Embers of War (62 page)

My own opinion, of course, as I have expressed it publicly, and I believe it very strongly, is as far as the Vietnamese and the Cambodian and Laotians are concerned, and weak as they are and weak as they will be, even with their national armies, that their only hope to remain independent is to have their independence within the French Union, which the French are now willing to give, but which, unfortunately, they have not been able to sell to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.
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There was candor here, but also a seeming unwillingness to face the obvious paradoxes. If the Communists had the motivation and the “sense of history” on their side, and the good guys didn’t, what did that say about the cause? And how could the French be induced to step up the war effort in order to hold Vietnam and at the same time commit to true independence for the Vietnamese? What would be the point of expanding their efforts to retain their colonial possession if they then had to give it up?

On negotiations, the vice president again spoke frankly, while again ignoring the contradictions. Diplomacy should be firmly resisted, he asserted, for it would inevitably lead to Communist domination of Indochina. The French “cannot get out,” and “we cannot have them get out because if we do the Communists—the Viet Minh are the only ones capable of governing, the only ones capable of controlling the country”—would take over. “So what we end up with here is a hard choice. It is a real risk and a real gamble, but what we end up with here, with all that is at stake, it seems to me we have to continue our military aid and, in that connection, I think the military are going to be as flexible as they can be, and, if there is any doubt, they will put in the additional material equipment that is necessary.”
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Hence Nixon’s determination, while in Vietnam, to strike only upbeat notes, to urge Navarre on, and to trumpet the robust health of the French Union. The stakes were huge, and victory must come. Now was no time to give up. And indeed, though Nixon’s optimistic pronouncements did little to lift spirits in metropolitan France, where the charcoal autumn sky matched the prevailing mood, they had a noticeable effect on
colons
and high French officials in Saigon and Hanoi. Navarre and Dejean had more of a bounce in their step after hearing him extol them for the job they were doing and simultaneously admonish the Vietnamese to keep their nationalist ambitions in check. The new U.S. aid package, Nixon had promised them, would soon make itself felt on the ground. How soon was soon? Nobody knew for sure, but Navarre and the high command took satisfaction from the fact that the campaigning season was by now well under way and Giap had yet to launch a major attack anywhere. In past years, he would have moved sooner than this. French intelligence speculated that he felt insufficiently strong to attack in the delta, and that he would concentrate his attention on the highland region of northwestern Tonkin.

Navarre was determined to meet the threat. Rather than concede the highlands and husband his resources for the defense of the deltas and of Annam in the center, he moved to take on the enemy here, in the remote and menacing northwest. As part of that effort, he ordered the reoccupation of a post near the Laotian border. This seemingly innocuous action would trigger a series of moves and countermoves in several world capitals and ultimately bring the war to its climax. The post bore the unlikely name of “Big Frontier Administrative Center,” or, in Vietnamese, Dien Bien Phu.

CHAPTER 16
ARENA OF THE GODS

T
HE VILLAGE WAS SET A THIRD OF THE WAY DOWN A HEART-SHAPED
basin measuring eleven miles in length and seven miles across at its widest point. It was surrounded by mountains, some round and gentle, others sharp limestone masses rising in irregular tiers to pointed peaks. A small river, the Nam Youm, ran past the village, through the plain from north to south. Although flat, the basin contained small features that sprouted up here and there, and there were numerous tiny hamlets and isolated dwellings scattered about. The inhabitants, perhaps ten thousand total, were mostly ethnic Tai who grew rice and mangoes and oranges on the fertile plain and marketed the opium brought down from the mountains by Hmong tribes, but there were also other tribal groups and Vietnamese. The Tai called the place Muong Thanh. To the Vietnamese, and to the French, it was known as Dien Bien Phu.

A strategic position it certainly was. The Laotian border lay just over the mountains, ten miles to the west, and the basin was one of the few hollows in the vast and largely impassable highland region, with its dense vegetation and forbidding terrain. The village was also at the junction of three routes. One went north, to China by way of Lai Chau, another was to the northeast to Tuan Giao, and the third ran southward to Laos via Muong Khoua. Whoever controlled the basin, legend taught, controlled the region and the entry to Laos and the upper Mekong—which was one reason the Tai referred to the bowl of land and its rim of hills as the Arena of the Gods.

Occupied in turn by the Chinese, the Siamese, the Hmong, and the Tai, Dien Bien Phu in 1889 was taken by French explorer-diplomat Auguste Pavie, who stuck around long enough to give his name to the horse path, the Pavie Piste, that ran north to Lai Chau. A French column subsequently camped in the village during operations against the Tai tribes, and in time it became an administrative post manned by a small group of local troops under French command. A lowly—and, one can guess, lonely—French colonial administrator took up residence as well, charged with the task of controlling the size of opium shipments, which in French Indochina was a state monopoly. In 1939, a small airstrip was built to allow supplies to be flown in from Hanoi (about a hundred and seventy miles away by air) for the garrison at Lai Chau, and during World War II the French used this strip for clandestine landings of agents of Force 136, an anti-Japanese resistance unit. On two occasions, French pilots used Dien Bien Phu to evacuate American fliers shot down over Japanese-controlled parts of Tonkin. When the Japanese launched their
coup de force
in March 1945, Dien Bien Phu became, for almost two months, the headquarters of French anti-Japanese resistance activity. Small planes from General Claire L. Chennault’s U.S. Fourteenth Air Force used the airstrip to bring supplies to the French and to evacuate wounded, and two obsolete French Potez 25 fighter aircraft used it as a base of operations against the advancing Japanese.
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After the war, the post reverted to French control, but from an early point Viet Minh units operated in the area. In late November 1952, with the Viet Minh 316th Division and 146th Regiment closing in, General Salan ordered Dien Bien Phu to be evacuated. Almost immediately he made plans to retake it. His top-secret directive number 40, issued on January 10, 1953, read in part: “The reoccupation of Dien Bien Phu must constitute in the forthcoming period the first step for the regaining control of the Tai country and for the elimination of the Viet-Minh from the area west of the Black River.”
²
Though Salan lacked the means to undertake this operation before he relinquished command to Henri Navarre, the idea took hold in the French High Command that Dien Bien Phu was key to the defense of northern Laos and especially the royal capital of Luang Prabang. The most likely invasion route, strategists reasoned, would be from Tuan Giao, where the Viet Minh had a modest forward base, through Dien Bien Phu, and then over the border and down the Nam Ou valley to Luang Prabang.

