French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The rapid fall of Beatrice was put down to one of those unfortunate “accidents of war” that can make the difference between victory or defeat— the artillery shells that had taken out the command posts, thus making it impossible for the defense to coordinate covering artillery fire. The same “accident” occurred on the following night to a battalion of Algerians on Gabrielle.2 But some accidents are preventable. What these accidents revealed was that, in underestimating the Viet Minh, the French had failed to implement some basic precautions. The construction of defenses had been left up to the individual commanders, many of whom looked forward to mobile action and regarded time spent in constructing deep defenses as an admission of fear.3 Their bunkers were not strong enough to stand up to Viet Minh artillery fire, or for that matter to the monsoons, nor had any effort been made to camouflage them, all of which was to leave the French garrison very vulnerable. There opening attacks had also revealed the audacity of the direct-fire techniques used by the Viet Minh, firing “down the tube” from well-camouflaged positions directly at the French as they had done at Dong Khe in 1950, rather than risk indirect fire at which they were less experienced.

  The fall of Béatrice left Gabrielle dangerously exposed to a Viet Minh assault, which opened at five o'clock on the evening of March 14. The Algerians who held Gabrielle fought tenaciously for most of the night, lasting longer, as Bernard Fall notes, than had the Legion on Béatrice.4 However, in the early morning hours Viet Minh artillery fire managed to silence most of the garrison's guns and mortars and, as on Beatrice, a shell took out the command bunker, leaving the defenders leaderless. A French attack toward Gabrielle spearheaded by a company of the 1er BEP enjoyed some success, but was compromised when French-led Vietnamese paratroops were pinned down by a Viet Minh artillery barrage. By eight o'clock on the morning of March 15 the garrison of Gabrielle began to fall back toward the center of the French camp. On Anne-Marie, the third outlying defensive position to the north, T'ai tribesmen began to disappear through the wire into the jungle.

  The fall of these three outlying positions not only seriously compromised the defense of Dien Bien Phu, it also revealed that the garrison commander, Colonel Christian de Castries, was simply the wrong man for the job. A cavalryman and protégé of de Lattre with an impressive combat record, the tall, aristocratic de Castries had made his reputation conducting slashing light-armor operations. His command style was that of open warfare, Napoleonic coup d'oeil, the ability to take the rapid decisions that throw the enemy into disarray at the critical moment. He possessed the cavalryman's gambler mentality, prepared to risk all on a single throw of the dice. For these reasons, the high command saw him as the ideal commander for Dien Bien Phu, whose purpose in their eyes was to serve as a base for French mobile operations. Giap had other ideas, however, and transformed the French-held valley into a besieged camp. Therefore, in retrospect, the command of Dien Bien Phu should have fallen to a man more skilled in the techniques of siege warfare, one who made careful calculations, worked out his options in advance and husbanded his resources—above all, one able to withstand prolonged pressure without being overwhelmed with the prospect of defeat. In the end, de Castries’ passivity, his isolation in his bunker where he continued to dine off the family silver laid out upon an immaculate white tablecloth, caused a revolt among his senior paratroop colonels, who effectively took over the direction of operations.

  THE FIRST THREE DAYS of battle revealed the glaring inefficiency of de Castries’ preparations, and his lack of command decision at critical moments. A counterattack to retake Béatrice was quickly organized but just as quickly turned back with withering fire. As a second counterattack was forming, de Castries accepted the Viet Minh offer of a temporary truce to collect the wounded, an uncharacteristically gallant gesture on Giap's part that can be explained as a device to give the Viet Minh the time required to recuperate their strength at this critical point. An assault to retake Gabrielle was a poorly planned and undermanned affair, without clear orders and objectives. Thus the French position at Dien Bien Phu began to unravel. The Viet Minh now had breached the defenses and commanded ground overlooking the airstrip. Morale in the French camp hit rock bottom. The French artillery commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Piroth, committed suicide. Airplanes burst into flames on the airstrip. The battle was lost after only three days. Everyone expected the human-wave offensive that would submerge the garrison at almost any hour.

