by Laura Lam
Rain! Heavy rain is still pouring …
A number of service wives were present at Dien Bien Phu. One woman gave birth to a baby girl on 4 May, inside the bunker of the temporarily re-gained Isabelle outpost. Her wounded husband, Captain Desire, was lying nearby with a group of wounded men. The child was named after one of the outposts and baptized by the Reverend Tissot. Outside the bunker, the monsoon downpour continued and would turn into a violent storm the next day. That night, thirty-two men went on patrol out of Isabelle, heading west. All were ambushed by the Viet Minh.
Two American C-119 crews led by James McGovern had volunteered to fly a low-altitude ammunition drop over Isabelle. On the morning of 6 May, under a clear blue sky and warm sun, they arrived over Dien Bien Phu. Viet Minh troops on the grounds were ready to shoot them with anti-aircraft guns. The first plane piloted by Art Wilson was hit in the tail boom. Wilson lost control but managed to escape and landed safely in Cat Bi. McGovern’s plane was hit in the port engine and he lost control, then a second shell struck its tail. Both McGovern and his co-pilot were killed by the exploded ammunition they had loaded inside the aircraft.
A crucial action for Giap in the final days was the attack on a strongpoint near the left bank of Nam Rom River that protected the central command post. Of their forty-nine strongpoints, this one was seen by the French as ‘the throat of Dien Bien Phu’ and it had been the scene of enormous casualties on both sides. Giap had discovered that the French access to this hill was via a fortress constructed many years earlier. The Viet Minh tunneled towards it for sixteen days, reached the site at eight-thirty in the evening of 6 May, set charges for nine-thirty, and blew it up with a huge quantity of dynamite. This single explosion was louder and more destructive than those previously. Before midnight, the Vietnamese gained complete control of this strongpoint. Their waiting army from the trenches started marching up along the slopes to the last hill.
Early Friday morning, 7 May, Viet Minh troops raised their red flag with its gold star above General de Castries’ command bunker. In the afternoon Colonel Langlais went to his dugout and burned his red paratrooper beret. He exchanged it for the hat of an infantryman. Meanwhile, General de Castries telephoned his wife in Paris with a brief message, “Do not worry. I’ve already been a prisoner. We will see each other again.” However, Cogny spoke to de Castries over a radio link from Ha Noi and instructed him not to surrender.
“Old boy, it has to finish now; but not in the form of capitulation. That is forbidden to us. There mustn’t be any raising of the white flag. The firing must be allowed to die away – but don’t surrender. Don’t mess up what you’ve done.”
“All right, General. I only wish to protect the wounded,” answered de Castries, in tears.
Cogny went on, “ I haven’t the right to authorize you to make this capitulation. Do whatever’s best. But this mustn’t finish with a white flag. Do you understand, old boy?”
“All right, General.”
“Au revoir, old boy.”
But la gloire was now irrelevant. It was impossible to prevent the widespread raising of white flags among the exhausted French troops, badly needing to avoid last-minute firing and the danger of mistaken identities. All over the battlefield, on one of the very few sunny days during the entire campaign, the French began to come to terms with their despair. Both sides began to count their losses.
In fifty-six days of fighting, the French lost 2,748 men in combat. At the battlefield, the Red Cross counted 4,436 wounded – of these 429 died shortly afterwards. More than three thousand men had deserted during the battle. Among those deserting, a few hundred found hiding places inside shelters and sat through the battle.
From late afternoon to evening on 7 May, ten thousand starving men in tattered clothes and rotten boots were emerging from the long valley. The Viet Minh ordered them to march to prison camps several hundred kilometres away. Many couldn’t. They were physically too weak. They formed staggering queues heading to the hospital, where they soon collapsed. Dr Grauwin ordered his staff to get into proper uniforms with Red Cross armbands and continue with their duty. Most of the survivors were disoriented due to prolonged bombardment. They were soon suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder that would remain for years to come.
Vietnamese losses were much higher, with eight thousand killed and fifteen thousand wounded. This reflected the disparity in tactics, military technology, and wealth. That would always be the pattern for the Vietnamese, who would be willing to pay any price to free their country from foreign domination. To celebrate their victory, the Viet Minh army went on marching and singing their own songs – one was for Henri Navarre.
