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

by Fredrik Logevall

  Giap’s more immediate concern was the disposition of hundreds of enemy wounded at Dien Bien Phu, and thousands of enemy prisoners. With the fighting over, it was possible, for the first time since the battle began, for him to determine the real strength of the garrison. The total was astonishingly large: When the shooting stopped on May 7, more than ten thousand French Union service personnel of all nationalities, including the lightly wounded, emerged into the open.47 The discrepancy between that figure and the number of fighting troops at General de Castries’s disposal in the final weeks can be explained in part by the sizable number of noncombatant personnel at headquarters and elsewhere. But by far the largest addition to the sum was supplied by the Rats of Nam Youm, the slackers who early on had decided to sit out the battle in abandoned dugouts and trenches along the banks of the river. Their number, at the end, approached four thousand.

  In short order, the prisoners were put on the road, the better to keep them under control and to prevent any French rescue attempt. Some were destined for camps along the lower Song River in Thanh Hoa province, 300 miles to the southeast by road; the majority was marched in a northeasterly direction, to Bac Kan province in the Viet Bac, upward of 450 miles away. The seriously wounded remained behind, along with some medical staff and engineers. The Viet Minh, lacking the medical or transport facilities to care adequately for the gravely ill either on the spot or their own rear areas, agreed, with a curiously old-fashioned conventionality that they on occasion exhibited, that about nine hundred of the wounded should be evacuated by air from the basin to French hospitals. Some wounded started out on the march but were returned to the valley when it became clear that they were not remotely up to the ordeal of walking even a few hours through the jungle. Also sent back: a group of mostly North African POWs, needed for reconstructed scenes of “the fall of Dien Bien Phu” staged for the film cameras.48

  The ordeal of the marchers, who numbered some nine thousand, has been told before.49 A harrowing story it is. As a group, they were in poor physical condition even before they set out from the valley floor, and now they would be compelled to cover some twelve miles per day for forty days over difficult terrain and during the rainy season. The daily ration of 800 grams of rice, supplemented by the occasional banana or handful of peanuts, provided insufficient nourishment, and the prisoners soon shed whatever body fat they had been able to retain during the siege. Their immune systems thus compromised, many proved unable to fight off infection and disease, and malaria, beriberi, and dysentery were endemic. Nor, in their weakened condition, could prisoners long help carry bamboo litters bearing ailing comrades; soon the seriously ill were simply left to suffer and die, all alone, with the jungle and its rats and ants closing in around them. The few doctors among the marchers were kept separated with the other officers and forbidden from giving even minimal care to the French wounded, forcing desperate men to resort to desperate actions—such as the soldier who cut off his own gangrenous arm with a pocket knife.

  Few of the grievously wounded survived more than a day or two, and even many of the technically fit succumbed before the end of the march. Those in their thirties and forties often held up better than those in their twenties. Senegalese and North Africans and Vietnamese had higher rates of survival than did French and Legion POWs, despite the fact that the Vietnamese—“traitors” for having fought on the side of the enemy—were singled out for tougher treatment. The predominantly central European background of the legionnaires, with their fair skin and hair, no doubt made them particularly ill equipped to deal with the harsh weather, and both they and the French troops also appear to have been more susceptible to disease than were the other groups. The individualistic, may-the-Devil-take-the-hindmost attitude of many in the Legion may also have made a difference, as they were sometimes unwilling to come to the aid of weaker comrades.50

  These personal tragedies may rightly be laid at the feet of the Viet Minh. Instances of outright wanton brutality or sadism on the part of the guards were by all accounts very few; severe beatings generally were administered only to escapees who were recaptured—and then often only if these were Vietnamese or recidivist escapees. Surviving prisoners also recalled occasional acts of kindness by their captors, who themselves often had to get by on very meager rations. Overall, though, the Viet Minh guards and political officers (can bo) showed scant concern for the survival of the captives and for abiding by the Geneva Conventions, even as more and more of the POWs succumbed to the brutal conditions. In response, it could be said that the marchers had it coming to them, in view of the suffering the French had inflicted on Vietnamese over these past decades; this does not negate the point that the Viet Minh, from start to finish, showed callous disregard for the prisoners, only a minority of whom were French nationals. The can bo concerned themselves mostly with waging psychological warfare through evening lectures and self-criticism sessions in which the captives were told they were “war criminals” who must confess the error of their ways. The can bo also sought to turn prisoners against one another by appealing to racial differences and expounding on the evils of imperialism. Why, the North Africans were asked, did you come to fight in Vietnam when your own countries are still under colonial control?51

  Those who survived to reach the camps (the first of which had been set up in late 1950, following the Viet Minh victory on the RC4) found conditions hardly better there. The relentless psychological conditioning continued, some of it now carried out by former French Union prisoners who had turned—“crossovers,” they were called—and been trained by the Viet Minh and Chinese in the use of Communist propaganda techniques. Malaria remained endemic, and the death rate from waterborne intestinal diseases—only the officers’ camp was provided with pots to boil water—skyrocketed. (Camp 70, for example, counted 70 deaths out of 120 in July–August 1954, many from amoebic dysentery.) Physical labor was compulsory, and those too ill or too weak to work received no rations.52

