Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys

by Neil Oliver

  The rest of the unloading and early preparations went off without incident, however, and he eventually shrugged off the initial shock of the loss. He was sure of his men and sure of his plans. They would overcome the challenge posed by the Antarctic and achieve the last great victory of the age. In a letter to Joseph Kinsey, the expedition’s fixer back in Lyttelton, New Zealand, Scott wrote: “They are a fine lot all round. I could not wish for better.”

  A new hut was erected as the base of operations—50 feet long by 25 feet wide by 9 feet high. Inside it was subdivided into two—a wardroom for the officers and scientists and a mess deck for the men. Scott would object even to the use of the word “hut” to describe the structure, since in his opinion it was the finest building yet constructed in the polar regions. There was a linoleum floor inside and the roof was covered in waterproof rubber. The double-thickness walls were insulated with bags of seaweed and sacks of volcanic sand were used as draught-excluders. The interior was lit by acetylene gas and there was a fully working stove and cooking range. The scientists’ workspace was equipped with all the latest kit to enable them do their work as thoroughly as if they were at home. As far as Scott was concerned, their expedition would stand as a landmark, the arrival of civilization in a primitive world.

  But in another letter to Kinsey, Scott revealed that the loss of the tractor had preyed on his mind. It also seemed he had the first inkling that new technology alone might not be enough.

  The loss of one of our motor sledges was a bad blow, as the other two have proved themselves efficient by dragging big loads of stores on shore, but, even so, as I watch them working here I feel rather than know that I was right not to place serious reliance on these machines…

  While Scott and his team scurried around like black ants on that landscape, the Antarctic waited. The home team was ready as well.

  Dien Bien Phu

  The time had come. It was Saturday March 13, 1954, and the preparations were complete. In position all around the high ground of the slopes surrounding the massive bowl-shaped valley were tens of thousands of soldiers. Hundreds of heavy artillery pieces—which had been dragged laboriously up steep mountain tracks the enemy believed impassable—were primed and ready for action, overlooking the valley floor. Food supplies, medicines, ammunition and the rest of the paraphernalia required for a siege had been brought into this most remote of locations on foot and on bicycle by uncounted hordes of men, women and children—willing and unwilling alike. It had been a mobilization of people-power the like of which the world has seldom seen. The last of the civilians had been evacuated from the area and all who remained now were warriors.

  In his command post Ho Chi Minh, President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was surrounded by his staff. They watched him closely now as he prepared to speak. Legend has it that he slowly removed his helmet and turned it upside down. Placing it on the table in front of him, he paused briefly and then put one clenched fist inside it.

  “The French…are here,” he said quietly, without looking up.

  Next he ran one index finger slowly around the rim, this time raising his eyes to meet the gaze of his men, each in turn, as he did so.

  “And we…are here.” He allowed himself to smile at this, and his men smiled back at him.

  The coming fight, he told them, would be like the attack of a tiger upon a trapped elephant. Again and again from the darkness of the forest the tiger would reach out to slash and cut at the limbs and belly of its much more powerful, but immobile prey. Slowly, slowly, the elephant would bleed to death.

  A defining moment—perhaps the defining moment—in the history of Southeast Asia was rising above the horizon like the sunrise of a new day. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was about to begin.

  The French had been dominant in Vietnam since 1883. The country had originally emerged as an independent nation in ad 939, when its erstwhile Chinese masters decided to withdraw from the place. Apart from a short period in the 1400s when the Chinese returned to their old haunt, it was self-governing for around 900 years. At first it called itself Dai Co Vet—the Great Viet State—or sometimes the much older name of Annam. In 1802, it took on the name Vietnam for the first time.

  During the 1600s French Roman Catholic missionaries had arrived to begin converting thousands of the population. They fell foul of the Vietnamese authorities, however, and for the next two centuries were subjected to periodic persecution and oppression. From 1858 onward the French sent soldiers into the country. Officially they were there to protect the missionaries, but in reality it was the start of colonization. France had plans for an Asian empire. By 1883 they had forced their will over the whole country, compelling Vietnam’s rulers to sign a treaty splitting it into three parts—which became known collectively as French Indochina.

  The German conquest of France at the start of World War II enabled Japan, Germany’s ally, to take control of the territory for a while. But their eventual defeat in 1945 opened the door to a new name and a new ideology. Ho Chi Minh had been in China, but returned to his homeland at the head of the Viet Minh—the Revolutionary League for the Independence of Vietnam. Emperor Bao Dai, who had been humiliated by the Japanese occupation of his country, stepped aside to make way for the new man.

  British and Chinese troops had entered Vietnam following the Japanese surrender, however, and were soon joined by the French, eager to reassert their control. Ho Chi Minh and his followers refused to accept this reoccupation and the so-called Vietnam War began in 1946. Two years later, France had established a Nationalist Government led by Bao Dai.

  Gradually, and with a depressing momentum, the nations of the West lined up to support the Nationalists. The Communist states, predictably enough and following the steps of a now familiar dance, made clear their backing for Ho Chi Minh and his Democratic opposition.