Navarre! Navarre! Coming with ferocious spirits Navarre! Navarre! Leaving torn to tatters…
The revolutionary side of my paternal family experienced the deepest sense of fulfillment. In Truong An, my grandmother cried out with joy, “Now we have justice! The invaders are always defeated in the end.” To celebrate the country’s liberation, our village, like so many others, held a huge feast in the open air – with decorative tents spreading from one end of the village to another. They roasted dozens of pigs, chickens and ducks, and Uncle Muoi grilled a great variety of fish. The happy event was highlighted with traditional music, dancing, and revolutionary songs – for three consecutive days and nights. I was only three years old at that time, but through the mist of early childhood memories, I can still recall glimpses of that joyous time.
Oh! The two words Compatriot and Homeland
Finally they are back in our hands
One Century of a lost nation
Now I can return to smiling and singing
Both Laos and Cambodia were also liberated. The battle of Dien Bien Phu had come to symbolize decisively not just the end of French colonialism in Indochina but also the end of centuries of European colonialism worldwide. In the words of Stanley Karnow, a historian of Viet Nam, this battle was “equal [to] Waterloo, Gettysburg and Stalingrad as one of the decisive battles of history”. In his country, it brought to Vo Nguyen Giap almost the status of a deity.
* * *
The French had left behind eleven thousand prisoners of war and sixteen hundred missing-in-action. The prisoners lived in open thatch huts in remote villages. Without security guards, they could wander about in open fields. However, it was impossible for them to escape as the villagers would keep an eye on any escapee. A number of prisoners did try but were captured and returned – their food rations were taken away as punishment, though they were seldom beaten. For the foreign soldiers, the surrounding jungle itself was a deadly terrain. At night the howling of monkeys, the growling of tigers, the blaring of elephants, and the near silent whispers of snakes, terrified any man contemplating escape. A prisoner’s daily diet consisted of boiled rice and vegetable, dried meat, and some pork fat. Each prisoner was given 1,600 grams of cooked rice per day (a Viet Minh soldier received 1,300 grams a day) Daily activities for the inmates included burying the most recent dead, manual labour, political lectures, meal times, and reading the L’Humanite (airmailed from France). Copies of the old newspaper were used to roll cigarettes and as toilet paper.
In March 1955 the Viet Minh handed over to the French 3,900 POWs from Dien Bien Phu, or forty-three percent of the total prisoners taken from the valley at the closing of the battle. The death rate of French prisoners while in captivity was sixty percent. Causes of death included dysentery, typhus, bronchitis, pneumonia, beri-beri, leptospirosis, and oedema. The impoverished Viet Minh could not provide medical care to sick French prisoners. They had no choice but to watch them suffer and die. However, they never resorted to any form of malevolent treatment toward their foreign enemy, whom they viewed as oddly naive. This was not the case with their fellow Vietnamese who had betrayed their country and various forms of sadistic cruelty were not uncommon – a severe punishment for an unforgivable crime.
Ho Chi Minh sent Cuong an urgent message, asking him to return to Ha Noi, to take
charge of a major veterans’ hospital. The Vietnamese now had to cope with the fifteen thousand wounded men and women returning from the great battlefield. Cuong packed a small bag of personal belongings and he came to Truong An to say goodbye to us. My father accompanied him to Thanh Chau. He was to travel from there to Sai Gon by means of bus and ferry. From Sai Gon he would join a group and head directly for Ha Noi.
ORGANIZED DEATH
“We shall bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age”
General Curtis Lemay
“The Americans thought that the more bombs they drop, the quicker we would fall to our knees and surrender. But the bombs heightened rather than dampened our spirit”
Ton That Tung
My family, especially my father and grandmother, were longing for Cuong’s return. Neither of them could predict that the American War would soon begin on our soil and Cuong would never again return to the South. They always talked about him with fond memories. The correspondence between him and the family had come to an end after the Geneva Agreement in July 1954, dividing the country in half against the will of the Vietnamese people.
