by Ian Slater
In fact, the new battle of Dien Bien Phu would not begin with all of Freeman’s Special Forces in an LZ position and the Chinese in position around the valley, but would start in earnest around 1630 with the sixty Echo and Foxtrot troops making their way back to Delta, and the Chinese having only half their artillery set up. In short, the situation was what Echo’s Leigh-Hastings would refer to as your usual run-of-the-mill cockup.
* * *
Two hundred fifty miles to the northeast, the winding summit of Disney Hill was still in American hands, due to the bravery of Vinh’s USVUN contingent. In hand-to-hand fighting they had finished off many of the Chinese troops forced to vacate their warrens because of flash flooding. It wasn’t that the Americans were backward in going forward with a bayonet, but most were equipped with the 203 rifle with grenade launcher tube underneath the barrel to which a bayonet could not be attached.
Though it was a battle where each side was looking for a knockout blow, both knew it would be a seesaw fight, depending as much on the reliability of supplies to the men at the front as on fighting ability. The mist had only partially cleared, and hung low in the valleys, stretching back north into China, where a two-engine train over a mile long could be seen, safe from U.S. TACAIR, bringing guns, food, and ammunition to the PLA battalions in the smaller hills and revetments cloistered about the base of Disney.
Now, more U.S. air cavalry troops and supplies were being unloaded at the southern base of Disney. It wouldn’t make up for the awesome tonnage being hauled by what Doolittle, Martinez, and D’Lupo were already calling Von Wei’s Express, but Freeman was trying to get “bananas”—Chinook choppers with slings — to ferry 105mm howitzers, made lighter than the usual field 105mms because of aluminum parts — in behind the southern side of the hill, in order to try knocking out the PLA storage areas beyond Disney. But all there was behind Disney now was an inland sea, following Freeman’s prayer for good weather, a prayer he was asked about at a quick but intensive news conference later that evening.
* * *
“Weather prayer?” he said, face perplexed, feigning ignorance. “I don’t petition the good Lord for good weather to kill my fellow man! The United States Army—” Cline whispered in his ear. “—ah,” began the general again, “the USVUN forces do battle no matter what the weather.”
After the conference it was Cline’s turn to be perplexed. “Ah, sir, General?”
“Yes.”
“Man-to-man, General.”
“All right, man-to-man.”
“Sir, why did you — lie about the weather prayer?”
“Well, in the interests of press accuracy, the padre gave the prayer. I merely requested it.”
There was a long pause as they walked back to the operations room. “You’re right, Bob. I lied. Tell you the truth, I don’t know why. Guess I’ve been getting some pretty lousy press lately, and I thought — well, hell, I shouldnt’ve done it. I’m sorry. I’ll correct it in my memoirs if I don’t get killed here. By God, how do they expect me to fight without TACAIR over Chinese territory?”
“Chinese haven’t got TACAIR over us, General.”
“No, because our boys’d knock ‘em out of the sky, that’s why.”
“Well,” Cline said, “at least we can go in over Dien Bien Phu with TACAIR.”
“When this foul weather clears — if it ever does. Thing I’m most worried about is that damn no-stop supply train Wei has at his service. Like having a damn Wal-Mart at his beck and call.”
“We can’t send troops across the line, General.”
“No, damn it, but we can try pushing their butts past it.”
* * *
Near Dien Bien Phu, Colonel Berry’s men were making their way back toward Delta when they ran into a squad of PLA hauling a wheel for an artillery piece. Both sides instantly disappeared, except for the man with the wheel, and he was dead in seconds, his body having literally disintegrated on the trail.
Both sides went quickly into defensive positions and froze. It looked like it was going to stay that way for quite a while, until another PLA squad came across the first, took their cue from the one downed wheel, and evaporated into the mist-shrouded jungle, each side knowing that come nightfall the other side would be laying trip wires and mines.
The Chinese had the best of this situation, because Foxtrot had to get past them before they reached the Dien Bien Phu valley.
