Embers of War (41 page)

THE FORBIDDING TERRAIN OF CAO BANG NEAR THE CHINESE BORDER, THROUGH WHICH CHINESE AID TO THE VIET MINH BEGAN TO FLOW IN 1950.
(photo credit 10.2)

II

FRENCH INTELLIGENCE CODE BREAKERS PICKED UP SIGNS THAT
Giap was preparing a major operation in the north along the frontier ridge. By the end of the first week of September, analysts knew that an attack was imminent, but not where. Some French posts had by then been evacuated—the truly impossible positions beyond Cao Bang, notably Tra Linh and Nguyen Binh (not to be confused with the Viet Minh leader of the same name)—but many were still occupied, for prestige reasons largely, and to guard the cemeteries (for the French could not bear the thought of the Vietnamese taking the burial sites and their white crosses). Both Dong Khe and That Khe were thought to be targets, and Lang Son perhaps as well, but hard evidence was elusive. Moreover, the French grossly underestimated the size of the attacking force: Instead of eighteen to twenty battalions as predicted, Giap was readying thirty to thirty-two battalions, including six heavy battalions and numerous artillery. Meanwhile, the vagaries of French domestic politics hurt Carpentier’s planning, as the cabinet in Paris turned down his request for reinforcements and instead in August
reduced
the number of French soldiers in Indochina by nine thousand, on grounds of cost. The increased American aid had yet to really manifest itself, and the war was a major drain on French resources. Pleas from Hanoi to consider using conscripts in Vietnam also met with deaf ears in Paris; no politician wanted to go anywhere near the notion.
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Overall, the French land forces in Indochina totaled some 250,000. About 40 percent of these were regular French forces (metropolitan, Foreign Legion, colonial); the remainder was about equally divided between Vietnamese army forces (under French command) and irregular
supplétifs
, plus a few thousand Laotian and Cambodian troops. On the support side, French women were a growing presence, as part of the
Personnel féminin de l’armée de terre
(PFAT). Many were secretaries, but sizable numbers also served in combat areas as ambulance drivers, nurses, surgeons, and helicopter pilots. Among the latter were several women who flew into high-danger battle situations to evacuate wounded soldiers and provide vital first aid. One pilot, Paule Dupont d’Isigny, by war’s end had logged some four thousand hours in Indochina and conducted more than thirty missions to rescue wounded soldiers from combat zones. Still other women worked as parachute riggers for the airborne units. (An experienced crew of two could fold one parachute in seven minutes.) Before the war was over, more than a hundred PFAT members would be killed in action.

In Tonkin, where the immediate threat loomed, Carpentier had some 53,000 troops at his disposal. Practically all of them, however, were engaged in internal security duties, and although thirteen battalions were earmarked as a mobile reserve, they were not in fact readily available to meet an external threat. The Expeditionary Corps still maintained its superiority in equipment, but much of the equipment was obsolete, and there were deficiencies, particularly in aircraft, so crucial to the French in maintaining their lines of communication. Though the general morale of the individual French officer and soldier was reasonably high, there were unsettling reports flowing to Paris of a slackening will and a “defensive-mindedness” among high officers, some of whom voiced despair at the rising number of French Union casualties—some 100,000 to this point in the war, including 25,000 dead or captured. Some colonial troops, meanwhile, notably the Moroccans, were reportedly beginning to question what they were doing, waging war against a people whose nationalistic effort they admired and themselves sought to emulate.
⁹

