Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu

699 Pages·2002·13.38 MB·English

by  Bernard B. Fall

BERNARD B. FALL
To Dorothy
who lived with the ghosts of Dien Bien Phu for three long years

THERE HAVE been, even in recent history, many sieges which lasted longer
than the French Union garrison's defense of a small town in the northeastern
corner of Viet-Nam with the unlikely name of "Seat of the Border County
Prefecture," or, in Vietnamese, Dien Bien Phu.
The French reoccupation of the valley lasted a total of 209 days, and the actual
siege 56 days. The Germans held Stalingrad for 76 days, while the Americans
held Bataan for 66 days and Corregidor for 26; British and Commonwealth
troops defended Tobruk once for 241 days. The record World War II siege was
no doubt that of the French coastal fortress of Lorient, held by German troops
for 270 days from 1944 until VE-day. Many of the major sieges of recent years
involved large numbers of troops on both sides: there were 330,000 German
troops encircled at Stalingrad at the beginning of the siege, and the Soviet troops
which encircled them numbered over one million. In comparison, Dien Bien
Phu, with a garrison which barely exceeded 13,000 men at any one moment, and
a Viet-Minh siege force totaling 49,500 combatants and 55,000 support troops,
could hardly qualify as a major battle, let alone a decisive one.
Yet that is exactly what it was, and in a way which makes it one of the truly
decisive battles of the twentieth century-in the same sense that the First Battle of
the Marne, Stalingrad, and Midway were decisive in their times: although
hostilities continued after the particular battle-sometimes for years-the whole
"tone" of the conflict, as it were, had changed. One of the sides in the conflict
had lost its chance of attaining whatever it had sought to gain in fighting the war.
This was true for the French after they had lost the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The
French Indochina War had dragged on indecisively since December 19, 1946,
and reluctantly-far too reluctantly to derive any political or psychological benefit
from the gesture-the French granted the non-Communist regime of ex-emperor
Bao Dai some of the appurtenances but little of the reality of national
independence. In fact, as the war bit deeper into the vitals of the
French,professional army and consumed an ever-rising amount of France's
postwar treasure (it finally cost France about $10 billion, in addition to $954
million of United States aid actually expended in Indochina prior to July, 1954),
it became increasingly clear that France had entirely lost sight of any clearly
definable war aims. General Henri-Eugene Navarre, the unfortunate French
commander-in-chief at the time of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, was to argue
later in his book Agonie de l'Indochine that there were two acceptable but
contradictory war aims: France could be expected to fight the Indochina War
alone but with all her might only if the Indochina States would accept a "special
relationship" that would justify the expenditure in blood and money that would
entail-and if they were willing to help in the fight to the utmost of their abilities.
If, on the other hand, the Indochina War had become an integral part of the
world-wide struggle, led by the United States, for the containment of
communism, all other nations concerned with stopping communism had an
obligation equal to that of France to participate in the struggle.*
It is because the United States herself now takes precisely that latter position that
Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara
went to Paris in December, 1965, to plead for greater and more direct support by
America's NATO allies in the struggle the United States has been shouldering
almost exclusively (with the exception of the South Vietnamese Army and minor
contingents from a few small nations). The results, apparently, were negligible.
In contrast to the United States, France never had the strength for a large-scale
unilateral commitment, and knew that public opinion at home, as well as war
weariness among the nationals upon whose territory the war was being fought (a
factor that appears to be too often forgotten now), demanded that a short-range
solution to the conflict be found. Or, barring victory, that a situation be created
in which the national armies of the Associated States of Cambodia, Laos, and
Viet-Nam could deal with Communist guerrilla remnants once the French
regulars had destroyed the enemy's main battle forces in a series of major
engagements.
Contrary also to the American Chief Executive who is able to commit American
troops in unlimited numbers in undeclared overseas wars, the French Parliament,
by an amendment to the Budget Law of 1950, restricted the use of draftees to
French "homeland" territory (i.e., France and Algeria, and the French-occupied
areas of Germany), thus severely limiting the number of troops that could be
made available to the Indochina theater of operations. Caught in a web of
conflicting commitments and priorities-NATO and communism in Europe vs.
containment in a peripheral area of Asia-the ever-changing governments of the
French Fourth Republic shortchanged all of them : the French units in Europe,
French Fourth Republic shortchanged all of them : the French units in Europe,
gutted of the bulk of their regular cadres, were unusable in the event of war, and
the regulars sent to Indochina were scarcely more than skeleton units to be
hastily brought up to strength by locally recruited troops. When General
Navarre, upon assuming command in May, 1953, requested 12 infantry
battalions and various supporting units, along with 750 more officers and 2,550
noncommissioned officers for his already understrength units, he finally received
8 battalions, 320 officers and 200 noncommissioned officers-and was told that
the "reinforcements" were in fact an advance on the replacements he would have
received the following year for 1953 combat losses.
In the meantime, the enemy was getting stronger by the day, particularly in well-
trained, regular combat divisions that could take on anything the French could
oppose them with. Twelve years later, the North Vietnamese were still unafraid
to take on the best forces the United States can muster. With the Korean war
terminated in a stalemate in July, 1953, Chinese instructors and Chinese-
provided Russian and American equipment began to arrive in North Viet-Nam
en masse. The enemy now had seven mobile divisions and one full-fledged
artillery division. and more were likely to come rapidly from the Chinese
divisional training camps near Ching-Hsi and Nanning. It therefore became
imperative for the French to destroy at least a large part of the enemy's main
battle force as rapidly as possible. This was feasible only if the French could
induce the enemy to face up to them in a set-piece battle, by offering the Viet-
Minh a target sufficiently tempting to pounce at, but sufficiently strong to resist
the onslaught once it came. It was an incredible gamble, for upon its success
hinged not only the fate of the French forces in Indochina and France's political
role in Southeast Asia, but the survival of Viet-Nam as a non-Communist state
and, to a certain extent, that of Laos and Cambodia as well-and perhaps
(depending on the extent to which one accepts the "falling dominoes" theory) the
survival of some sort of residual Western presence in the vast mainland area
between Calcutta, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
This book is the history of that gamble. When the general editor for the Great
Battles Series, the eminent military historian and writer Hanson W. Baldwin,
approached me in 1962 with the assignment, I undertook it with great
trepidation. I realized, from previous research on far less sensitive aspects of the
Indochina War, that it would be extremely difficult to piece together a
reasonably accurate picture of what actually happened at Dien Bien Phu without