On the far side of the valley, five to six miles away and high above the valley floor, elements of Wang’s Chengdu army had already installed several AA batteries of SU-23-2 twin 23mm guns, each twin capable of firing two thousand rounds a minute, should any American aircraft be foolhardy enough to come down into the mist-roofed valley. Along with the SU-23mm, there were banks of M1938 12.7mm dual-purpose machine guns set in the antiaircraft configuration, threatening any chopper that came within three thousand feet with six hundred rounds of flak a minute.
The Chinese paras had brought the dual-purpose 12.7mm guns, but the much heavier four-crew 23mm AA guns, whose wheels collapsed in the firing position, had been hauled by vehicle as far south as possible from Mengzi in China, then manhandled by the infantry over torrential rain-swollen rivers and poor secondary roads to Dien Bien Phu. But for the Chinese, the “piece de la resistance,” as Pierre LaSalle reported gleefully, was the Chinese 122mm self-propelled howitzer, whose range, over 22,000 meters, meant they could “pummel,” as LaSalle put it in Le Monde, any American-USVUN position in the valley. It was also mounted on a PT-76 tank chassis with an in-water speed of ten kilometers. And these were only the guns that Delta’s Ranger scouts had pinpointed.
There was no doubt in Freeman’s mind that the Chinese did not merely want to defeat Freeman’s Special Forces at Dien Bien Phu, but were intent on humiliating the Americans as the Viet Minh had the French almost fifty years ago. Whoever won Dien Bien Phu would eclipse the famous General Giap, would defeat the white man again. For the French, an American defeat would not only exonerate France for the loss in ‘54, but would, as Pierre LaSalle put it, “cut the Americans down to size.” The only hope the Americans might have, Freeman knew, was TACAIR support, and even then it would be touch and go, so long as the valley was locked in by foul weather.
“Goddamn it!” Freeman said, venting his frustration. “On my northern front at Disney I’ve got clearing conditions, though it’s still raining, but I can’t send U.S. aircraft across the parallel. On my western flank, where I’m allowed to use TACAIR, I have foul weather, locking in our flyboys and our ground forces. Life isn’t fair, Major.”
“No, sir. But there is another alternative.”
“You suggest it,” Freeman said, “and I’ll cut you off at the waist!” Before Cline could say anything, Freeman said it for him. “I know there are only about nine thousand of our boys, and maybe ten, twenty times that many Chinese around us, but the international political situation we’d create if we were to surrender, to give up without a fight, would be—” He paused. “—catastrophic! The world’s superpower beaten by chinks. Good God, if that happened, we might as well give up on any oil claim anywhere in the world’s oceans, and not just in the South China Sea. No one would take us seriously. Might as well say, ‘Take the Spratlys, take the Paracels — take any damn thing you like!’ No one could rely on us.”
His fist slammed against the map and caused a six on the Richter scale from Dien Bien Phu to Ningming. “No, Bob, whatever happens, we have to hold at Dien Bien Phu, and we have to push the bastards back at Disney. There’re only two points of battle along the whole line — I realize that — but they are the two plays the whole world is watching. If we win them, we win them all. They’re the two hard-ass cases. Besides, if you hadn’t noticed, we haven’t yet rescued one single MIA!”
The general walked back and forth, pausing every now and then to thwack his jodhpurs with a riding crop. It was an affectation he took from Patton, as Patton had taken his from others. Abruptly, he turned to Cline. “Heard some
damned sitrep last night saying some of our boys atop Disney could see horses — through the big binoculars.”
“Horses?” Cline said.
“Horses!” Freeman repeated. “Don’t know what that frog reporter’ll make of it. That kind of Frenchman would love to see us lose. Probably say all we have against us is Chinese cavalry.”
* * *
It was Chinese cavalry, used largely as packhorses nowadays to subdue minorities, such as the Tibetans, in hard-to-get places. But this day they were hunting the POWs from what official communiqués to the Zhongnanhai HQ in Beijing were calling the breakout at Ningming. Upshut was told bluntly by the Ningming divisional commander that he would be executed for gross negligence of duty unless all forty-two — the morning count had found another five missing — POWs were recovered, dead or alive.