Cuong had visited us frequently during the five years he was based in the Mekong Delta. My mother was especially hospitable to him and since he was a strict vegetarian, she served him a diet of brown rice, nuts, tofu, fresh fruits and plenty of vegetables from our garden. It was Cuong who taught her rudimentary medicine and basic health care. He had learned from my paternal grandmother that my mother had overdosed me with Western medications at least twice. My mother described one of those incidents:
Hoa Lai had high fever that evening and I looked for the box of quinine. It was wet from the rain and all the tablets stuck together. I used a tiny spoon and scooped out a lump and pressed it down her throat. Her body began to jerk violently, and her eyes rolled up. I was so scared and did not know what to do. I just held her and eventually she stopped jerking and went to sleep for a long time.
On several occasions, my mother had also misused the asthma medicine given to me by Uncle Nam. She had thought that by giving me the double quantity I would recover sooner.
Not only did he teach my mother the proper use of Western medicine, Cuong also recommended a diet to help relieve the asthma symptoms. Whenever Cuong was in our house, he would take me for a walk around the garden after each evening meal. We smelled the fragrances of the flowers and he taught me their names. Afterwards he and my father would have a long chat over jasmine tea and sweet ginger. Every morning before sunrise Cuong started a walking meditation along the riverbank, for an hour, always in bare feet. My grandmother said the way Cuong walked while meditating was very different from his normal stride. He planted each step slowly and firmly on the ground, thereby pulling energy, so my grandmother said, from the earth.
Cuong and my father dressed similarly – beige khaki shirts with four pockets in the front, and matching trousers – and each carried a faded and partially worn leather briefcase. They were tall, but my father, whose facial features resembled his own father, was noted in the village for his prominent and straight nose. He looked very much like a Confucian scholar and behaved like one. Cuong resembled my paternal grandmother. His features were refined, his complexion light, and he had an aquiline nose and sensitive eyes. His manners were graceful, and, unlike my father, he loved to talk.
Granduncle Ba had two sons who were like brothers to my father, and Nam was one of them. Following the Dien Bien Phu battle, Nam escaped to the South with remnants of the colonial army, disguising themselves as civilians. Nam’s military career had begun in 1951 – when he was drafted into the colonial army. The day French troops took Nam away, his mother and elder sister rushed to the French administration compound in Can Tho where young draftees were kept. The compound was stormed and hundreds of protesters were arrested, including Nam’s mother and sister. The mobilization of Vietnamese young men to fight against the Viet Minh had been the brainchild of the Americans. The United States regarded the creation of the Vietnamese colonial army as essential in defeating the Viet Minh and made that a condition of their financial support for the French in Indochina. Thus, the establishment of the Armée Nationale Vietnamienne (ANV) was officially announced by General de Lattre in July 1951. By the end of the year, the colonial regime had succeeded in drafting 63,600 Vietnamese men and many French regi- ments were instructed to incorporate at least one Vietnamese company in every battalion for on-the-job training. After basic military training under French leadership, Nam was transferred to North Viet Nam to fight against the Viet Minh. He quickly rose to the rank of captain, a rarity for a Vietnamese in the colonial army. His reputation had grown and created a tug of war between the French commander of the Military Academy in Sai Gon, who wanted him to teach artillery classes, and the field commander in Ha Noi, also French, who refused to release him for transfer to the Academy. Who could say how many casualties were caused by Nam’s accurate artillery fire, ironically the very same casualties his uncle Cuong was trying desperately to save?
Nam’s younger brother, Nghiem, who would become in time a well-to-do businessman, had no interest in the military. However, he too was eventually drafted into the ARVN and served in its military police.
