Embers of War (68 page)

Fatigue and lack of supplies were a constant concern, Tran continued. Meals consisted only of rice, often undercooked, as the kitchens had to be smokeless by day and sparkless by night. And yet the work went on: “To climb a slope, hundreds of men crept before the gun, tugging on long ropes, pulling the piece up inch by inch. On the crest, the winch was creaking, helping to prevent the piece from slipping.” Then it got worse: “It was much harder descending a slope. The sight was just the reverse: Hundreds of men held onto long ropes behind the piece, their bodies leaning backwards, and the windlass released the ropes inch by inch.” In this way, whole nights were spent toiling by torchlight to gain five hundred or a thousand meters.
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Always there was pressure to do more, to go faster. When a staffer informed Pham Ngoc Mau, an artillery commander, that the 105mm cannon could be moved at a speed of approximately 150 meters per hour, he received a blistering reply. “Speed my ass! You can’t simply say like everyone else that we can’t do a fucking two hundred meters per hour!” The relentless pace inevitably led to accidents and other mishaps, and to questioning. At one point, during a particularly grueling uphill stretch, a cannon began tilting, one wheel sinking into the side of the trail. For a time, it seemed the whole apparatus might thunder down into the ravine, taking the soldier-porters with it. The men moaned. “We’re dying for nothing,” they complained. “What good is it to have trucks if we’re using our own arms as motors?”
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Though such moments of despair appear to have been relatively rare, meetings were organized to boost the morale of the troops and to seek ways to make the labor less excruciating and dangerous. One such improvement: the installation of a device under the beam of the cannons to allow them to slide on the ground without having to be lifted, which both eased the burden on the men and reduced the risk of accidents.
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V

THE FRENCH COMMAND KNEW OF THE IMPENDING ATTACK. ON JANUARY 20
, intelligence operators intercepted and decoded Viet Minh messages indicating that the assault would commence on the evening of the twenty-fifth, by the light of the moon in its second quarter. Shouts of joy rang out among operational officers in Hanoi and Saigon; at long last, the enemy would emerge and receive the drubbing that was his due. As the news spread among the officers and men at the garrison, again there were smiles and expressions of delight. False bravado? To some extent, maybe, especially among senior officers privy to information about the depth and breadth of Viet Minh preparations. But most everyone was eager to get on with the show. Time and again the soldiers had been told an attack seemed imminent, yet nothing had happened; the succession of false alarms was frustrating and nerve-racking. Ennui was a frequent companion in the remote valley, as the men dreamed of home, of wives and girlfriends, of cold beers at the neighborhood café, of warm baths and favorite meals. The dark rotgut that was issued to them in the form of
vinogel
—a canned, jellylike wine concentrate to which water must be added—only made them pine harder for real drink; the women in the camp bordellos provided gratification but not love.

The constant flow of aircraft bringing men and supplies was a source of comfort, however, adding to the conviction that the battle, when it came, would surely go France’s way. Every fifteen minutes they landed (weather permitting), day after day after day, U.S.-supplied C-47 Dakotas and C-119s. In due course, this rate of delivery would be seen as far too limited—one postwar estimate said it would have taken twelve thousand flights, or five months of essentially nonstop deliveries, to make the valley into a fully defensible field position—but for the moment, it seemed fully adequate to most. By mid-January, twelve battalions were in place, charged with defending the strongpoints. In the north, Gabrielle had the Fifth Battalion of the Seventh Algerian Regiment and a Legion mortar company; Béatrice had the Third Battalion of the Thirteenth Legion Demi-Brigade; and Anne-Marie had the Third Tai Battalion and a Legion mortar company. There were similar-size concentrations in the center at Huguette, Dominique, Françoise, and Eliane, while in the area of de Castries’s command post, Claudine had the Eighth Colonial Parachute Battalion, two tank platoons, artillery, a Legion heavy-mortar company, and security, intelligence, and medical units. At Isabelle in the south was installed the Third Battalion of the Third Legion Infantry Regiment, the Second Battalion of the First Algerian Rifle Regiment, one tank platoon, artillery, and a Tai partisan company.

January also witnessed a steady flow of visitors to the entrenched camp. Most pronounced themselves pleased with the buildup, with the positioning of the strongpoints, with the presence of twenty-eight guns and sixteen heavy mortars ready to open fire on Viet Minh positions. When someone expressed skepticism that it would be enough, de Castries did his level best to change the person’s mind.
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Cogny and Navarre, for their part, were more cautious than their camp commander as the anticipated Viet Minh attack date approached. The intelligence reports were sobering. As early as December 27, the French Air Force had picked up evidence of the passage of heavy Viet Minh equipment toward Dien Bien Phu. Already then intelligence analysts estimated that Giap would deploy 49,000 men, including 33,000 combatants, figures that would turn out to be within 10 percent of reality. On January 9, aerial photographs showed that 105mm howitzers had left Viet Minh rear-base areas in the direction of the highlands.
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Navarre hedged his bets. He found ominous the news that de Castries’s chief of staff had been killed by a sniper within the perimeter on December 28. On the last day of the year, Navarre confessed to U.S. ambassador Donald Heath that Dien Bien Phu might be overrun despite his best efforts. The Viet Minh, he told the American, now might have the means to move 105mm cannons up on the heights overlooking the approach to the valley. The following day Navarre informed Paris that, “faced with the arrival of new possibilities which very serious intelligence has been announcing for two weeks … I can no longer—if these materials truly exist in such numbers and above all if the adversary succeeds in putting them to use—guarantee success with any certainty.”
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That was the key question: Would Giap be able to put his major weaponry to effective use? Navarre and Cogny in January still clung to the belief that he couldn’t. If he followed the conventional practice of firing his guns from behind the crests, the trajectory would be wrong and he’d be too far away to do serious damage; if he fired them from the forward slope, he would be easily identified and destroyed. The garrison’s artillery commander, the one-armed Colonel Charles Piroth, encouraged them in this belief, insisting that he could handle easily whatever Giap threw his way. Cogny, increasingly fearful that the outlying strongpoints—especially Béatrice and Gabrielle on the north end—would be swiftly overrun in the battle and be almost impossible to retake, hoped he was right. Artillery would be decisive, he knew, one way or the other.