In addition, Dien Bien Phu could be further vindication—following the example of Na San in 1952—of the theory of the
base aéro-terrestre
(“air-ground base,” or, in American military parlance, “airhead”), by which a small number of air-supplied “hedgehogs” would be planted in the path of the advancing enemy and held for only limited periods by mobile units from the general reserve. For Salan, certainly, Na San was the shining symbol of French ability to withstand a massive Viet Minh assault on a prepared defensive position, and he made an early convert of Navarre. If Giap could again be goaded into a major battle as at Na San, and could again be forced to sacrifice thousands of men in vain, in a region of supposed Viet Minh domination, it would enhance France’s position in the negotiations to come. It would also respond to American pressure for more aggressive military action.

The establishment of a strongpoint in northwestern Tonkin was advantageous for a third reason: It would provide crucial assistance to the Tai and Hmong tribal partisans who had operated with success against Viet Minh forces for some years. Navarre held a romantic attachment to this tribal “resistance,” likening it to the activities of the French Resistance against the Germans in occupied France, and he argued that strengthening the tribes militarily could free up regular troops for mobile operations. Herein lay also a fourth consideration: The tribes were a source of opium, which was important to the French to finance their special operations section and which, when it fell into enemy hands, was used to fund Viet Minh special operations and arms purchases. Retaking Dien Bien Phu would ensure that the opium crop remained in effective French control.
³

Beyond all this, perhaps there was yet another, final reason to make a stand here, less important to Navarre, who was after all still new to Indochina, than to his subordinate officers, many of whom had deep experience in the region. They felt a sense of attachment to this part of the world—to the sheer beauty of the landscape, to the tribal minorities whose leaders they had befriended, to the captivating young women with the swaying gaits who put leis of flowers around their necks. The peoples of these mountains and valleys were in peril and moreover had little love for the Viet Minh; France had a solemn duty to protect them.

Later on, after everything went wrong, French commanders would attack one another over the strategic purpose of reoccupying Dien Bien Phu.
⁴
The myth would take hold that top officials were from the start divided on whether the operation should be undertaken at all. In reality, the French command initially acted at Dien Bien Phu with a large degree of unity and with faith that the enterprise could succeed. On July 24, 1953, top civilian and military leaders—among them Navarre—meeting in Paris reached consensus on the importance of defending northern Laos if at all possible.
⁵
That desire grew still stronger in October, when Laos signed a mutual defense treaty with France that cemented Laotian ties to the French Union and Giap’s forces thrust into eastern Laos. The Paris government hoped to sign similar treaties with Cambodia and Vietnam; the prospect of doing so would be much diminished if Laos was left to her fate.
⁶

Nor is it easy to credit the postwar claim by Navarre’s principal subordinate and commander of the Tonkin theater, Major General René Cogny, that his initial (grudging) support for the plan to retake Dien Bien Phu was based on his belief that it would be a lightly held “anchor point” used primarily to support mobile operations by local tribal forces. Cogny’s primary concern was always the Red River Delta and making sure that he had maximum resources there, but the archival record shows quite clearly that he endorsed the
base aéro-terrestre
concept. His personal dislike for Navarre, which was real and which would in time turn to a deep and abiding hatred, should not obscure the fact that initially the two men largely agreed. For Cogny no less than for Navarre, the concept had the virtues of being versatile and of having both a defensive and offensive purpose: It was a “hedgehog” that would thwart a major attack, and it was an “anchor point” that would support mobile operations in the enemy’s rear.

There were, to be sure, other potential sites for such bases in the highlands region. Na San was an obvious contender, but its location was not ideal, as the Viet Minh were now capable of easily outflanking it; in August, Navarre indeed ordered the evacuation of the Na San garrison for redeployment elsewhere. Lai Chau, the Tai tribal capital, also received consideration, but its location was problematic. Situated a mere thirty miles from the Chinese border, it was far from the main route into Laos, and its stunningly dramatic topography made it difficult to supply by air. And relatively easy air supply would be of central importance to the sort of operation gestating in Navarre’s mind. Better placed than either Na San or Lai Chau, he and his commanders concluded, was Dien Bien Phu, especially as it had a reasonably good airstrip already in place. Although the site was ringed by mountains, the French—who considered themselves the master artillerists of the world—deemed these to be beyond artillery range, even if occupied by enemy forces. Machiavelli’s famous admonition to always control the high ground did not apply. Giap would have no choice but to bring whatever artillery he had into the valley itself, where it would be pounded to bits by French counterbattery guns and aviation.