The first onslaught was on fort Béatrice to the north of the valley, guarded by one of the toughest Legionnaire brigades. For hours the Vietminh rained down shells on the blighted Legionnaires, who could only take shelter from the bombardment. The French artillery was shelled to pieces and their hand weapons were useless in such circumstances. After five hours of horrendous shelling there was a respite of perhaps a minute and then the Legionnaires heard the wails and screams of thousands of rampaging Vietminh soldiers racing out of the jungle towards their dugouts. The Legionnaires were waiting for them.
The Vietminh, dressed in their pyjama-style fatigues, flung themselves on the barbed wire surrounding the fort. Those who managed to survive the Legion’s withering automatic fire hurled grenades into the dugouts before scurrying away to safety, chased by a hail of bullets. Hundreds were killed in that first onslaught, scores left hanging lifeless across the barbed-wire fence.
As soon as the Vietminh had pulled back into the jungle, mortar shells began raining down on the Legionnaires as they went about tending their wounded, re-supplying their ammunition and checking their arms. For the following six hours the mortars and shells kept up a non-stop bombardment of Béatrice, destroying most of the defences around the fort. Shortly after midnight the guns fell silent and immediately the Vietminh infantry swarmed down from the slopes towards Béatrice. Once again the Legionnaires were waiting for them, but there were only about a thousand Legionnaires and infantrymen at Béatrice whereas the invasion force was at least ten times as large. The Vietminh would rush towards the French defences in waves, blowing bugles before hurling grenades into the dugouts and throwing themselves on top of the defending soldiers. With their defences overrun, the order was given for the Legionnaires to pull back to another fort and surrender Béatrice. Twenty minutes after the first attack, all firing stopped. Only about two hundred Legionnaires made it to safety; the rest had been shot, hit by artillery or hacked to death in the trenches.
The following night the Vietminh artillery opened up on the next fort, Gabrielle, and four hours later some six thousand Vietminh swarmed towards the structure on three sides, shouting and screaming and firing their weapons. Fewer than four hundred French troops were defending this fort. There were, however, some small French tanks, and these kept up a steady fire, cutting swathes through the lines of attackers. The first assault was finally repulsed and the small Legion tank force, supported by Legionnaires, counter-attacked, driving away the Vietminh, who turned and fled. But the damage to Gabrielle was irreparable and the decision was taken to abandon the fort and pull back to other positions. In taking Béatrice and Gabrielle, the Vietminh had killed about a thousand Legionnaires, but had lost more than three thousand men.
French bombers flew over the valley intent on blanket-bombing the Vietminh, forcing them to pull away from the airstrip. But, to their surprise, they were met by scores of anti-aircraft guns firing non-stop. The bombers were forced to pull away after taking many hits and the accompanying fighter planes had little success against the enemy guns, as these were well concealed in the jungle. This was the first time in the Indo-China war that the Vietminh had ever used anti-aircraft guns, and it completely altered the French battle plan. At a stroke the French had been forced on to the defensive, for they had neither bombers to take out the enemy hordes nor fighters to destroy the enemy guns, and re-supplying the garrison with troops, ammunition, food and medicines was all but impossible. The Vietminh’s use of anti-aircraft guns also meant that sending in paratroopers was now a risky option, both for the paratroopers themselves and the transport planes.
Forty-eight hours after taking Gabrielle, the Vietminh moved on to fort Anne-Marie, but this time they changed tactics. They didn’t send in any ground troops after hours of bombing, but for three days and three nights kept up almost non-stop shelling of the fort, making normal life impossible for the Legionnaires holed up inside. The decision was taken to vacate yet another fort and pull back to reinforce the airstrip defences.
