly get. Second, the plan depended on the use of Laotian troops, who were largely untested in battle and who—it was widely assumed—were too “soft” and too “peace-loving” to be a match for the battle-hardened and resourceful Viet Minh. Nevertheless, a limited version of Condor was launched, though neither its commanders nor Navarre nor Cogny entertained much hope it would arrive in Tonkin in time to do much good.6

  LOUDSPEAKERS URGE FRENCH UNION FORCES AT DIEN BIEN PHU TO GIVE UP DURING THE CLIMACTIC FINAL DAYS OF THE BATTLE: “SURRENDER. YOU WILL BE TREATED WELL. SHOW FLAGS AND COME OUT IN GOOD ORDER. THOSE WITH RIFLES, POINT THE BARREL TOWARD THE GROUND.” (photo credit 21.1)

  II

  ON THIS DAY, THOUGH, APRIL 27, THE COMMAND AT DIEN BIEN PHU had more pressing concerns than whether help might arrive from the west. Foremost among these was the deepening supply problem. It wasn’t merely that some planes were forced to turn back on account of the weather; it was that some pilots had stopped flying, fed up with having to dip lower and lower through the flak to compensate for the shrunken drop zones. On the night of April 23–24, one of the mostly American-piloted C-119 “Flying Boxcars” had been hit by two 37mm shells from a Soviet antiaircraft gun. The pilot made it back to base, but the next day the American pilots, who were being paid roughly $2,000 a month for the job, announced they would no longer make the run to Dien Bien Phu; the risks were simply too great, and the French fighter pilots whose job was flak suppression were not doing a good enough job. It took two days for General Cogny to win General Navarre’s approval to have French pilots fly the Boxcars, and it remained to be seen if these men would be up to the task.

  Meanwhile, the enemy drew ever closer. Two weeks earlier Vo Nguyen Giap had abandoned mass assaults in favor of grignotage, or “nibbling away” of the French positions, in a replay of the trench warfare tactics of the Ypres salient in World War I. Hundreds of sappers were deployed to push assault trenches ever closer to the fortifications, a practice, Giap told associates, that would allow the Viet Minh “completely to intercept reinforcements and supplies.” Lead elements would dig a deep hole at the bottom of the trench and pass the dirt to the rear, where it would be immediately put in sandbags, while other workers brought forward logs and wooden beams to provide the diggers with overhead cover. It was a simple, beautifully efficient system. On most nights the defenders of Eliane could hear the clinking of picks and shovels almost under their feet, sometimes with their naked ears and sometimes using crude geophones made of a combination of wine canteens and medical stethoscopes. This too was reminiscent of Passchendaele forty years earlier, when German troops heard miners from Wales digging beneath them on Messines Ridge, in preparation for blasting them out.7

  Why did Giap shift tactics? With the French seemingly on the ropes in the second week of April, why did he not seek a swift and conclusive victory, a coup de grâce? Mostly because neither he nor his subordinate commanders could accept the casualty rates the French had been inflicting on them in the first month of the fighting. They needed a respite. Of the total number of dead and wounded that the Viet Minh suffered during the battle for Dien Bien Phu, close to half had been suffered already by April 5. Roughly four thousand of these were fatalities. Many of the losses occurred during intense fighting on strongpoints Dominique, Eliane, and Huguette, but French aerial attacks also could have devastating effect. C-47 transports were equipped with depth-charge racks to allow napalm drums to be unloaded swiftly. These were fused to explode twenty yards above the ground. Larger C-119s swept low, then pulled up abruptly while napalm cans slid out. The actual damage done by these attacks was often marginal, especially when poor weather and antiaircraft fire made accurate targeting impossible, but the mere anticipation that such a weapon could fall from the sky was acutely unnerving to defenders.

  By mid-April, various reports indicated growing despondency among Viet Minh troops. Fiery speeches by political commissars about sacrifice, duty, and the need to stamp out Franco-American imperialism were duly given, but these worked best on new recruits anticipating quick success; they rang hollow to weary veterans of the frontal attacks who had witnessed comrades being slaughtered all around them and who themselves might have sustained wounds. French radio intelligence picked up agitated dispatches from lower-unit commanders reporting that some units were refusing orders, and a Viet Minh deserter told the French on April 20 that new recruits were despondent about the difficulties of the struggle. The commissars had to press all the harder, especially at recovery stations where soldiers were convalescing, insisting that the fight must go on as long as necessary, regardless of losses.8