  But it did not come. For if the French were suffering, Giap too had his problems—high losses and low ammunition foremost among them. Therefore, the battle eased off for almost two weeks. This allowed French morale to improve somewhat, especially when the 1er BEP annihilated two companies of Viet Minh who held the road between the main center and Isabelle, to register the first French victory of the battle. The price was high, however. This action alone cost the French 151 dead and 72 wounded and revealed that they could not continue to pay the high price of keeping open the road to Isabelle indefinitely. Furthermore, units that had faltered in the first days, usually Indochinese troops, were disarmed and used as coolies. Some preferred to take up residence in caves dug into the side of Dominique along the river, where they were soon joined by other deserters, especially from North African units. By the end of the battle in May, an estimated three thousand to four thousand deserters were holed up in the caves along the Nam Yum. How many of these deserters were legionnaires is not clear. For instance, the 13e DBLE listed seventy-seven deserters at Dien Bien Phu.5 The “Rats of Nam Yum” became a real nuisance to the garrison, refusing to fight but at the same time scurrying out of their burrows at night to collect parachute-dropped supplies and thus denying them to the garrison. The French command debated whether or not to clean them out, but decided that they had enough on their hands with the Viet Minh.

  As Giap had calculated, the battle of Dien Bien Phu ultimately turned into a logistical struggle. The French had bet on being able to keep their airstrip open and to interdict the Viet Minh supply routes through bombing. They lost that bet virtually from the first day. The airstrip closed by shelling, they were forced to parachute supplies and reinforcements. An inefficient method of revictualing at the best of times, the drops were made even more so by the intensity and accuracy of Viet Minh antiaircraft fire, which obliged the French to parachute from 8,500 feet into an ever-shrinking perimeter. U.S. Army logistics experts estimated that the garrison at Dien Bien Phu required at least 200 tons of supplies a day to maintain combat effectiveness. While the U.S. Army estimates are perhaps on the heavy side, it was reckoned that the French dropped no more than 120 tons a day between March 13 and May 7, 1954, about 100 tons of which the garrison was able to collect. The rest went to the Viet Minh or the Rats of Nam Yum. At the same time, Giap was able to supply a combat force of around fifty thousand troops and another forty thousand to fifty thousand logistical troops along well-camouflaged routes used by trucks and coolies, which the French were never able to sever.6

  As Giap built up his munitions and filled out his units with reinforcements, his coolies pushed out trenches nearer the French positions. On March 30, Giap's troops leapt out of their approach trenches at French positions on Eliane and Dominique, cutting through the wire so quickly that French defensive fires fell behind them. A Legion mortar company fought to the last man, as did a company of Vietnamese paratroopers. But most of the Algerians, who made up the bulk of the garrisons, broke and made for the caves on the Nam Yum. Counterattacks by Legion paratroopers helped to retake Dominique and part of Eliane. The fighting continued until April 6, when Giap called a halt. His casualties had been devastating, and it became obvious to him that he had to adopt a more progressive, less wasteful strategy. He called in units operating in other areas, and even sent for twenty-five thousand young recruits whose training had yet to be completed. But the French, too, were suffering, with Legion battalions down to three hundred men each and the artillery counting enough munitions for one more night of battle.


  Giap now abandoned human-wave assaults in favor of “siege by infiltration,” the pushing forward of webs of trenches from all directions until they ensnared and effectively isolated a French strongpoint from support. This began a period of trench taking, World War I without the gas. The 2e BEP dropped into Dien Bien Phu on April 9, and the next day were thrown into an assault on a portion of Eliane called Eliane 1, which changed hands several times before the paratroops finally secured it. The only reason that Giap did not finish off the French was that his army, too, was suffering from what he called “right-wing tendencies”—i.e., low morale caused by the estimated 6,600 killed and twelve thousand wounded, and second thoughts about the desirability of sacrificing one's life for the Revolution. To get his weary troops in shape for the final push, Giap organized lectures on agrarian reform, which seemed to produce the desired result. Giap concentrated fifteen thousand men in thirty battalions and began to entwine Huguette in a web of approach trenches.