Already he had caught seventeen — women and mostly older men, Americans, Australians, and Brits, ex-rig foremen, beer bellies, out of condition, and nothing but boiled rice and swill since their captivity.
“Seventeen,” Upshut repeated proudly if nervously to the divisional commander.
“Good, comrade. That only leaves twenty-five unaccounted for.”
The horses and riders were getting tired, but Upshut kept them at it. Any man who failed to catch a prisoner would be executed.
* * *
Of the remaining twenty-five, most of them, including Mike Murphy, Trang, Shirley Fortescue, and Danny Mellin, were nearest the railway, shivering, chilled, and hungry. But at least the cavalry were not paying the area near the tracks much attention, leaving it instead to the guards, one posted by Wei every fifty yards along the length of the rail line.
Danny Mellin and Shirley Fortescue were ahead of Murphy and Trang, wading in the paddies adjacent to the Ningming-Xiash road, the rain still falling. It brought with it a mist that, with the turbulence in the paddies caused by the rain, would hide them from view unless they were to get too close to the flooded road.
Despite the chill and the slimy leeches they could feel sucking blood from every part of their bodies, they did not let up. Mellin and Shirley were now closer to the road than Murphy and Trang, Mellin whispering to Shirley that he was going out to get them.
“Why? Aren’t they safer the farther out they are?”
“This paddy is giving way to flooded fields where there’ll be more cover as—”
“You mean we have to wade for fourteen miles to the border?”
“No. Sooner we can get onto the unflooded part of the road between Ningming and Xiash, the better, but I might need Mike’s help.”
“Doing what?”
“I’ll explain later,” Mellin said, and nodded to one of the many tree islands, about a quarter mile from a long section of road that, unlike the elevated rail line above it, was well underwater, several trucks bogged down. “Wait over there for us. Rest up a bit. Won’t be long.”
Dragging herself to the base of the tree island, up through tall, slimy elephant grass, Shirley hoped none of the specks she could see, which were guards on the rail line, was using binoculars.
It was something she needn’t have worried about, for even given the vital role the railway was playing in the battle of Disney, the People’s Liberation Army — or any other army in the world, for that matter — wasn’t flush enough to provide each soldier with a pair of ten-power field glasses. Though the day wasn’t cold, she was shivering from having been so long in the water. As the sun climbed higher, the entire countryside steamed with moisture evaporating, so thick in parts that, as if in a mirage, some of the Chinese cavalry seemed disembodied from their mounts.
The elephant grass gave way to a patch of brown grass where a deadly black and yellow krait was curled up, basking in the early sun. It struck out. She dodged, letting out a yell. The snake vanished. A cavalryman heard her. So did Mellin and others. Almost immediately she heard the sloshing of water against her tiny island. She could hear Danny Mellin’s voice but couldn’t see him, though he’d barely left her before she’d seen the snake.
“Shirley, one of them’s seen you. Make out you’ve hurt your leg. Can’t move.”
“I’m sorry, Danny, I—”
“No matter — just stay where you are.”
* * *
Within a few minutes a mounted PLA trooper, his horse making a loud, sloshing noise, looked down at her imperiously, his right hand waving a revolver at her to get up. She made a pathetic-sounding plea. “My leg.” She pointed. “It’s hurt. I can’t—”
A stick of wood as thick as a man’s arm and about four feet long shot up from the mist and bashed the trooper’s head. He slumped on the frightened horse’s neck.
“Didn’t you hear her, you bastard? She’s fallen and she can’t get up!”
“Mike — what are you — I thought Danny—”
“I’m here too,” Danny told her, coming around from the blind side of the tree island.
Shirley nodded at Trang, who had the horse by the bridle, talking soothingly to the animal in Cantonese.
“Maybe he only understands Mandarin,” Mike joked.
“He understands love,” Trang said.
“Well, keep him on this side,” Mike said, “where they can’t see much from the railway. Trang, I hope you can ride.”
“Of course.”