  There is no way to know with accuracy how many prisoners died in the months following their march out of the valley, but certainly the period of captivity killed far more of the garrison than had the entire battle. One careful estimate, by a representative on the International Control Commission in March 1955, had the number of prisoners from the Dien Bien Phu garrison handed back by the Viet Minh at the time of the POW exchange (which began on August 18, 1954) at 3,900, or some 43 percent of those who began the trek. Not all the remainder died, certainly—some managed to disappear in the jungle, and as many as a thousand legionnaires may have been directly repatriated to Communist countries of origin. Nevertheless, the picture that emerges is extremely grim. Add in the roughly 3,500 dead or missing in action from the battle itself, and one is left with the following dark interpretation: Of the approximately 15,000 men who served in French uniform in the valley of the Nam Youm, fewer than half ever went home, wounded or unwounded. Historian Martin Windrow puts the death ratio at 60 percent, a statistic, he rightly notes, that rivals the very worst battles of the twentieth century.53

  FRENCH UNION POWS ARRIVE IN HANOI AFTER THEIR RELEASE, AUGUST 25, 1954. (photo credit 21.2)

  The Viet Minh, of course, paid a heavy human price for their victory at Dien Bien Phu. Various casualty figures have been put forth over the years, including by a Franco-Vietnamese team that in 1955 began an aborted project to recover bodies for an ossuary; consensus remains elusive, but a safe estimate is that the Viet Minh suffered on the order of 10,000 deaths, from start to finish, and at least 15,000 wounded. According to internal sources uncovered by historian Christopher Goscha, Giap’s troops experienced an astonishing killed-in-action rate of 32 percent during the first-wave attack in March—that is to say, three out of ten Vietnamese men who went over the top in the initial assault did not return. In the subsequent waves the death rate dropped, but it never went below 20 percent. Among the wounded, these documents show, almost a quarter (23.7 percent) suffered injuries to the head or neck. Many, it goes without saying, would
never recover, even if they lived.54

  VIII

  IT REMAINS TO BE ASKED IF IT COULD HAVE TURNED OUT DIFFERENTLY. Might the battle of Dien Bien Phu, if the French command had conducted it another way, have yielded a different result? Could it have ended in a victory for French Union forces instead of a defeat, thereby perhaps changing the whole complexion of the war?

  In strategic terms, Navarre’s original decision to make a stand at Dien Bien Phu had more to recommend it than conventional historical wisdom has suggested. He was not wrong to want to create an initiative outside the delta, or to see the valley as the best available place to bar Giap’s path to Luang Prabang, the royal capital of Laos, which France was committed to defending. Nor was it necessarily unreasonable to see in Operation Castor an opportunity to repeat the success of Na San the previous year, but on a greater scale: that is, Navarre believed he could create at Dien Bien Phu a focus of action that would draw into play, on terms favorable to him, the bulk of the enemy’s mobile force. And it made sense to try to deny the enemy the lucrative opium harvest of the area. The counterargument would be that Navarre would have been better off sacrificing northern Laos in order to husband his resources in the more vital Red River Delta and force Giap to attack him there, and that he should have anticipated much more readily than he did the logistical problems that ensued and that ultimately would be the garrison’s undoing. Fair points both. Then again, had General Giap followed the original plan and launched the attack on January 25—which, as we have seen, he came very close to doing—his troops might have suffered a colossal defeat. Navarre’s conception would have been fully vindicated. Castor would have gone down in history as a military masterstroke, its architect a strategist of the first order. Many of the same military experts—not least, it should be said, American ones—who after May 7 savaged Navarre’s decision to establish a garrison that could be supplied and reinforced only by air had earlier lauded his choice and predicted it would result in a smashing victory.

  Of course, Giap did not attack on that final Monday in January. He waited seven more weeks, until twilight on March 13. By then, it had long since become clear to Navarre, to Cogny, and to de Castries that their hopes of operating beyond the valley, indeed beyond the range of their own artillery, were in vain. By then, they grasped that the Viet Minh had defied the forecasts and assembled an enormous stock of ordnance as well as superiority in numbers. A battle of position and attrition now seemed more or less inevitable, and the question is whether the French commanders could have done more in tactical terms to prepare for the encounter. The answer must be yes, even if some things were beyond their power to remedy—notably the inability of the French Air Force, stretched to the limit and lacking sufficient aircraft and crews, to provide adequate air cover. They might have, for one thing, used that limited airpower more effectively. They committed the common error of overestimating the strategic capabilities of airpower, dropping huge tonnages of bombs on Routes 41 and 13 to interdict Viet Minh supplies and having little to show for it. The Viet Minh proved too adept at getting the materials through. French planners would have been better off concentrating their bombing effort on the basin itself.55

