by Douglas Boyd
The black Thais living in Muong Thanh – a picturesque collection of thatched long-houses on stilts beside the Nam Youm River – returned to the valley after the initial battle, women and children first. The men were more cautious, suspicious of occupiers, whether Viet or French. Like troops all over the world, the paras spoiled the wide-eyed kids clothed all in black with sweets and chocolate. The Vietnamese paras of Col Marcel Bigeard’s 6th Battalion of Colonial Parachutists had dropped in with kilos of sea salt in their packs. Here in the highlands, it was a commodity worth its own weight in opium and Muong Thanh was the biggest opium market in Vietnam.
For the first weeks all was relatively quiet in the surrounding hills. The Viets were there all right, because 1 BEP’s probing patrols found plenty of freshly dug trenches and bunkers. The trails were obviously well-frequented and they heard the ceaseless sound of distant chopping as Giap’s men hacked out new ones. So effective was the Viets’ camouflage and use of tree cover that no one in the valley had any idea he was mobilising 260,000 civilians as coolies and requisitioning 20,000 bicycles, each transporting a load up to 250 kilos, which would otherwise have required five porters at least. In this way, he brought to DBP more than 200 artillery pieces bigger than 57mm broken down into parts and several batteries of Soviet Katyusha rocket-launchers.[22] Against this, Piroth had six batteries of six 105mm guns and a single battery of four 155mm howitzers, plus three heavy mortar companies. For reconnaissance there were two Cricket light aircraft, supported by a handful of Bearcat fighters for local air cover.
With bulldozers dropped from the C-119s – one which escaped its parachutes on the way down dug itself inextricably deep into a rice paddy to everyone’s amusement – the airstrip of interlocking metal strips was usable on 25 November, three days ahead of schedule. On the same day a Legion patrol noticed a stiffening of Viet resistance and the Thais of Muong Thanh took off with their French Catholic missionary to build a new village several kilometres to the south, where the para medics ran a free clinic in the mornings, giving vaccinations and simple medical care.
The anti-Viet White Thai guerrillas manning outlying posts around the valley were the first to be attacked. On 10 December, one company of them under Sgt Blanc in Muong Pon, a village north of DBP, radioed for help. Capt Erwan Bergot commanded the main relief column which was finally halted at 1800hrs the following day after fighting its way through 11km of ambushes, forced to leave the road and go cross-country through hilly jungle, criss-crossed with watercourses, mostly dry. They were still 10km – or thirty-six precious hours’ march – short of Muong Pon, when a Piper Cub spotter plane overhead signalled significant concentrations of Viets ahead. Sgt Blanc radioed that the garrison had only six rounds left per man. From DBP he was promised a munitions drop at dawn. Bergot decided to make the final push at 0400hrs, hoping to catch the Viets off-balance with several renegade former bo-dois at the point of his column to confuse the opposition in the dark.
At dawn on 13 December, they were sleepwalking from sheer exhaustion when the sound of heavy firing warned them that the final assault was being made. With them under observation all the way, the timing was no accident. At 1100hrs they still had one kilometre to go, when the Viets melted away. At noon Bergot’s men finally entered the village, to find it empty but for piles of cartridge cases, dirty field dressings and blood-soaked bandages. No trace of Sgt Blanc or the White Thais, living or dead.
Shuddering at the familiar scene, Sgt Zurell said, ‘This is how it all started at Dong Khe.’[23]
[SEE MAP C : Dien Bien Phu, November 1953 – May 1954 below.]
As demolition of existing buildings and excavation of bunkers in the main valley progressed, the visitors came in droves, driving Lt Col Gaucher of 13 DBLE to swear, ‘I’m a bloody tourist guide. I know what they’re all going to say. The ministers ask whether we can hold on. The vote-collecting politicians murmur, “France is counting on you.” As for the Yanks, they poke a stick in the roofs of the dugouts to measure the thickness of earth and then look worried.’[24] Gilles wanted to finish the job and be off. He left on 8 December and the stream of VIP visitors continued with Castries showing them round. Lesser mortals were farmed out to his colonels.