  Huguette 1 and the legionnaires who held it were submerged on the night of April 22–23. De Castries, promoted to brigadier general, made the controversial decision to retake it over the objections of two of his senior colonels. The attack, led by the 2e BEP, jumped off at two o'clock on the afternoon of April 23 behind a heavy French artillery barrage. But as the legionnaires moved over the blistering metal plates of the now-disused airstrip in small commando groups, they came under intense Viet Minh artillery and machine-gun fire. Unfortunately, their cries for help went unheeded by the battalion commander who, buried deep in his bunker, did not have his radio tuned to the proper frequency. The attack was called off, but not before the 2e BEP took 150 casualties. The battalion commander was relieved of command, and the remnants of the two BEPs merged into a bataillon de marche, BEP.

  By the end of April, the Viet Minh occupied the airstrip. Of the sixteen thousand men who had been thrown into the battle since March 13, the French were down to three thousand combatants in the central position, and a further 1,200 on Isabelle, which had yet to be seriously threatened. Indeed, another of de Castries’ controversial decisions was to leave the Isabelle garrison, and especially its battalion of legionnaires, on the margins of the battle when they could have been of far more use defending the main position. Apparently he reasoned that the troops on Isabelle would have to leave their two howitzer batteries behind in a withdrawal, and therefore forfeit artillery support that he felt he could not do without.7 One thousand men lay wounded in the underground hospital. Moreover, the monsoon had begun to fall from March 30, collapsing the already fragile bunkers and turning the trenches into troughs. Indeed, the Viet Minh artillerymen now slammed the French garrison with 105 shells captured from French parachute drops, while in some of the final attacks the Viet Minh troops assaulted the French wire while dressed in camouflaged para-troop uniforms and steel helmets provided courtesy of French air drops.

  Despite the obviously deteriorating situation, or perhaps because of it, the Legion behaved like a drunk man with a credit card, calling for volunteers in units already stretched to the breaking point to be parachuted into a battle that was already lost, as if some morbid fascination with reediting Camerone on a grand scale had taken hold of their imaginations. During night guard, Janos Kemencei, who had been wounded and captured at Cao Bang and subsequently released as a “humanitarian gesture,” now at Dien Bien Phu, found that men were continually floating out of the dark sky.8 The 1st battalion of the 3e étranger found 120 volunteers for Dien Bien Phu.9 The 5e étranger, in a report that complained bitterly that it barely had enough troops to put its groupe mobile into action, announced proudly that 207 officers and NCOs had volunteered to be parachuted into Dien Bien Phu.10 This offered proof of high morale rather than sensible thinking. This was the conclusion of the 13e DBLE, which had to prevent men from volunteering for Dien Bien Phu to keep up unit strength.11

  On May 4, the Legion paras on Huguette were finally submerged by the 308th “Iron Division.” On the morning of May 7, all the points on Eliane fell into Viet Minh hands. Giap took advantage of his momentum to overrun the rest of the French positions. At five-forty that afternoon, de Castries, impeccably dressed in a clean uniform and wearing his red spahis cap, and his staff were captured in his command bunker. At six o'clock, Janos Kemencei's 1er BEP, or what was left of it, was approached by a line of pajama-clad Viet Minh, young, thin, trembling, who ordered them out of their trenches. He was tired, discouraged and humiliated, especially when he saw the POW column joined by hundreds of men who obviously had not suffered too greatly from the siege. His paratroopers were in rags, many had no boots and were wounded. Where had all these men been when the call had gone out to organize counterattacks? Clearly, the fighting at Dien Bien Phu had been done by a handful of men, paratroopers and legionnaires among them. That night, Isabelle exploded into geysers of mud as Viet Minh artillery pounded it into oblivion before swarming over what remained. The French role in Indochina had effectively ended.