But the airstrip had taken a tremendous pounding during that first week of the battle and was declared unusable. All supplies would now have to be dropped by parachute or helicopter. But, given the new-found firepower of the Vietminh, re-supplying by chopper was a very dangerous manoeuvre. So accurate had the Vietminh gunners become, putting many transport planes out of action, that parachute drops during daylight were abandoned. But dropping supplies in darkness was always a risky option. The French battle plan at Dien Bien Phu was rapidly becoming a nightmare and the Vietminh were creeping ever closer.
By day the Vietminh continued their barrage of the main French defences surrounding the airstrip. At night they adopted a new tactic, crawling as close as possible to the perimeter wire around the airstrip and then digging like crazy with their spades. The French replied with mortars, killing many of the thousands of Vietminh peasants digging their trenches around the airstrip. By day the French filled in the trenches, but the Vietminh were crawling ever closer.
For two weeks this stalemate continued, but fewer parachute drops were hitting the target as the Vietminh encircled the French troops and supplies of ammunition, food and medicine were getting lower. It was impossible to take out the wounded, and doctors and surgeons brought in by helicopter were having great difficulty keeping the seriously injured alive.
The French decided to reinforce their men at Dien Bien Phu and two parachute battalions, numbering some fifteen hundred men, were successfully dropped one night as Legion troops took up positions around the perimeter of the airstrip in case the Vietminh tried to take out the paratroopers.
This influx of new troops restored morale, but two weeks later talk began of beating a defensive retreat out of the valley, though, in reality, everyone at Dien Bien Phu knew that they would be slaughtered on the way out. And no one was prepared to leave behind the wounded and the dying to be massacred by the Vietminh.
When pulling back was mentioned, however, the Legionnaires refused to even discuss the matter. They were adamant. They replied, ‘We are not leaving a single Legionnaire here to be massacred by the enemy… We fight to the death if necessary… we prefer to die rather than retreat… there is no pulling back… there is no surrender.’
Each day the French were sending in their bombers and fighter planes but to little or no effect despite the fact that large chunks of the surrounding jungle were being set alight and decimated by the napalm bombs. This reliance on bombing was meant to be the core of the French offensive. It had failed completely. The Vietminh continued to press forward at night and to shell the French compound throughout the day.
As word spread of the impending disaster at Dien Bien Phu those Legionnaires in other parts of Indo-China reacted by insisting on going to join their comrades trapped in the valley. There was now no possibility of these Legionnaires parachuting into the compound and so they made their way on foot through the jungle. When they reached the perimeter, which was guarded by the surrounding Vietminh forces, they would surprise them, shoot their way through and join their comrades. It was foolhardy and reckless, but there was no way the French commanders could stop the Legionnaires.
By mid-April the situation had become critical. For one month the defenders had been encircled, somehow withstanding the shells and the mortar bombs which peppered the defences every hour of daylight. At night they could now hear the Vietminh attackers tunnelling away with their spades, getting ever closer.
Finally, on May 1, General Giap decided the time had come for the final push to overrun the French positions and take all the forts and the headquarters. In the early hours of the morning, in driving rain, the Vietminh bugles were heard once more and the defenders prepared for yet another onslaught. But this time it would be different.
Coming at them out of the darkness, the French saw thousands of enemy soldiers yelling, firing their rifles and running flat out towards their positions. Never before had they experienced such an infantry attack – some seven thousand troops we
re attacking in wave after wave, pressing towards the remaining forts around the airstrip. But, as before, the French were waiting for them, their machine guns rattling away non-stop, carving huge swathes through the Vietminh lines. Even so, as the Legionnaires felled one wave of attackers, another wave would take their place, running in their bare feet through the torrential rain towards the French lines, screaming above the din of battle.
Repeatedly, lines of French defenders were overrun by sheer numbers and forced to pull back. Legionnaires held in reserve were sent in to counter-attack and every time their onslaughts drove the Vietminh back. At various points in the defence this happened three and four times during the five-hour battle as the horrendous pressure was kept up by General Giap’s forces. It was painfully obvious to the French officers that defeat was at hand, as Giap clearly cared nothing for his troops, sending them on such certain suicide attacks in which hundreds of them were cut down as they ran straight towards the enemy machine guns.