  Many of the new recruits had walked to Dien Bien Phu, often in groups of about a hundred, usually for long distances through difficult terrain, only to find conditions worse after they arrived. Though the People’s Army had the luxury of rotating units between the trenches and rest areas in the surrounding jungle, this brought only limited relief. Even in the rear areas, men generally slept only on bamboo mats or banana leaves on plastic mats. Few had mosquito nets, and malaria was endemic. Quinine to treat the illness was in short supply, so much so that soldiers would have to pass around a cup of water containing one dissolved tablet, take a sip, and send it on. When the rains started for real about April 25, the conditions deteriorated, and not only for those in the trenches. Sickness increased, and the situation for the wounded, deplorable to begin with, deteriorated further. Gangrene cases proliferated. Ton That Tung remained the only real surgeon on his side, and along with his six assistants he waged a hopeless struggle to treat the wounded, lacking modern drugs and instruments and sometimes forced to operate while standing knee-deep in water. As before, head injuries were a particular problem, and Tung taught the assistants his method of removing foreign bodies by suction a
nd then closing the skull. With no electrocoagulators at their disposal, the team resorted to touching the blood vessels with white-hot platinum wire.9

  Referring to this very day, April 27, Ton That Tung would later hint at the extreme hardships he and his staff faced:

  0:45 A.M. Somebody rings me up for the next operations. While waiting for the arrival of the wounded, I sit alone in front of the operating room, a straw hut lit by the vacillating light of a kerosene lamp. The song of crickets is drowned in the gurgle of the brooks. Our artillery thunders at regular intervals as though to mark time. The sudden change in the weather makes me feel bad. I recall president Ho’s advice: “You must overcome all difficulties.” So many difficulties have cropped up. Dien Bien Phu, an idea, a place for testing people’s endurance.10

  A Viet Minh nurse, Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan, later commented on the brutal conditions:

  It was raining very hard and there was a lot of standing water, so there were places cut to allow water to run off, because the bunkers for the wounded had to be kept dry. So the wounded had platforms to lie on. But you had to go out to check the wounded, especially the ones with head wounds, wounds to the skull and brain, and if we discovered that they had died we had to carry out the policy for handling the dead. We had to bind their hands and feet, so that the mortuary people could handle them properly. And when we found someone who had died, we had to follow the procedures to protect and guard them. This was because we also had civilian coolies moving by, and maybe the coolies needed a shirt or a pair of pants, so they would strip clothing from the dead. The guy I replaced had put them outside and had not guarded them properly, and that is why he was disciplined. So I was very frightened of this job. The work was tense and nerve-wracking, and you had all these kinds of things to worry about.11

  The Politburo of the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP) was concerned enough about flagging morale to discuss the matter in a meeting on April 19. Agreement was reached on the need to work harder to buck up soldiers’ confidence and to press on for final victory in the battle as soon as possible. Political commissars at Dien Bien Phu vowed to do better, acknowledging “erroneous tendencies” that affected the fulfillment of vital tasks. On April 27, they launched a “campaign for moral mobilization and ‘rectification’ of Rightist tendencies.” Giap’s statement that day urged marksmen and machine gunners to kill the enemy one by one—“for each bullet fired, an enemy killed”—and promised decorations for the most successful.12

  In his memoirs of the battle, Giap wrote with candor of this period in late April:

  The principal trait of that phase of the battle had been the violent character of the combat.… [T]he battle having lasted a very long time, more troops—who had to fight without interruption—became fatigued, worn and subject to great nervous tension.… It was precisely at these moments when rightist tendencies appeared among our cadres and soldiers—in the fear of suffering many casualties, [in giving way to] fatigue, in subjectivity, in overestimation of the enemy.… These rightist tendencies remained serious, and partly limited the scope of our victories.13

  “Rightist tendencies” was political shorthand for lack of commitment, doubt, and combat fatigue. Officers, both junior and senior, were themselves not immune to these maladies as they contemplated the prospect of continued fighting and still more casualties among their men. One of them, a twenty-five-year-old company chief of peasant stock and bearing the initials N.T., years later recalled his feeling upon seeing his entire unit decimated. “You are going to die,” he had told himself in the midst of the action, “there is nothing more to think about.” Though shot in the head, he survived, and he soon rose in rank over the dead bodies of his immediate superiors. Ordered by commanders to launch an offensive against one of the strongpoints, he asked to postpone the attack for a few days because of the exhaustion of his men, who had spent nearly a week digging trenches. “Our men are already overly tired,” he said. “We will certainly win the battle if the attack occurs only one day later.” His plea was rejected. Only three of his seventy-one men survived the engagement. N.T. vowed quietly to himself that he would never again comply with that kind of order, and in later years he would gain the reputation among superiors as being “unruly” for his determination to minimize casualties among his troops.14