* * *
Following the Viet Minh’s victory at Dien Bien Phu, Viet Nam had the right to be recognized as an independent nation, with Ho Chi Minh as head of state. However, the major powers – especially the United States and China – sought to divide Viet Nam in half. Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Communist representative at the peace conference in Geneva, put China’s priorities first. For centuries, Chinese foreign policy had been based upon fragmenting South East Asia in order to assert Chinese influence and control. Accordingly, a divided Viet Nam would better suit Chinese interests than a united Viet Nam. To achieve this goal, Zhou prepared the groundwork for the Geneva Conference beforehand by conducting “underground negotiations” with Pierre Mendes-France, elected prime minister in June 1954. To impress other delegates, Zhou, then age fifty-six, arrived for the seventy-four days of talks in the Swiss capital with an entourage of two hundred people, including cooks, hair dressers, servants, and shipments of Chinese antiques and carpets destined for his delegation’s headquarters – the lavish estate Grand Mont-Fleuri. By contrast, Ho Chi Minh’s small delegation, represented by Pham van Dong, stayed in a modest villa nearby.
The Geneva Conference failed to find a durable solution for Viet Nam and angered the Vietnamese. They were furious with Zhou for conniving with their enemy. “He has double-crossed us,” Dong said. In this international game, Viet Nam was merely a pawn.
The United States, then in the midst of a Cold War with the Communist Bloc was also in favour of a divided Viet Nam. Under the agreement struck in Geneva, North Viet Nam, from the 17th parallel northward, would be ceded to the Viet Minh. The South, on the other hand, would be administered provisionally in preparation for the general election of a national government two years later, on 5 July 1956. However, unhappy with its terms, the Americans refused to sign the agreement. They had already decided to pursue their secret plan for a military regime in South Viet Nam. Knowing how popular Ho Chi Minh was among his own people, the Americans feared the charismatic leader would win in an election. The two-year delay simply served as an excuse to allow enough time for the establishment of the American-backed regime. The national election designated for 5 July 1956 would never be held.
To the Vietnamese, Ho was an intellectual and a poet with a common touch. His immense authority came from quiet persistence, self-denial and moral strength. He had suffered much during the three decades of being hunted and in his crippling detention in Chinese jails. This had left him virtually without equal in public respect and affection. Besides being a scholar, Ho also conducted himself as a gentleman. These two are very potent sources of authority in an Asian society, especially where there is a heritage of Confucianism.
Without consulting the Vietnamese people, the Americans now suddenly showed their hand
. They had found Ngo Dinh Diem in a Catholic seminary in New Jersey and arranged for him to return to Viet Nam. He was to become the leader of South Viet Nam – representing the American position.
Diem was a puritan, a celibate and a recluse. He had no local support network and was without any army. Diem had little appreciation for the Vietnamese struggle for independence. His ancestors had been converted to Catholicism in the seventeenth century by Catholic missionaries from Portugal, who had opened trade with Viet Nam. When France invaded Viet Nam, the Ngos had sided with the French. Once “Indochina” was firmly established in 1873, the French also assumed the power to enthrone and dethrone Vietnamese emperors. In 1885, they removed Emperor Ham Nghi, who made a narrow escape with his senior mandarins to a mountainous area in Central Viet Nam. Ham Nghi led a nation-wide resistance movement called “Can Vuong,” with secret headquarters in Quang Binh (Ngo Dinh Diem’s ancestral province). The French brutally suppressed the Can Vuong, captured the Emperor, and sent him into exile in Algeria in 1888. Diem’s father, Ngo Dinh Kha, was a senior interpreter for the French at the time and was appointed to be “Pacification Minister”. Kha’s responsibility was to assist Colonel Duvillier, the military commander for Central Viet Nam, to wipe out all anti-French movements initiated by the Can Vuong. When the French enthroned Dong Khanh, Kha was promoted again and became the new emperor’s “personal advisor”. He was to watch over the emperor’s activities and report them to the French.
The appointment of an interpreter to such a high position in the Imperial Palace broke the long tradition of the monarchy that had earlier chosen only senior ranking mandarins with a Confucian background to serve the emperors. But Kha was serving the French, not the emperor. Some years later Kha would be discarded by his French masters and he would have much resentment toward them.
Upon Diem’s return at the Tan Son Nhat airport in July 1954, he was welcomed by a handful of people arranged by the American colonel, Edward Lansdale. Diem talked to his brother Nhu about the lack of public support, his disappointment, and his desire to go back to New Jersey. He was a Catholic, yet he was to rule a country whose population was eighty percent Buddhist. Lansdale refused to let him go. Reluctantly, he stayed. He was to lead the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN).