While an increasing flow of American dollars, weapons, vehicles and aircraft in the early 1950s did improve the fire and mobility of the CEFEO, they could not offset the fundamental disadvantages of a roadbound army facing a hill and forest army in a country which had few roads but a great many hills and forests.
(The Last Valley, page 129)
This is a really epic book about an epic battle. Its full title is The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam and it does what it says on the tin at immense length and in fascinating detail, clocking in at a whopping 734 pages, including detailed endnotes, bibliography, list of acronyms, no fewer than 21 maps, and a thorough index. It clearly sets out to be the definitive account of this military debacle.
1. Background
The first hundred or so pages take us through the origins and early stages of the First Indochina War (1946 to 1954). Vietnam had been part of French colonial Indochina since the 1850s, a colonial territory which was consolidated at the turn of the twentieth century. The higher education the French offered the natives ironically educated a generation of Vietnamese to demand greater freedom and independence.
The most notable of these nationalists was Ho Chi Minh (born 1890) who travelled to France after World War One and tried to contact the American delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference, hoping that President Woodrow Wilson would apply his Fourteen Points to Europe’s colonies – particularly French Indochina – and secure their independence. But young Ho’s letters to the President went unanswered.
Rebuffed, Ho set about educating himself in communist doctrine and guerrilla tactics, travelling to Soviet Moscow to study, then returning to Vietnam where he helped set up the Indochina Communist Party in 1930 and then helped weld the various disparate Vietnamese nationalist groups into a united front, the Viet Minh, in 1941.
After the Fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940, the French authorities in Indochina (as in France’s other colonies) switched allegiance to the new Vichy government, a fascist puppet state which the Nazis allowed to administer the south of France and the French Empire.
On September 27, 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, which became known as the Axis alliance. Japanese forces entered French Indochina and took over all important administrative powers from the Vichy French. The native Vietnamese (and Laotians and Cambodians) watched in wonder as their European imperial masters were humiliated by fellow Asians. In a culture based on ‘face’, the French empire in the East (like the British one) never recovered from the loss of face involved in their feeble surrender to the Japanese.
France was finally liberated by the Allies in late 1944 and the Vichy regime was overthrown. This put the Vichy administrators in Indochina in a tricky position vis-a-vis their Japanese masters and the growing tension came to a head in March 1945 when the Japanese rounded up the Vichy forces, locking them up in Japanese prison camps and executing anyone who resisted (‘In Saigon the senior military and civil prisoners, General Lemonnier and Resident Auphalle, were beheaded after being forced to dig their own graves,’ page 81.)
In the six months between Japan’s seizure of power and the final Japanese defeat in September 1945, the Japanese left the Viet Minh to their own devices, allowing them to organise and set up cells throughout the country. The Japanese concentrated their efforts on pillaging Vietnam’s food resources to feed Japan, leading to the catastrophic famine of 1945 in which well over one million Vietnamese starved to death.
When the Japanese finally surrendered in August 1945, the Viet Minh, led by Ho, their by-now veteran organiser, immediately declared Vietnamese independence to cheering crowds and amid nationwide rejoicing. Frederick Logevall’s epic account of the period, Embers of War, includes eyewitness accounts by the handful of Americans on the scene, who were amazed and impressed when Ho quoted the American Declaration of Independence. Like the Americans, the Vietnamese just wanted to be free from an imperial oppressor.
Which makes the tragedy all the more bitter, which makes you want to weep tears of frustration, when you read how the Americans under President Truman abandoned their wartime commitment to liberate colonial peoples, and instead stood behind General de Gaulle’s typically arrogant insistence that all of Indochina must be returned to French Imperial rule.
As per the agreement made between the Big Three powers (the USA, Britain, USSR) at Potsdam earlier in 1945, a ragtag army from nationalist China was allowed to occupy the north of the country, and a division of the British Indian army occupied the south, the idea being that they would maintain the peace until the French military returned.