The picture was not all bad, to be sure. An intensive pacification effort in the first half of the year, commanded by Major General Marcel Alessandri and designed to clear the Red River Delta and thereby deny the Viet Minh a major source of rice, had achieved considerable success—the flow of rice was cut almost in half. This was a severe problem for the DRV not merely in nutritional terms but also because rice was the medium of exchange of the Viet Minh economy. Troops were paid in rice; services and supplies were purchased with rice. Through the middle months of the year, rice rations for Giap’s forces were cut again and again. In addition, pressure on the Hanoi-Haiphong corridor had eased somewhat, to the point that in April the French opened the road to mostly unrestricted traffic by day, whereas before it was restricted to armed convoy travel three days per week. In Cochin China, Viet Minh southern commander Nguyen Binh’s attacks on French posts—around Tra Vinh, Vinh Long, Bien Hoa, Thu Dau Mot, Than Son, Can Tho, Soc Trang, and Sa Dec—diminished markedly in both frequency and intensity in the spring, after he suffered crushing losses in the face of French artillery and airpower, and
colons
in Saigon spoke of a palpable easing of tension in the city. Thenceforth the war would play out mostly in Tonkin and northern Annam.
¹⁰

Carpentier, recognizing his position of weakness in the far north, in early September ordered that Cao Bang be evacuated and that Thai Nguyen be captured immediately beforehand. Though the two operations were not militarily connected, Carpentier reasoned that the easy capture of Thai Nguyen—and there was no reason to believe Giap would put up a major effort to defend it—would deflect press attention away from the abandonment of Cao Bang. Carpentier ordered that both actions be completed by mid-October, just before the end of the rainy season. He figured Giap’s forces would not be in position to attack before then.

He figured wrong. At dawn on September 16, after months of careful preparation, the Viet Minh leader threw five battalions with artillery and mortar support against Dong Khe. Two companies of legionnaires put up furious resistance and initially held their own, even though heavy cloud cover precluded air support. Nervous tension enveloped Giap’s command headquarters nearby, particularly after news arrived that a key Viet Minh regiment had lost its way and been unable to join in the attack. There were reports of heavy Viet Minh casualties. Ho Chi Minh, who had arrived at the headquarters the week before, sunburned after a weeklong journey on foot, urged calm. The operation should continue, he said. Giap and Chen Geng agreed. For two days, the fighting raged, until at ten
A.M
. on September 18, fifty-two hours after the first shots were fired, the Dong Khe post fell. One officer and thirty-one legionnaires managed to get away at the last minute, emerging out of the jungle near That Khe a week later.
¹¹

The garrison at Cao Bang, fifteen miles to the north, was now cut off, and the French determined they had no choice but to attempt a fighting retreat southward before the Viet Minh could encircle them. Instead of moving down Route Coloniale 3 toward French units moving northward from Thai Nguyen, however, Carpentier foolishly elected to use the RC4. He reinforced Cao Bang by air with a battalion of North Africans and assembled a force of 3,500 mostly Moroccan troops and a crack paratroop battalion at That Khe, fourteen miles south of Dong Khe. This force, code-named Task Force Bayard, would camouflage the move of the Cao Bang column, meet it halfway, and then escort it back to That Khe. But its commander, Lieutenant General Marcel Le Page, his orders sketchy, vacillated and did not move out of That Khe until September 30. A rumor floated among the soldiers that Le Page’s parting words were “We shall never come back.”
¹²

In Cao Bang, meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Charton, a squat, no-nonsense commander much loved by his men for his personal courage and his foul mouth, ignored orders to leave his equipment behind and move south on foot. Instead he loaded his personnel into trucks and took with him his artillery pieces as well. On October 3, in this way, 2,600 soldiers—including almost a thousand Moroccans and six hundred legionnaires—and five hundred civilians (including the town’s prostitutes) began to move the thirty-three miles to Dong Khe. The column, like a giant caterpillar with metallic bristles, stretched for miles; almost immediately it ran into ambushes and blown-up bridges. By early the next morning, having covered only nine miles, it was blocked. To the south, the Le Page relief force, which had advanced to a few miles from Dong Khe, had also been halted in its tracks. The numerically superior Viet Minh closed in from both sides of the dense forested hills, using roadside bombs, machine guns, and artillery. Bad weather and low-lying mist prevented air support for the French Union troops, who were now completely at the mercy of the attackers. On Carpentier’s orders, the French commanders burned their trucks and supplies and (in the case of Charton) abandoned the artillery pieces, then moved off the RC4 in the hope of outflanking the blocking forces. The new plan was to rendezvous at a feature called Hill 477 east of Coc Xa. Progress was excruciatingly slow in the thick brush, as scouts used machetes to hack a path through the dense growth, and many men were simply lost in the forest.
¹³