As dawn broke the Vietminh beat a retreat to safety of the jungle, leaving some fifteen hundred dead comrades in or around the French positions. In places their bodies were heaped one on top of the other and had been used by the French as defensive cover. In contrast, the French had lost about two hundred men.
Yet there was no respite for the defenders. No sooner had the Vietminh retreated than their artillery started up again, pounding the French defences. Two nights later General Giap sent in fresh troops in a bid to finish the battle. The tactics were the same – wave after wave of attackers flooded through the shattered perimeter wire in the dark hours of the morning intent on overrunning the French defences with weight of numbers.
Against all the odds, the French somehow held out, with the Legionnaires relying on fearsome counter-attacks to dislodge the enemy. But ammunition was now running dangerously low, the wounded were lying unattended in the dugouts and the French were taking a mighty beating.
But the Vietminh were suffering too. Thousands were lying dead on the airstrip, thousands more were wounded, and the peasant army seemed almost on the brink of cracking under the skill and courage of the Legionnaires. For four days there were no ground attacks, but there was still the ever-present shelling, which made life hell for those desperately trying to tend the wounded, repair the damage, eat a meal and take some rest. The defenders were physically shattered and close to exhaustion.
Colonel de Castries, in command of Dien Bien Phu, knew his men could take no more and prepared to surrender the garrison. He called French headquarters to report the desperate plight of the defenders and the necessity to surrender to save the lives of some of the men under his command. He was given permission to do so. But that was not the end of the battle. The Legion’s paratroop commanders heard that Colonel Castries was about to order the white flag of surrender to be hoisted and sent a runner to him with an extraordinary message:
‘The Legion never surrenders… We’re going to attack.’
Two hundred Legionnaires fixed bayonets, charged the magazines of their light machine guns and sub-machine guns and clambered out of their defensive positions. They began walking towards the enemy beyond the perimeter, holding their guns at their hips, fingers on the trigger. They then began to trot line abreast and as the Vietminh began firing at the human line moving towards them the Legionnaires charged, yelling, ‘Faire Camerone’, or ‘Let’s do a Camerone.’ This battle cry harks back to the Legion’s most famous stand, when just fifty Legionnaires, holed up in a farmyard, held at bay an entire Mexican army of some four thousand soldiers, including cavalry. When only five Legionnaires were still standing and capable of running, they fixed bayonets, raced out of the farmyard and towards the astonished Mexicans, yelling obscenities. It was only when the Legionnaires were some twenty yards from the enemy lines that a whole company of Mexicans opened fire, killing all five of them. It was the most glorious battle in the French Foreign Legion’s long and distinguished history.
The French Foreign Legion was formed in 1831 for the sole purpose of getting rid of thousands of soldiers from across Europe who had moved to France after the collapse of Napoleon’s empire. One thousand soldiers, ranging from teenagers to sixty-year-old veterans who had served in a number of European armies and wanted to return to army life, were hurriedly mobilised and the ragtag Legion was born. However, all the officers recruited were French. The Legion’s first campaign, soon after its formation, was in Algeria, which would become its natural home, away from the politics of France.
Throughout the following decades recruits to the Legion came from all parts of Europe and, according to legend, many joined to escape justice, wives, girlfriends and money lenders. In fact many were simply refugees or former soldiers who had found life too tough outside the army. After every major war in Europe during the past one hundred and fifty years the Legion has been a haven for veterans from many countries wishing to continue army life. During those years many recruits have been French, German, Spanish and Swiss, with some ten per cent British.
The Legionnaires found life very tough in Algeria, where they were engaged in a war of colonisation against tough tribesmen who fought guerrilla-style battles against the ill-prepared and poorly armed Legion.