  Inside the valley, the layout of the position left much to be desired. The network of defensive strongpoints was poorly conceived, with Isabelle too far away to really support the central position with artillery fire, and Gabrielle and Béatrice too weakly defended to play their assigned roles in defending the airstrip. At no time did Cogny order de Castries to test whether his reserve forces could reach these strongpoints at night and under fire. Probably none of them, and certainly not Isabelle, should have been occupied, for although they forced the Viet Minh to begin the assault farther from the airstrip, the battalions that ostensibly defended them would have been better used to launch counterattacks from the central position. Such counterattacks often showed good results when Bigeard and Langlais launched them and indeed were a major reason the garrison held out as long as it did. The U.S.-supplied Chaffee tanks proved crucial in these raids, and it seems undeniable that de Castries should have demanded, and received, another dozen tanks—or as many as could have been flown in and reassembled. But de Castries seems never to have grasped the importance of the counterattacks, both to retake hill positions once they had been lost and to get at the Viet Minh’s antiaircraft artillery, much of which was close to the airstrip and an ideal target for sallies from the main position. Though a courageous and intelligent commander, he was miscast for this role, being inadequately attuned to the particulars of trench warfare—and Dien Bien Phu was, in Bernard Fall’s words, “in many ways a piece of Argonne Forest or Verdun transported into a tropical setting.”56

  Even matters so basic as strengthening the gun pits and reinforcing the roofs of the essential service installations, including that of the hospital, would have made a big difference. Most of the bunkers were too weak to stand up to the Viet Minh artillery fire, or for that matter to the monsoons; nor was any effort made to camouflage them. The meager resources of the valley didn’t help in this regard—even wood, it will be recalled, was not readily available—but certainly de Castries and his engineering commander should have done much more than they did to prepare the position for the assault they knew was coming. As it was, the flimsy fortifications made the garrison much more vulnerable than it should have been.

  Finally, mention must be made of the personal schism between Henri Navarre and René Cogny, which grew deeper and wider as the spring progressed (and which, after the war, led the latter to file suit—unsuccessfully—against the former). By the end, the two men felt a profound and abiding mutual disdain and were barely speaking, a situation hardly conducive to nimble and imaginative decision making. Nor was Navarre willing to relieve Cogny of his command in favor of someone with whom he could work. Instead, in a stunning failure of leadership, he allowed the feud to fester, week after crucial week.

  How the battle would have run had some or all of these problems on the French side been rectified is of course impossible to know, but it’s not fanciful to imagine a different outcome. Giap scored a tremendous victory and showed tactical brilliance in his use of antiaircraft and artillery and his employment of World War I siege tactics and techniques. The sequence in which he attacked the three northern strongpoints—first Béatrice, then Gabrielle, then Anne-Marie, which the demoralized Tai abandoned without a fight after seeing at close hand the fall of the two stronger outposts—has been justly praised by military historians, and did much to shape the outcome of the battle. Nevertheless the French could have held Dien Bien Phu, if not indefinitely, then certainly through the rainy season and into the autumn. Even with the shortcomings and the mistakes on the French side, Giap was compelled to use the whole range of his resources, and his forces were severely bloodied by the end. He had his hands full throughout, even though the enemy had 3,000 to 4,000 “internal deserters” who decided to sit out the battle. (What if all these Rats of Nam Youm, or even half of them, had chosen instead to fight?) Had the fortress held out even just a few more days, Giap might have been compelled to order another pause—which in turn would have allowed the Condor column to arrive from Laos to bolster French defenses.

  To argue for this counterfactual is not to say that, as a result, the French could have won the war. For even if French Union forces had held the valley and brought about the destruction of Giap’s main force divisions, and even if that result had seriously undermined the morale of Viet Minh troops elsewhere in Indochina, the overall balance of strength would still have tilted against France. The extent of the pourrissement (deterioration) in the countryside rendered the reestablishment of French control an unlikely prospect at best, not merely in Tonkin but in large swaths of Annam and Cochin China as well. The VNA remained a weak military instrument, while on the home front in France, morale was sinking ever further, as more and more Frenchmen and -women concluded that the war no longer had any valid objective and as the French Army continued lo
sing officers at a frightful clip—an average of six hundred killed per year, the equivalent of a whole graduating class from the military academy at Saint-Cyr.

  None of which diminished the momentousness of the occasion when the small and intense French foreign minister, who had been at the center of Indochina policy for eight years, who was as closely associated with this war as anyone on his side, arose slowly from his seat in the Palais des Nations in Geneva on the afternoon of May 8, walked to the lectern, and acknowledged before the delegates and the world the fall of Dien Bien Phu.

  CHAPTER 22

  WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

  WHEN GEORGES BIDAULT STRODE TO THE PODIUM AT THE PALAIS des Nations that Saturday afternoon, May 8, 1954, the Geneva Conference was already approaching the end of its second week. The formal Indochina discussions would begin only now, with Bidault’s speech, but the behind-the-scenes jockeying on the war had been intense from the start, from the arrival of the first delegations on April 24–25. The Chinese, some two hundred strong and clad in blue high-neck suits, created a stir among the journalists who assembled at Cointrin airfield to greet prime minister and foreign minister Zhou Enlai’s plane on the twenty-fourth. This was, everyone knew, a kind of international coming-out for the Beijing government, and a horde of photographers clicked away furiously as the courtly and handsome Zhou, with his high forehead, wide mouth, and piercing black eyes, descended the stairway, flashed a smile, and made quickly for his waiting car.1