On 24 December there was not a single para in the valley because 1 BEP and the rest were across the border in Laos on Operation Regattas – a link-up with a Laotian column from Luang Prabang. Hard on the paras’ trail, the Viets gave them just time to shake hands with the Laotians before harassing them all the way home across country, every track being mined and ambushed. That was the last regular offensive patrol.[25] From then on, DBP was an entrenched camp, fighting for its life.
Navarre’s Christmas present was three Chaffee M-24 tanks with 75mm guns, flown in as spare parts on 28 December and rebuilt in twenty-four hours by mechanics of 13 DBLE in underground workshops. Seven more M-24s were to follow. The majority of legionnaires being German, their delayed Christmas was celebrated with decorated branches, home-made cribs and small presents – and the singing of Lili Marlene, Deutschland über Alles and Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht ringing out across the valley to the godless enemy. In return, echoing from psywar loudspeakers in the Viet front-line trenches came the voices of deserters speaking French, German, Arabic and all the other languages of the colonial troops, with the Christmas message, ‘Comrades, why do you go on fighting? Do you want to die for Michelin?’ Rubber from the Michelin plantations was the most important single export of the country.
As a reminder that soldiers can also be hurt by personal tragedy, Maj Pégot of 3/13th had lost his wife, swept overboard from the ship bringing her to Vietnam earlier in the year. Keeping him company on his first New Year’s Eve as a widower, Gaucher was discussing the report of Sgt Maj Fels in 11 Company, who had just returned from a night recce with three other LURPs. Only 8km from DBP they had observed, not a few porters struggling along a trail under heavy loads but convoys of trucks running through the darkness with headlights full on.[26]
On 27 January the French positions were completely surrounded, and re-suppliable only by air. Yet, 31 January was VIP day with Colonial Secretary Marc Jacquet flying in with Ambassador Maurice Dejean and Navarre himself. Even Under-Secretary of State for War Chevigné came to rubberneck, and was advised like all the others to leave before 1600hrs when, punctual as a church clock, a single gun in the hills always fired a few rounds. The defenders dubbed it ‘the lone Jap’, believing it a solitary relic from the Japanese occupation that had fallen into Viet hands.
Giap was in no hurry because he needed time to build up supplies and train his troops. A network of trails beneath the jungle canopy had to be constructed. Most importantly, by waiting for the start of the monsoon – during the six-month rainy season the valley received more than 1.5 metres of rainfall – the low cloud and heavy downpour would make air support and re-supply impossible on most days. By the second week of March, when Giap was still offering to talk[27], the Viets had dug more than 100km of trenches around the northern strong-points of Anne-Marie, Béatrice and Gabrielle. At this point, De Castries had 13,000 men – a cocktail of Algerian, black Senegalese and Vietnamese infantry, three Legion infantry battalions plus 1 BEP and 2 BEP and other French and colonial paras – all surrounded by four Viet divisions.
‘Soldier’s comforts’ amounted to not much more than stacks of much-thumbed old French magazines until the arrival of the BMC – bordel mobile de campagne. The pioneers had constructed an underground brothel with cubicles. The pretty girls in ao-dais arrived with their madam, a slim and elegant lady whose golden sandals were soon begrimed with the ubiquitous dust, above which she delicately held the folds of her pink satin kai hao with one hand while the other kept the sun off her face with a large black umbrella. They were welcomed by the MO of 1/2 REI, whose job would now include the VD checks. Once they were installed, Standing Orders specified the hours for different units and ranks.[28] As one legionnaire remarked seeing the girls totter down the steps of their DC3
on their high heels, all the camp lacked now was a garrison cinema.
Wounded in a minor operation on 5 March, Cabiro lost consciousness after seeing his right foot apparently attached to the leg only by a strip of muscle. He came to in a hospital bed in Hanoi, too horrified at the thought of being crippled for life to ask an orderly to pull back the sheets and show him the damage. As a fair example of military humour, when the orthopaedic surgeon did his rounds and showed the patient some toes sticking out of the plaster, Cabiro asked if that meant he still had a right foot and was informed that the nurses always stuck some spare toes into the plaster, so as not to traumatise amputee patients.
The anaesthetist for his first operation was the fiancée of Roger Faulques who, on turning up at the bedside to announce his imminent return to DBP, was told by the normally positive Cabiro, ‘Don’t go. It’s a fuck-up.’ Faulques landed back in the camp next day in the middle of a fire-fight.