Through late 1945 into spring 1946 the French armed forces arrived from Europe, determined to restore the status quo ante, immediately rounding up any nationalists foolish enough to trust them, amid an atmosphere of mistrust and tension. Scattered moments of resistance quickly grew into a guerrilla insurgency across the country, in the north and south, which was crystallised in a dispute over customs dues in the port of Haiphong. On November 26 1946 the French navy bombarded the city, seriously damaging it and killing over 6,000 civilians, in just one afternoon. After such a massacre by the country’s ‘protectors’, there was no going back (page 90).
2. The first Indochina war
So by 1947 France found itself drawn into an unwinnable guerrilla war against an enemy who mostly refused open battle in preference for urban terrorist attacks and hit-and-run guerrilla operations in the steamy jungles of northern Vietnam. In a way the 8 years of war, from 1946 to 1954, are footnotes to, or simply the logical consequence of, the fatal initial French decision to reoccupy the country against the express wishes of the majority of the population.
The French military struggled to contain an insurgency which was so unpredictable and where the terrain and the people were so much on the side of the insurgents. French generals arrived in Indochina full of enthusiasm and confidence, slowly grasped the hopelessness of the situation, and ended up writing bleak reports back to Paris, while all the time little convoys and isolated outposts were ambushed and annihilated.
Back in Paris the governments of the Fourth Republic proved themselves as addicted to bickering and posturing as the French governments before the war had been, lacking – in a neat formulation of Windrow’s – either the strength to prosecute the war with conviction (to implement conscription and triple the number of French troops in Vietnam) or the political courage to face the facts and agree to talks with the Viet Minh.
The situation underwent a sea change in October 1949 when Mao Zedong’s communist forces finally secured power in war-torn China. Mao immediately set about sending supplies to the Viet Minh and Windrow describes how military training camps were set up in south China for cohorts of Viet Minh forces to attend – learning the skills of organisation, rifle, machine gun, mortar and artillery technique.
Reading the history of this period has taught me that the fall of China to communism caused massive recriminations in American politics, with a wave of republicans queueing up to accuse President Truman’s Democrat government of being ‘soft on communism’. The American political atmosphere was paranoid even before communist North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, precipitating America into a bloody three-year struggle in support of the beleaguered south.
All this turned the independence struggle in Vietnam into a cauldron of the Cold War and, especially after the Korean War ground to a long-delayed armistice in summer 1953, the two sides (Viet Minh and French) were supplied ever increasing amounts of arms and matériel by their respective backers (China and America). By the time the Indochina war ground to a halt in 1954, the United States was paying three-quarters of the cost of the war.
3. Dien Bien Phu
In 1951 and 1952 there were larger-scale engagements as the Vietnam Liberation Army’s self-taught general, Vo Ngyen Giáp, experimented with larger attacks on French positions around Hanoi in the North. Windrow describes each of these in meticulous detail, with precise maps showing troop dispositions in staggering detail, and there are very precise maps for each of them, so that you can follow the night’s or day’s events with great precision.
November and December 1952 saw the Battle of Nà Sản. Giáp attacked the French outpost at Nà Sản, an isolated fortified camp in Tonkin supplied only by air. Giáp sent wave after wave of Viet Minh infantry in direct attack, but these either failed, or the territory they seized was immediately retaken by aggressive French paratroop units. Ultimately, Giáp failed, with the Viet Minh suffering very heavy losses.
In May 1953 French General Henri Navarre was dispatched to Vietnam with orders to bring the situation to some kind of resolution favourable for possible negotiations. He based himself in Hanoi in the north of the country, where the Viet Minh were strongest. His first priority was maintaining security in the corridor from Hanoi down to the port of Haiphong and in the broader delta of the Red River. Late in the year he launched an anti-insurgency operation in the middle of the country, the territory known as Annam.
But the idea slowly took shape of deliberately recreating the Nà Sản experience on an even larger scale with the aim of drawing Giáp into committing the bulk of the Viet Minh forces – also known as the Vietnam Liberation Army (VLA) – into a massed assault which would allow superior French artillery, armour and air support to decimate them.
Given France’s total domination of the air, the idea developed that the base used to draw the Viet Minh in would be supplied by air, and air forces would also help to decimate all the VPA units brought against it.