The Algerian Arabs relied on spear-wielding cavalry and the Legion’s only defence was to form into squares and fire their muskets at the horsemen as they galloped around these formations. Hand-to-hand fighting usually ensued in which the experienced Legionnaires dominated, driving away the Arabs who weren’t killed on the field of battle.
Any captured Legionnaires were handed over to the Algerian women, who would take a delight in stripping their captives naked and indulging their whims with exquisite methods of torture which always ended in terrifying pain before the Legionnaire’s eventual death. The women would then hurl their captives’ testicles and severed heads at Legion troops passing through their villages.
The conquest of Algeria took four years, in which time the Legion became a tough fighting force. It met most of its own needs, relying on France only for weapons, ammunition and the paltry pay. Those years produced a tightly knit band of disciplined brothers who would die for one another rather than surrender to an enemy. The Legionnaires also learnt that there was no question of surrender, because death would follow automatically and sometimes in the most gruesome fashion. And slowly, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Legion’s reputation grew, and those who served in it were treated with respect and often a little fear.
Today the French Foreign Legion consists of some eight thousand soldiers, mainly infantry and paratroopers, but it also includes a mountain division, artillery and engineers. A rapid-reaction force of some fifteen hundred men, all with Special Forces skills, is based in France, and there are also Legionnaires based in Chad, Surinam, Djibouti, French Guinea and the Comoros Islands, near Madagascar. Some six thousand men apply to join the Legion each year, but only about a thousand are accepted.
One of the Legion’s more recent and most dramatic operations was the rescue, in 1978, of some two and a half thousand European men, women and children in the copper-mining town of Kolwezi, in Zaire, after two thousand heavily armed rebels of the Congolese National Liberation Front stormed the town in a bid to steal arms and money.
These wayward rebels arrived in armoured cars in Kolwezi, and, with much firing of arms, took control of this town of some twelve thousand people. The local Zairean militia of two hundred armed soldiers offered no resistance and quickly fled, leaving the rebels in complete control. Their first target was the bars and hotels, which they shot up before drinking the town dry and then embarking on an orgy of drunkenness and violence, raping the women and shooting any man who dared to get in their way.
The rebels set up courts in the hotels and hauled local dignitaries before them, accusing them of aiding President Mobutu of Zaire, a man they described as a traitor. Every person brought before the court was found guilty and all were immediately shot. The orgy of violence and dr
unkenness continued. Fortunately, however, a radio operator at one of the mines managed to get a message out telling the civilised world what was going on and pleading for assistance to stop the murder and violence.
The Zairean government was not capable of putting together a military force strong enough to take on the rebels, and Belgium, the former colonial power, refused to intervene. The French came to the rescue by sending in Legionnaires from the 2nd Parachute Regiment from their base in Corsica. Within ten hours the soldiers were flying to Kinshasa, but the following day, when they were over Zaire and ready to parachute into Kolwezi, they faced major problems. They had no maps of the town, no information about the size or capability of the rebel forces and no idea where the town’s two thousand three hundred white men, women and children might be holed up. Nor did they have artillery or mortars – only grenades, rifles, sub-machine guns and light machine guns. The United States sent five Hercules C-130 transport planes to the Zairean capital, Kinshasa, to pick up the Legionnaires as they parachuted down there instead, and within hours the first batch of four hundred Legionnaires were on their way to Kolwezi. They had no idea they would be facing a rebel army of some two thousand men with mortars, medium machine guns and armoured cars.
Their orders were to make straight for the town centre because it was believed that the rebels would have herded the town’s whole population into one place. They had been warned that they would have to move at great speed because this group of Congolese rebels was renowned for killing hostages as soon as trouble arose.
The scene that greeted the Legionnaires as they entered the outskirts of Kolwezi was horrendous. Scores of swollen, decomposed bodies, both black and white, were lying around the streets, in alleys and doorways. Even young children had been massacred, their frail, thin bodies left to rot in the scorching sun, and the stench of rotting corpses filled the air.
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