“Swap clothes with him,” Mike said. “No, I don’t mean the bloody horse!” They all laughed, all on the edge of that hysteria that comes in the wake of near disaster, a sense of overwhelming relief that Danny Mellin knew he had to get on top of lest it make them foolhardy.
Trang changed into the mounted trooper’s uniform and, using the coiled rope on the saddle’s pommel, Danny, Shirley, and Murphy tied themselves into a line of three prisoners.
“Trang!” Danny called. “Take it slow. Parallel to the rail line, but don’t go in close till you see a culvert. And Trang…”
The Asian looked down at the American. “Yes?”
“Make sure you can get that Kalashnikov and sling off in a hurry.”
“I will. Who has the Malenkov?” He meant the Soviet-made handgun.
“I do,” Murphy said. “Hope it fires after it’s been wet.”
“I hope we don’t have to use it,” Danny said.
“So do I,” Shirley echoed. “But what happens if another rider sees us?”
“Then,” Murphy said nonchalantly, “I’ll hit him with the fucking stick!”
Trang spotted a culvert then, about a quarter mile west of them. It was difficult to tell exactly, but Mellin figured the culvert itself looked about a quarter mile long. For his plan to work, a culvert was better than open track. “Keep a watch out for the maintenance sheds along the track,” he told the others. “There should be one every couple of miles.”
“ ‘Bout the size of a dunny,” Murphy explained. “An outhouse!”
Despite her fatigue, Shirley found the Australian’s buoyant mood infectious, and she began giggling uncontrollably, as one sometimes does when physically and nervously exhausted.
“Trang,” Danny said, “give me his knife.”
Shirley suddenly stopped laughing as she realized what had happened to the luckless cavalryman — that Murphy’s blow had killed him, that they were at war with the Chinese.
Soon they were passing more islands on the flooded plain. At one point another PLA cavalryman waved and Trang waved back, his three prisoners strung out behind him. “My God,” Murphy,said. “I almost waved to him.”
“C’mon,” Mellin said sternly. “I know we’re all dog-tired, but let’s stay with it. If we can—”
A horn beeped. Soldiers by a bogged truck were waving for Trang to come on and bring the prisoners in.
“Shit!” Murphy said. “If Trang doesn’t take us in, they’ll suspect something.”
“We’ve got no choice,” Danny said. “Now listen, here’s what we do. Go in close. Wave, Trang, but tell them you have to take your POWs to the culvert.”
There was more hor
n blowing. Shirley was more frightened than she’d been the day she was taken from her rig. She knew why the soldiers wanted them to come in — they had seen her soaking wet — and Danny Mellin knew too. Everybody did. But there was no option.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
The battle of Disney Hill was swinging back in favor of the Chinese, whose supply trains kept bringing up ammunition and more soldiers. But once they moved below the 22nd parallel and into USVUN territory, they came under devastating TACAIR support. It was provided by one of the oldest aircraft in the U.S. inventory, the Skyraider, capable of carrying more ordnance than its own weight, and with a loiter time that made it the sentimental favorite by far of those downed pilots who— while waiting for rescue pickup from the relatively slow Skyraider — would hang around and shoot up anything that tried to get near them before they could be rescued by chopper.
It was a paradoxical military situation, since the more territory Freeman’s army gained — by pushing farther north — the less it could depend on TACAIR, because of the Washington-decreed inviolability of Chinese airspace beyond the Chinese-Vietnamese border. In Washington the “Yalu” complex was alive and well in the State Department from the days of the deep-seated American fear of an all-out nuclear battle between the United States and China.
But for D’Lupo, Doolittle, Martinez, and all the others in the seesaw battle of Disney Hill, politics was a bullshit land where men in three-piece suits talked diplomatese over café latte while the men on the line were dying for yards.
And it was now that General Freeman gave another controversial order: that Melbaine’s battalion was not to seek any ground farther than the ridgeline of Disney Hill, for at least that way if Wei’s forces crossed the 22nd parallel in force, they would be open to unrestricted TACAIR as well as artillery bombardment.
“Fine!” Doolittle growled. “Why don’t we just pull back into the rice paddies and let ‘em have the whole fucking lousy hill?”