  Two opposing governments then began fighting for control of Vietnam—eventually prompting the world’s great powers to schedule a peace conference for April 1954, in Geneva, Switzerland, to decide the fate of the country and to try to end their own cold war in Asia. Due to attend were representatives of the State of Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Kampuchea (now Cambodia), Laos, China, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States of America.

  In the meantime, both combatants in the war decided a last spectacular victory was required to ensure an upper hand at the peace talks. France believed it had come up with the right place and the right plan.

  Time was running out for the colonists. They’d been fighting in Vietnam off and on since 1946, but if anyone had the upper hand it was the Communists under Ho Chi Minh and his gifted military commander—the teacher-turned-soldier General Vo Nguyen Giap. The French commander in Indochina, General Henri Navarre, had inherited a demoralized army that no longer had any clear objectives beyond its own survival. The Communist forces had waged a successful guerrilla campaign, roamed freely throughout the countryside of the north and enjoyed the support of the Soviet Union and her allies. It was Navarre’s job to try to regain some kind of initiative before it was too late.

  As 1953 drew to a close, Navarre and his advisers identified the village of Dien Bien Phu, in a remote corner of north-west Vietnam near the borders with Laos and China, as the place for one last roll of the dice. Located toward the rear of their enemy’s territory, it promised a double opportunity—to disrupt Ho Chi Minh’s supply lines into the neighboring French protectorate of Laos and to lure his massed forces into an all-or-nothing pitched battle. If France could create an attractive enough target, the thinking went, the Communists would have to attack it. Provided that target was strong enough, it would be the springboard for destroying whatever force was sent against it.

  The 10-mile-long valley floor would, Navarre hoped, be turned into a killing field from which the Communists would never escape. If it proved successful, Navarre would be able to use Dien Bien Phu as the blueprint for dealing with the Communist insurgency in the rest of the cou
ntry.

  It sounded simple if you said it quickly enough—but in reality the plan posed enormous logistical problems and challenges for the French. First of all they had to get a large fighting force into the area. Given the location of Dien Bien Phu, and the nature of the surrounding countryside, the only way to move men into the area quickly was by air. The Japanese had effectively started the job for the French by building an airstrip there during World War II. The river valley was flat and wide and therefore presented an ideal location for an air-supplied base—and by March 1954 the French presence had grown to almost 16,000 men, almost all of whom had either been flown or parachuted in. They were French regulars, including members of the elite parachute regiments; French Foreign Legionnaires; veterans of fighting in Algeria and Morocco; and Vietnamese soldiers loyal to France and the Nationalist Government of Bao Dai.

  Navarre imagined that the battle to come would be a fluid and mobile affair and so placed a cavalryman—Colonel Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries—in charge of the ground troops. De Castries, from a proud military family and a graduate of the Saumur Cavalry School, set about throwing a ring of seven fortified locations around Dien Bien Phu, and one of the abiding myths of the story is that he named them after his past loves: Anne-Marie, Beatrice, Claudine, Dominique, Gabrielle, Huguette and Isabelle. The fact that those names run in alphabetical order is no doubt neither here nor there, and is certainly less interesting.

  The empty buildings of the Vietnamese village that had stood beside the Nam Yum River were dismantled to provide materials for the fortifications. Even the mansion of the French governor was taken apart so that the bricks could be put to use elsewhere. Gone too was every bush and tree in the valley, consumed by the French military engineers as they sought to create an impregnable redoubt.

  The preparations had been impressive in terms of the speed of their execution if nothing else—but the ordinary soldiers now hunkered down on that valley floor were filled with foreboding. They were numerous, well trained and well armed—that much was true. The seven fortified positions encircling them housed modern heavy artillery. Numerous tanks and aircraft were at their disposal and they would be supported and supplied by continuous landings by supply planes. Dien Bien Phu had been designed as a porcupine—and the enemy soldiers were expected to throw themselves onto its spines. But there was no doubting one major and deeply worrying fact: they were occupying the low ground and all around them overlooking them were hills and mountains that they did not control.

  The army of the Viet Minh had occupied that high ground: in fact Giap had managed to mass at least 50,000 men on those slopes and ridges. The French had believed the terrain was too steep and thickly forested—and the trackways leading to it too treacherous—for it to pose a realistic threat. Giap had thought otherwise, and had utilized the strong backs and legs of the local peasant population to manhandle more than 200 heavy guns into positions overlooking the French garrison and strong points.

  As the Americans would learn later, the landscape of Vietnam was wholly unsuited to the tactics of conventional European armies and warfare. The French build-up at Dien Bien Phu gave them control of…nothing at all. They were entrenched in their position but the army of the Viet Minh moved through the surrounding area like grains of sand through loosely linked fingers. Before the battle itself was even under way, the French would suffer more than 1,000 casualties at the hands of Giap’s regular divisions.

  But much worse was to come. Like the British in South Africa 75 years before, the French in Vietnam had misunderstood their enemy. They believed in their technology and tactics and so underestimated the significance of inferior numbers. They did not understand the terrain and so they were ready to fight the wrong kind of war in the wrong place. Worst of all, they thought Dien Bien Phu would be just another battle—and its outcome of limited significance beyond setting the tone for the imminent peace talks. What they could not know was that part of the future of the world, especially their own future, was being written for them in the hills around and above them. Change was in the air, along with the rains of the coming monsoon.