Windrow charts the process whereby various factors led the French to decide to locate this ‘air-land base’ at the remote settlement of Dien Bien Phu. Dien was actually a straggle of small villages in a long narrow valley far in the north-west of the country. It was given strategic value by being a kind of crossroads for Viet Minh forces coming from China and/or heading south-west to threaten French-occupied Laos.
Plans were drawn up to parachute in over 10,000 men, mainly crack paratroop regiments and Foreign Legionaries, along with vast amounts of equipment, including 10 Chaffee tanks and bulldozers to create a working airstrip. Operation Castor, as it was called, commenced on 20 November 1953.
Once the airstrip was laid, old Dakota transport planes from the Second World War began flying in scores of artillery guns, hundreds of mortars, vast amounts of ammunition and everything required to build a huge military encampment in the long narrow valley. During this set-up phase there was little or no sight of the enemy and countless politicians and journalists flew in to be impressed by the might and power of the French Army. In fact, right from the start, a lot of the planes, crews and equipment were supplied by the Americans.
4. Catastrophe
The entire project rested on a number of assumptions or propositions:
1. Dominance in the air would prove decisive, so that:
- supplies could be dropped indefinitely
- wounded taken out by air
- new men brought in
- Vietnam Liberation Army forces could be identified from the air and wiped out
- VLA artillery could be identified from the air and wiped out
2. The VLA would not be able to get their artillery over the high ridges surrounding the valley, and if they did they’d be wiped out from the air.
3. The base could be used for offensive attacks on VLA supply lines.
In the event, every one of these assumptions proved false. The few attempts to go out on offensive patrol were beaten back by the encircling VLA with heavy French losses. As January changed to February the early monsoon brought fog and mist, drastically reducing flights in and out of the airstrip. The VLA went to extraordinary lengths to camouflage their supply tracks, bending trees over to be tied in the middle above jungle paths, meticulously camouflaging each other’s uniforms and helmets and, most effectively, only moving at night. The VLA did manage to haul their heavy guns over the ridges, in heroic efforts which Windrow describes at length. This took the French completely by surprise. And then the VLA dug them into deeply embedded fissures and caves with huge overhangs of solid rock. For the entire battle the French struggled to locate the attacking guns and, despite dropping hundreds of tons of explosives, didn’t destroy a single one.
French intelligence knew that Giáp was building up large forces around the base and expected an attack in late January. By 31 January the French were completely surrounded. The battle proper started on 13 March 1954 with a devastating barrage of one of the most remote outposts of the base. (In a hilariously French touch, it is alleged that the nine or so outcrops of the base, located on small hillocks scattered along the valley, were named after mistresses of the womanising camp commander, Colonel Christian de Castries – hence the names camp Elaine, camp Beatrice, camp Gabriele and so on.)
That first evening’s barrage destroyed lots of French illusions. It was as intense as a Great War artillery attack and ranged freely from the intended target (the most isolated stronghold, ‘Beatrice’) across the entire camp, damaging the airstrip, threatening command HQ deep in the compound, and killing key commanders at Beatrice within half an hour. De Castries’ chief of staff had a nervous breakdown on that first night from which he never recovered. It took only a few more days of similarly intense barrage for the French artillery commander, Charles Piroth, to realise that: a) the VLA had brought their artillery over the mountains, b) they had hidden them so effectively they couldn’t even be located let alone neutralised by the French from the ground, c) air attacks were similarly ineffective. Plunging into a depression, after only a week the chief of staff withdrew to his hut and killed himself with a hand grenade. La gloire!
Windrow then proceeds to describe the 56 day-long ordeal of the French forces as they were slowly, systematically reduced, the VLA targeting one stronghold after another, softening them up with overwhelming artillery attacks and then sending wave after wave of fanatical VLA troops against the French forces. The French troops showed episodes of tremendous courage but time and again were borne down by the sheer numbers of the enemy.