  Senior commanders also had to contend with the possibility that a French force would arrive from Laos to relieve the garrison (they had become aware of Condor), and—more seriously—the possibility that the United States would intervene with massive airpower. Such a bombardment, they knew, would catch tens of thousands of Viet Minh infantrymen in the open and would surely also destroy the army’s forward supply depots at Tuan Giao. Even if none of this happened, even if everything went according to plan, victory at Dien Bien Phu might turn out to be a defeat if Navarre used this time—when much of the Viet Minh troop strength was concentrated here, in the remote northwest—to organize his defenses in the vital Red River Delta. The uncomfortable fact for Giap was that whereas Dien Bien Phu absorbed perhaps 5 percent of the French battle force in Indochina, it tied down as much as 50 percent of Viet Minh forces and the vast bulk of the military aid from China.

  These were arguments for launching the third phase of the battle as soon as possible, and Giap took comfort from the fact that his logistical preparations for the final phase were now almost complete. Before dawn that morning, April 27, scores of Viet Minh trucks, their drivers taking advantage of the miserable weather and low cloud cover, had arrived near the battle zone, laden with ammunition. Similar-size deliveries had occurred in the days before that, some containing also 75mm recoilless guns and fuel.15

  But timing was key. The Geneva Conference was under way, and within a week or two, it would turn its attention to Indochina. If Giap’s forces could score an all-out victory at Dien Bien Phu prior to then, it would be a giant boost to Viet Minh negotiators. By the same token, to fail before the eyes of the world by launching the assault prematurely would have potentially disastrous consequences at Geneva. Giap knew he had to choose his moment carefully.

  III

  JUST HOW THE DRV LEADERSHIP FELT ABOUT GENEVA, AND ABOUT negotiations more broadly, is not easy to discern from the record, but it’s clear that top officials retained their earlier skepticism and uncertainty. They were poised, after all, to score a smashing victory at Dien Bien Phu, an outcome certain to undermine drastically the French public’s willingness to continue the war. In the Red River Delta, their forces now effectively controlled the central portion of the Hanoi-Haiphong road, while in the country as a whole perhaps 80 percent of the population lived in Viet Minh–held areas. Why risk negotiations in such a situation? In particular, why risk multilateral talks of the type Viet Minh diplomats had never taken part in before?

  But in Ho Chi Minh’s mind there were also compelling reasons to give diplomacy a serious try, while remaining vigilant as always in pressing the military advantage. For one thing, the morale problem at Dien Bien Phu hinted at an important and growing problem for a revolutionary war now in its eighth year: The Vietnamese people, including those in liberated areas, were tired, were longing for a respite from the fighting, were showing signs of losing their fervor for the cause. They wanted an end to the severe economic dislocation necessitated by the demands of war, and they wanted better living standards. The balance of forces, however, still suggested the struggle could go on for a very long time. For vulnerable though the French were in large parts of Indochina, they retained the edge in firepower and had full command of the air. In Saigon and much of the Mekong Delta in the south, their position was strong and would likely remain so for a long time to come. There remained, moreover, the threat of American military intervention, a threat likely to increase as time went by and an outcome to be avoided if at all possible: Defeating France and her Vietnamese collaborators was difficult enough without also adding the mighty United States into the mix. “Our main enemy,” wrote party theoretician Truong Chinh of the internal d
eliberations that spring, was not France but “the U.S. empire.” As the French “grew weaker by the day,” the Americans “intervened more actively in Indochina by the day.”16

  Keeping the United States out of Vietnam meant cultivating support for the DRV internationally, and that too argued for being open to diplomacy. Alienating world opinion by forswearing the chance for peace would be unwise. “We have always followed the situation in the world” and “coordinated with the wishes for peace of the people of the world,” one official said. A negotiated agreement would therefore be a “victory” as it met “the pressing needs of the world’s peace lovers.” In the view of deputy prime minister and foreign minister Pham Van Dong, the DRV needed “the sympathy and the support of all peoples” to contain its enemies and protect its sovereignty.”17

  Party officials were less keen to talk about yet another possible consequence of a prolongation of the fighting, namely that the struggle would become increasingly fratricidal over time. Already now, Vietnamese were killing other Vietnamese in larger numbers. Viet Minh strategists remained confident they had the vast majority of people on their side, and they were as contemptuous as always of what party documents habitually referred to as the “puppet army” created by the French, but in quiet moments they expressed concern about the changing nature of the war. The revolutionary cause they championed was based on the principles of national unity and derived its legitimacy from its status as the only real representative of the populace. In the spring of 1954, the revolution was not yet seriously threatened, but how would things look in six months or a year, or in two years?