  Colonel Charles Piroth, the good-natured, one-armed commander of the French artillery, had guaranteed he had all the guns he needed to destroy, or at the very least contain, anything the Communists might have managed to cobble together in this unforgiving wilderness. He couldn’t have been more wrong, but he wasn’t alone.

  By mid-afternoon on March 13, the first real day of battle, the French guns in fortress Beatrice had been utterly destroyed by Giap’s highly trained and superbly camouflaged artillery high in the surrounding hills. Piroth’s crews had not even been able to exchange fire with their tormentors—since they couldn’t work out where they were—and after less than a single day’s fighting the eventual fate of the French at Dien Bien Phu was already ominously clear.

  Piroth was devastated—and humiliated. De Castries’s deputy, he felt responsible for giving his superior officer a false sense of security and by the following day he was broken—just going through the motions. Under his breath he whispered about being personally responsible, and dishonored.

  Some time during the night that followed, he went alone into an underground bunker and killed himself by lying down and exploding a hand grenade clutched in his one fist.

  The Viet Minh artillery pounded away at the French positions with devastating accuracy. Giap’s crews erected dummy gun positions to trick the French gunners—and moved their own pieces around the valley sides to ensure their locations were never fixed or predictable. The French guns were out in the open, the better to provide 360 degrees of fire, and were sitting ducks. The battle that Navarre had imagined as fast-moving, with French soldiers sallying forth to engage the enemy, swiftly degenerated into the kind of artillery duel familiar to veterans of World War I. From the start, the French had to dig in and hide underground in the hope of staying alive long enough for their situation to improve.

  For the defenders, Dien Bien Phu was harrowing and horible from the moment the Viet Minh guns first opened fire. The seven forts were picked off one by one. As quickly as the French replaced the destroyed guns, they were hit again. Within weeks the French guns had fallen silent for good. The ground forces had been expecting to see steady landings of supply planes bringing fresh men and materials on an almost hourly basis. As it turned out, the airstrip was utterly destroyed by March 27, and from then on the men on the ground depended entirely on air-drops. When the fighting started, the defenders of Dien Bien Phu had an estimated eight days’ worth of supplies. They needed to have hundreds of tons of material delivered every day just to keep things ticking over—and the fact that the siege was endured for as long as it was is testament to the organizational talents of the supply bases outside Vietnam and the bravery of the airmen.

  Pilots who had to make the runs down the narrow river valley would later say it was as dangerous as over-flying the Ruhr Valley during World War II. As well as guns for attacking the ground forces, Giap had placed anti-aircraft artillery along the valley sides. Strafed from both sides, military and civilian pilots alike ran a deadly gauntlet as they attempted to drop the thousands of tons of materials needed by the defenders. Civilian pilots Wallace Buford and James McGovern became the first Americans to die in war in Vietnam.

  Legionnaires besieged within the defended compound found themselves reliving the fate of their predecessors at Camerone, but on a much greater scale. Who can know now if the legend brought them any comfort, or made it any easier to fight and die.

  “Faire Camerone”—do as they would have done. And so they did.

  It was Legionnaires who were given the job of recovering the air-drops. As the planes flew higher to avoid the guns, so their accuracy suffered. The territory controlled by the French was also diminishing—disappearing like an oasis exposed to constant sunlight. More and more of the parachutes could be seen falling into enemy territory and it was down to the men of the Legion to go out and bri
ng them back. Under withering fire, men crawled on hands and knees in search of the containers under their telltale white parachutes, which now littered the landscape like untimely blooms. True to the reputation of the French, sometimes the life-and-death sorties were made in search of cases of good red wine. On other occasions it was vital military intelligence that went astray—often never to be seen again. De Castries’s Brigadier General’s stars, sent out to him by his commander, General René Cogny, were lost along with the bottle of champagne sent to help him celebrate his promotion in the field.

  By the start of May, the French situation was becoming hopeless. Giap’s strategy had steadily eroded their position until eventually they were in control of a patch of Vietnam not much bigger than a football field. By now the Viet Minh had dug something like 300 miles of trenches around and into the French positions. Giap’s sappers had undermined the French defenses, in the medieval way, so as to blow them sky-high with buried dynamite. He had used modern artillery to knock out virtually every French gun on the ground, and anti-aircraft fire to strangle the compound. His own troops had made countless frontal assaults on every French position. It had been a classic and terrible battle of attrition.

  The defenders had been reduced to exhausted, traumatized wraiths. As the siege drew to its close they were existing on a diet of black coffee and cigarettes and getting virtually no sleep while the enemy guns thundered and thundered. Casualties and corpses were piled high and the monsoon rains poured without a halt, creating hellish conditions reminiscent of Passchendaele in 1917. But in among it all there were countless acts of valor. The last medical evacuation by air had been on March 26. Two days later one more was attempted, but the plane was damaged and could not take off again. Genevieve de Galard, a Women’s Air Force nurse, was aboard the stricken flight. She stayed at Dien Bien Phu until the end, and was considered an angel by the sick and the dying.