(In one of the book’s countless insights, Windrow highlights the narrowness and inflexibility of Giáp’s own tactics which were, in essence, exactly the same as First World War tactics – dig trenches close up to the enemy positions, fire a devastating bombardment, then pour endless troops into the breach, regardless of horrendous losses.)
Windrow
What makes Windrow’s account distinctive is the immense detailed attention he pays to every aspect of the military side of the battle. For example:
- He devotes pages to a minute breakdown of the exact structure of the Viet Minh / VLA, giving the names and numbers of each division, brigade, along with the respective generals and senior officers.
- He explains the threefold division of the Viet Minh forces, into: local irregulars based in villages who provided support; militia based in villages who were organised to carry out small scale engagements; and regular army who were fully trained and lived in jungle ‘barracks’ high up in the inaccessible hill and jungle territory of North Tonkin, near the Chinese border.
- He gives comprehensive histories of all the French divisions, regiments and battalions involved in the battle, down to platoon and squad level of all the French forces.
I have never read such an exhaustive account of a sustained military operation, such a precise breakdown of the forces involved, nor such a minute-by-minute narrative of almost every parachute that opens, every canon that fires, every machine gun blockhouse which fights on to the death.
Hundreds of pages are filled with comprehensive blow-by-blow descriptions of every unit involved in the battle, clotted with division or regimental or battalion numbers, commanders and personnel, sometimes amounting to lists of acronyms and locations which can get quite confusing. This is a typical paragraph chosen from thousands like it:
The withdrawing Group East consisted of Colonel Barrou’s GM 100, the Vietnamese light infantry unit TDKQ 520, and irregular scouts. Although much harried over the past five months this motorised brigade had a fine reputation; its infantry were the two-battalion Régiment de Corée – the former French UN battalion from the Korean War, expanded by local recruitment – and BM/43 RIC, a good unit enlisted mainly from ethnic Khmers from western Cochinchina. Coming to meet them in Lieutenant Colonel Sockeel’s Group West were GM 42, built on three montagnard battalions recruited among Rhadés from around Ban Me Thuot; each brigade had the usual 105mm artillery battalion and a few Stuart tanks from the 5th Cuirassiers. Group West also had a small airborne brigade: GAP 1, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Romain-Defossés, with 7 BPC (Major Balbin) and 3 BPVN (Major Mollo). (page 634)
Learnings
The Last Valley is a profoundly instructive book because it takes you so deeply and exhaustively into every aspect of the battle – not only into the experience of the men fighting in the trenches and front line of each stronghold, but giving a complete account of all the orders issued, signals sent and plans devised both by General Navarre and his staff in Hanoi, and by de Castries and his staff in the camp, as well as insights into the challenges faced by the different air forces which were involved in the non-stop drop and resupply of the base. We get to know many of the officers, including the legendary Lieutenant-Colonel Marcel Bigeard and Colonel Pierre Langlais.
Windrow doesn’t lose sight of the wider context, for the battle was only part of the larger French strategy, and Navarre had, throughout its bitter course, also to defend the Mekong Delta and to provision his ongoing campaign in Annam.
One of the book’s major revelations is that most of the French forces fighting in the battle were not strictly French, for they included a large number of native forces, both Vietnamese and Thai regiments recruited from the locality, as well as a large number of Algerian forces, and colonial troops from French West African countries such as Senegal.
A significant number of battalions were from the French Foreign Legion, none of whose men were French and a frisson goes through the reader to learn that many of these men were former Wehrmacht soldiers who had various reasons to flee Europe with no questions asked.
At regular intervals Windrow pauses his narrative to explain aspects of warfare, always writing with clarity and common sense.
- He gives a detailed technical explanation of artillery shell fire, how it works, what it feels like and the kind of wounds it inflicts (pages 371 to 374).
- What it’s like inside a tank (hot, cramped, blind, poisoned by fumes) (pages 448 to 449).
- How a flamethrower works and what the flames looked like and did (page 504).
One of these digressions is the best description of what motivates men to fight I think I’ve ever read.