On the afternoon of 13 March Giap’s ally, the monsoon, arrived and the humidity turned to a sticky drizzle that magicked out of the dirt buzzing swarms of blue flies hungry for the feast that awaited them. Every six seconds a shell landed on the French positions from the 105mm and 75mm howitzers dug in on the reverse slopes of the surrounding hills. Once the French artillery had been neutralised, they would move to the forward slopes and fire ‘down the tubes’. Later still, they would be inside the French positions.
On Béatrice, held by 3/13 DBLE, Lt Col Gaucher and Maj Pégot were watching the Viet trenches closing around them like a pincer. It was the last thing they saw. They and most of the headquarters staff were killed when the command post took a direct hit. Casualties rose to thirty-six dead and wounded as the ruins of the position became a scrap-yard of steel fragments in knee-deep mud with the air stinking of cordite and the vaporised contents of dead men’s bowels.
Simultaneously Giap launched between 5,000 and 6,000 bo-dois in waves against Gabrielle, whose outlying blockhouse was captured, re-taken by a battalion of legionnaires and lost again. The next target was Gabrielle itself. Instead of human waves, this time Giap used artillery and infiltration. A direct hit on the command post from a 75mm wheeled bazooka dragged to within 150 metres killed all the command team. Anne-Marie fell in turn. By 1600 the airstrip was closed to traffic, with the control tower and radio beacon destroyed. The Bearcat fighters had been destroyed on the ground by Viet artillery, with only two of the light observation craft able to take off and make it back to Hanoi.
The ‘lone Jap’ had turned out to be one gun of each Viet battery in turn registering its allotted targets in the valley. The resultant accuracy caused an appalling toll among the crews of the French gun-pits, ringed by sandbags for protection against mortars, but neither dug in nor covered. Having lost two 105mm guns, a quarter of his 75s and a third of the 120mm mortars, one-armed Col Piroth went from pit to pit, apologising to the survivors – and then retired to his quarters, where he pulled the pin out of a grenade with his teeth and held it to his belly.
On 14 March 1954, the second day of the Viet offensive, De Castries was so out of control that he ceased to function as commander, but isolated himself in his bunker, dining off the family porcelain in a dream-world of denial. Instead of sacking him and parachuting in a replacement, Navarre promoted him to Brigadier. The forceful para Lt Col Pierre Langlais became the de facto commander. When criticised afterwards, his answer was typically para: the brass in Hanoi could have dropped in another commander any time, if they did not like what he was doing![29] It is largely to his credit that the valley was held for fifty-four days in the face of overwhelming enemy superiority.
On 15 March communication with the legionnaires on Béatrice was lost as one radio after another was silenced with the loss of 326 men. The last call came from an operator of 9th Company, calling in the fire on himself as the Viets overran his position. It is no exaggeration to say that this was felt by the entire garrison to be an omen: if the Legion could not hold, what hope was there for the rest of them? By the evening, Anne-Marie and Gabrielle, defended by Algerian tirailleurs, had also been overrun.
Within days, the main strip was unusable in the daytime due to accurate shelling of each aircraft that landed in daylight. Medical evacuations continued at night, thanks to a handful of pilots and a team of specialised and very courageous nurses, one of whom was to become the heroine of DBP. By 23 March the road linking the French positions, and along which all supplies had to pass, was also unusable in daylight, even for the volunteer ambulance drivers from 13 DBLE.
The former Resistance hero Col Bigeard, whose Vietnamese paras had dropped in on 20 November and been withdrawn at the end of December, dropped in with them for a second time. On 10 April Cabiro was lying on a stretcher at Bach Mai airbase, waiting to be flown to Saigon en route for France when several former comrades from 2 BEP broke ranks and crossed the hard standing to shake his hand with that peculiar duck-walk imposed by wearing two ’chutes and bulky gear. Shortly afterwards they were in the air heading for DBP in support of their comrades in 1 BEP, eroded by being used as a mobile reserve from the day they dropped in.
They were not the last legionnaires to parachute into the beleaguered camp. A unique if irregular flow of volunteers materialised from the strangest sources, including 120 men from 1st Company of 3 REI and 207 officers and men from 5 REI who had no parachute training. Oddly, the rate of casualties on landing was no higher than for regular paratroops. The voluntary reinforcements continued to arrive until 6 May, even though the later volunteers knew they had a one-way ticket. Their motto was Crever pour crever, autant crever avec les copains. You gotta die sometime, it might as well be with your mates.