  Many of the survivors of the battle would not survive the war, however, for the death march that the Viet Minh now imposed upon them killed far more of the French troops than the entire battle ever had. French and Legion POWs, roughly 60 percent of whom perished in captivity, suffered more than Senegalese and North Africans, but less than captured Vietnamese, 90 percent of whom failed to return. Why this was true is not entirely clear. Many of the losses occurred because many began their captivity wounded and in a state of advanced exhaustion, so that legionnaires frequently collapsed by the wayside during the forty-day, six-hundred-kilometer march to the camps. Legionnaires also appear to have been more susceptible to malaria and amebiasis than other troops. However, it also appears that they were less willing to help each other than were French and North African troops.12

  How does one evaluate the performance of the Legion in Indochina? Certainly, most commentators consider the legionnaires and paratroopers to have been the most solid in the French camp.13 This is no doubt correct. In its own estimation, the 2e BEP was “worth its weight in gold.”14 The strength of the Legion lay in the obvious courage of its troops, as demonstrated at Dien Bien Phu, and the quality of its best officers. That the Legion, indeed any French troops, were able to maintain morale at all in the atmosphere of indifference, even outright hostility, of France to the war, a hostility that translated into poor armaments and even sabotaged equipment, is in itself a tribute to a strong esprit de corps: “All [the officers] feel painfully the heavy sacrifices undergone for such a result,” the 13e DBLE reported in the aftermath of the battle, “and note with bitterness the guilty indifference exhibited by our country toward the Expeditionary Corps. This is all the more evident as some have tried to blame the incompetence and the weaknesses of the soldiers for the unfortunate evolution of the Indochinese battles.”15 Many must have reasoned out this situation like Lieutenant Basset of the 2e étranger, who felt by 1952 that

  after all, I am beginning not to care, I fight the war like a game. I like combat, the risk, like others enjoy bowls or fishing. I fight for myself, for my legionnaires, for the Legion— France??? Yes, I believed when I was younger, but the mentality of most of the French is so rotten that I cannot pretend to fight for them.16

  This wartime environment had special consequences for the Legion. In part, the impression of Legion solidity was a relative one, the result of the fact that so many other units, especially the imperial troops, did not perform well. The Legion also produced what one might term a pyramid performance, with the BEPs at the top, the GMs and the REC in the middle, and the infantry, especially the static units, occupying the base. At Dien Bien Phu, the Legion fought with great courage and tenacity. Its two lapses were the failure to retake Huguette 1 on April 23, for which the battalion commander was relieved, and the accusation that legionnaires on Isabelle were largely idle spectators to the battle. Neither accusation appears to be entirely justified. Huguette 1 was strongly held and the failure to seize it was no disgrace, even if the battalion comma
nder was asleep at the switch. And while it is certainly possible that the garrison at Isabelle could have been employed more usefully in the main position, they vigorously defended their redoubt against Viet Minh encroachment.

  So, while it was a defeat for France, Dien Bien Phu was paradoxically a sort of victory for the Legion. But in a way the Legion was in its element there, engaged in a head-butting contest against Viet Minh units that were rushing it head on. The heroic resistance at Dien Bien Phu became a necessary myth for the army generally as well as for the Legion, for it disguised some serious professional shortcomings, the inability, or unwillingness, to construct viable defense works among them. In more open warfare, the criticism was that the Legion had lost much of its flexibility and ability to maneuver. It also suffered from a lack of technical specialists. Its high casualty rate, which the Legion places at 10,483 officers and men,17 higher than for any other period including that of the two world wars, can be attributed in large part to the fact that the Legion maintained an average of twenty thousand men in Indochina, who fought intensively over eight years. However, the reports reveal that inadequate training and inexperienced leadership also played a part in this high casualty figure.