The section were the soldier’s closest comrades – his copains, mates or buddies; he marched, fought, ate and slept beside them, and came to know them as well as he had known his childhood brothers. It would be absurd to imagine that every soldier likes and trusts all the men in his squad; nevertheless, every serious study of human motivation among combat soldiers confirms that the key to a man’s behaviour in battle is his feeling of mutual dependence and obligation towards these immediate comrades. Today many veterans of serious and prolonged combat are not embarrassed to use the word love. This unique sense of unselfish fellowship forged in shared ordeals is the principal reward of soldiering, and its rupture by the death of friends is the most painful price. (p.176)
This put me in mind of all those accounts of British officers in the First World War who came to love their men, and were upset to be separated from them, by different postings or injury. The war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon write eloquently of this soldierly love, and only a force this powerful and primeval can explain why, right up to the end, French troops were still being parachuted into Dien Bien Phu to fight alongside their fellow Legionnaires or Parachute divisions, in a cause which was obviously hopelessly lost.
The Geneva Conference
As the battle grew more intense, preparations began for a major conference of diplomats and politicians to be held in Geneva, designed to bring together all the interested parties in South-East Asia (China, Russia, America, Britain, France) in order to address the aftermath of the Korean War as well as the situation in Indochina. Though it hadn’t been planned this way, political and military commanders on both sides (Ho and Giáp, Navarre and de Castries) now realised that the outcome of the Battle at Dien Bien Phu could well determine the outcome of the conference, and thus the entire fate of the French Empire in Asia.
Also the open access given to journalists from the start ensured that the battle had more, and more graphic, coverage on French radio, in newspapers and magazines, than previous confrontations. The struggle against overpowering odds of their brave boys in the jungle seized the French imagination more powerfully than any previous engagement in the eight-year-old war. As the situation became progressively more grim so did the mood of the French public.
I hadn’t really grasped how fragile France was after the Second World War. There were some 19 different governments between 1945 and 1954, many lasting only months, as the relentless backbiting of a host of extreme parties, including a powerful communist party, stymied any administration’s ability to govern.
Amid a welter of parliamentary backstabbing, and recriminations among the generals and between military and politicians, Dien Bien Phu eventually fell to the Viet Minh on 7 May 1954.
But, as Windrow harrowingly shows, the misery for the surviving French soldiers was only just starting because around half of the prisoners of war taken by the Viet Minh died on the long jungle marches to distant POW camps, or in the camps themselves, due to malnutrition and disease, a process he describes with characteristically grim thoroughness.
A thoroughly demoralised French government announced its intention to quit Indochina, despite the readiness of many, including General Navarre, to fight on. The Geneva Conference agreed to partition Vietnam along the 17th parallel, handing the north – Tonkin – to the Viet Minh, while the south was to be under the ‘democratic’ rule of the puppet emperor Bao Dai. Even before the French had left, Americans were appearing in numbers to give political, strategic and material aid to the southern regime, a further decisive step towards their entanglement in what became known as the Vietnam War, a decade later.
Right to the end Windrow’s book is full of fascinating insights. The final pages explain how many of the survivors of the Indochina campaign found themselves immediately redeployed to French Algeria, where the first attacks by the Front for National Liberation took place in October 1954, just a few weeks after the French had evacuated Hanoi.
He goes on to describe how many French soldiers felt betrayed by the lack of political and military support at Dien Bien Phu. The suffering was on such a scale that for the whole cause they were fighting for – to preserve the French Empire in the Far East – to be overthrown in just a few weeks of political haggling in Switzerland seemed like a grotesque betrayal. This laid the seeds of the growing alienation of the French Army in Algeria, which saw a similar betrayal by politicians beginning to take shape and led to the creation of the Organisation Armée Secrète, which was to wage a terrorist campaign against French politicians, and eventually try to mount a military coup in 1962.
For France herself, that was to be one of the legacies of Dien Bien Phu. For America, it was to be dragged into a catastrophic war which permanently damaged the country. For the poor Vietnamese it was to be another 20 years of war before they finally secured their hard-won independence.
Credit
The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam by Martin Windrow was published in 2004 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. All references are to the 2005 Cassell Military Paperback edition.
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