Alessandri, upon learning of the order, wired Carpentier: “Cancel everything. If you carry it out it will be a crime.” But it was too late. The message, at once threatening and insubordinate, went unheeded.
¹⁴

“We plunged into the mountains, on a ‘trail’ which was a trail only in name,” a Hungarian legionnaire in the Le Page column recalled of the night of October 3–4. “Several of our wounded died that night. They could not take falling every ten or twenty yards with their porters. We were all beat, for we had practically not slept since we left our base [four days earlier]. Climb, descend several times each day on these abrupt slopes loaded to the maximum with packs and equipment was back-breaking.” Always, both columns feared an ambush that could come at any moment and, even worse, felt the incomparable anxiety of not knowing exactly where you were, of being astray in the natural labyrinth of monstrous vegetation, with no guides or detailed maps, with food and water and ammunition running out, and with the enemy all around you.
¹⁵

Viet Minh troops too were exhausted, having pursued their prey for six days and nights, but there would be no rest on the seventh day. “Why do we need to rest now?” Ho Chi Minh declared. “We are tired but the enemy is ten times more so. A runner on the point of reaching his finishing-line cannot rest.” Giap followed with a short message to the troops via telephone on October 6: “I am sure that the enemy is hungrier and colder than you. He has suffered heavier losses and his morale has been undermined as he is a defeated invaders’ army. Therefore, you must put more effort into your work in order to annihilate most of the enemy troops. Rainy and foggy weather is all the more favorable to us.… Forward!”
¹⁶

By the time Charton and Le Page linked up on October 7, both columns had taken huge casualties and were low on water, food, and ammunition. And the worst was yet to come. The two commands had filed into an enormous ambush: Fifteen Viet Minh battalions had closed in. Panic set in among the Moroccans, who had a well-earned reputation for extraordinary courage and resilience; all of a sudden, many of them fled down the cliff faces screaming “
Allah-Akbar! Allah-Akbar!
” The French force was disintegrating into a mob. Charton and Le Page and the remaining battalion commanders decided to divide the survivors into small parties and flee through the jungle toward That Khe, twenty miles away. Some of the groups made it; many did not. Charton was wounded and taken prisoner by the Viet Minh. The forest was swarming with Viet Minh shouting “
Rendez-vous, soldats français! Rendez-vous, vous êtes perdus!
” (“Give yourselves up, French soldiers, you are lost!”)
¹⁷

Some French units dropped their rifles and surrendered, too exhausted and hungry to go on. “They all stretched out their hands to ask for food,” a Viet Minh officer recalled. “But we were not much better off as far as food was concerned. Our rice rations, which we carried in sausage cloth sacks around our shoulders, had been considerably depleted by many days of fighting.… At first we gave them each a ball of cooked rice. Later we had to halve the ball, then divide again into three parts. They gobbled it in the twinkling of an eye, then obediently followed our orders to move toward the POW camp along the forest tracks.”
¹⁸

Ultimately, only some 600 men from the two columns made it back to French lines. The Expeditionary Corps had suffered 6,000 casualties, of whom no fewer than 4,800 were listed as dead or missing. Charton’s column alone lost 75 officers, 295 NCOs, and 2,939 from other ranks. Other combined losses included more than 100 mortars and some 950 machine guns, 8,000 rifles, and 450 trucks. “The disaster of RC4” was by far the most devastating defeat of the war to this point. General Carpentier, stunned and shattered, facing the prospect of informing Paris that the Charton and Le Page columns had been wiped out, flew over the scene and could only say mysteriously, “Everything that could happen has happened.”
¹⁹