In a Saigon military hospital, Cabiro met the elegant wife of Gen Gambiez, whose own son had been killed when an Evasan helicopter in which he was being evacuated after being wounded at DBP was blown out of the air by a Viet shell. In the tradition of service wives, Madame Gambiez had put aside her own grief to come and comfort the pilot, who had lost a leg and was in the room next door to Cabiro.
It was only a matter of time until even medical evacuations from DBP became impossible. On 26 March the last aircraft managed to take off with a load of badly wounded men. The next Evasan flight was not so lucky: 28-year-old convoyeuse nurse Geneviève de Galard could not fly back to Hanoi with her wounded men after a direct hit prevented their Dakota from taking off. Reporting for duty to Surgeon-Major Paul Grauwin, operating twenty-three hours out of twenty-four in mud over his ankles, naked to the waist in the stifling humid heat of the underground operating theatre, she then calmly supervised the main surgical ward of forty beds with frequent electricity cuts and drugs and even dressings in short supply. Personally nursing the most severely wounded men, she was constantly being asked by blinded multiple amputees who had been healthy young men, ‘Vais-je vivre, mademoiselle?’ Am I going to live, miss? Mam’zelle became her nickname. And Grauwin, the senior surgeon on the post, who never asked whether the body on the table in front of him was French or Viet, received the nickname from his Cambodian patients of bac-si kim – the doctor who stitches.
He wrote of this time: ‘Blood, vomit and faeces mixed with the mud made up a frightful compound that stuck to the boots in thick layers. I shall never forget the martyrdom of men wounded in the thorax, trying in vain to get into their lungs the air and oxygen on which their lives depended; and my oxygen cylinders were emptied at a crazy rate. I had to put these patients in the farthest of the Air Commandos’ shelters, where the main passage was not covered over. When I saw them again, a pleural effusion was gently taking them to their deaths.[30]
‘I saw a long line of muddy statues – but they were moving, groping their way along the walls. Under their layers of mud they were quite naked. One of them had a leg missing. How had he managed to get here? Another had only one eye. Then men with plaster on their shoulders, their thorax, their legs. There was mud over everything, dressings and plaster.[31]
‘After the last operat
ion I staggered half-conscious towards the rectangle of grey light down there at the end of the passage. Then I heard a small voice whispering somewhere behind me, “Oh, I would like to go to sleep and never, never wake up again.” I turned and saw Geneviève leaning against the wall behind me, quietly crying.’[32]
From the night of Geneviève’s arrival air drops of supplies brought in about twelve tons daily, or one-fifth of the minimum requirement. The pouring rain and low cloud forced aircraft to fly in low where they were sitting ducks for the anti-aircraft batteries. By the end of the battle, the French had lost 62 aircraft with another 167 damaged. So short of machines and men were they that crews were hired from US-operated Civil Air Transport Company, whose pilots said the intensity of Viet Minh anti-aircraft fire over the approaches to the valley was worse than they had known in Korea or the Second World War over Germany.
One counter-attack by tanks and infantry including men from 13 DBLE was made to take out some of the anti-aircraft positions in the hills near Claudine. Five 20mm guns and various machine guns were destroyed and 300 enemy killed, but it made no difference. And when Claudine was abandoned, one of the last men of 13 DBLE to leave said, ‘We killed masses, but always more came, jumping over the bodies of the others.’[33]
Knee-deep in water, slipping and sliding in the mud, the Viet Minh sappers inched their trenches nearer and nearer to Dominique and Eliane. On 30 March when the final human wave came in, the colonial gunners depressed the barrels of their guns to fire horizontally. This and the scything fire from the quad-fifties – a Second World War mating of four .50 calibre machine guns with synchronised feeds – caused the Viets to retreat blindly into a newly laid minefield. Survivors of 2 BEP, 8th Assault Regiment and 6th Colonial Paras managed to re-take the hill called Eliane 2 at the cost of several hundred lives. They need not have bothered. Under cover of a mortar barrage, the Viets re-took it anyway.