That Cogny and Navarre actively disliked each other didn’t help French planning. They had never been close, but recently the mutual animosity had become obvious to all, not least to their respective staffs in Hanoi and Saigon. They were, in almost every way, opposites. Whereas Navarre was short and trim, taciturn and socially awkward, and ill at ease around journalists, Cogny was a giant of a man at six foot four and 210 pounds, an extrovert who had a flair for public relations and was a born leader of men. Now forty-nine, he had doctoral degrees in law and political science and had survived the tortures of the Buchenwald concentration camp, emerging at the liberation severely malnourished—he was down to 120 pounds—and with a limp. (He walked with a cane the rest of his life.) Under de Lattre, he had commanded a division in Tonkin, earning raves from his men for wading through waist-deep paddies with them and fording streams to see what was happening on the other side. He had remained in Indochina after the great man’s death. Far more thin-skinned than Navarre, easily wounded by even the slightest criticism, he also had a well-earned reputation for arguing orders, even in front of privates. For all that, Navarre had nevertheless appointed him in May 1953 to command of the key northern region.
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Historians have sometimes made too much of the Cogny-Navarre clash—Cogny, as we have seen, was not hostile to Operation Castor, whatever his postwar claims—but by the middle of January 1954 their feud threatened to become a major distraction. Cogny openly fumed at “the air-conditioned general” moving pins on his wall map in his palatial Saigon office while the real fighters dealt with real problems in the north. The security situation in the Red River Delta was growing more serious each day, he warned Paris, with the Viet Minh maintaining guerrilla activity at a very high pitch and with more and more of its six thousand villages falling out of government hands. (At most, a third of them could now be considered friendly.) The vital rail link between Hanoi and Haiphong was being cut virtually daily, often through the use of new remote-controlled mines, as was the Hanoi-Phu Ly–Nam Dinh road. Cogny’s faith in the Vietnamese National Army (VNA), meanwhile, never high, plummeted in the early weeks of the year, as a result of several alleged acts of treachery—including instances of soldiers allowing Viet Minh commandos to enter French-held compounds under the cover of darkness and massacre the men (often legionnaires) who were holding them. In Hanoi, January witnessed an uptick in brazen grenade attacks on French Union soldiers, notably on the streets around the Citadel.
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Cogny expressed confidence that he could counteract these Viet Minh tactics, but only if he had adequate troops at his disposal.

He was especially incensed by Navarre’s decision to proceed with Operation Atlante, an ambitious strike into Viet Minh–held territory in south-central Vietnam that got under way on January 20. Following an amphibious landing at Tuy Hoa, in which U.S.-supplied Grumman Hellcat fighters tore into the coastline with napalm, more than thirty infantry battalions with supporting artillery and armor swept through a large Viet Minh zone with the objective of securing the coastal area of central Vietnam from Nha Trang to Hue, and secondarily to give the new light battalions of the VNA a chance to show their mettle in battle. Cogny questioned the importance of the objective and said the operation was drawing aircraft and troops from his larder. He felt vindicated when Atlante in the early going failed to yield the hoped-for results. The Viet Minh proved elusive as always, fading into the hills, and in one counterattack they wiped out an entire
groupe mobile
made up of French troops who had fought with the U.S. Second Division in Korea.
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VI

AT DIEN BIEN PHU ON JANUARY 25, EVERYONE IN THE ENTRENCHED
camp waited with nervous anxiety. And waited. By nightfall, no attack had come. A Dakota circled above the basin, like some silver metallic hawk, ready to drop flares at the first sight of advancing enemy troops, but none emerged. By sunrise the next morning, all was still quiet. At 1:50 that afternoon, Navarre and Cogny arrived at the camp, along with two other dignitaries: Marc Jacquet, the minister for the Associated States, and Maurice Dejean, the high commissioner for France in Indochina. De Castries, his red scarf blowing in the breeze, was there to meet the plane, as was Piroth, his empty sleeve tucked into his belt. Immediately the group headed to de Castries’s command post, the only dugout protected by steel plates. While Paule Bourgeade, de Castries’s beautiful young secretary (whose lipstick-stained cigarette butts were prized possessions among the paras), prepared coffee, the group grappled with the question: Why had Giap held his fire the night before?

No obvious answer presented itself. Perhaps, someone offered, he will attack this evening. The moon will still be out, and perhaps he just needed an additional day for final preparations. This seemed as good a theory as any, and the discussion moved on to the state of the garrison’s defenses. De Castries, unflappable as always, calmly announced himself ready for the undertaking. Jacquet took Piroth aside and said, “Colonel, I know there are hundreds of guns lying idle at Hanoi. You ought to take advantage of a minister’s presence [that is, Jacquet himself] to get a few sent you on the side.” Piroth declined the suggestion with the air of a military man having to endure a civilian offering battlefield advice. “Look at my plan of fire, M. Minister. I’ve got more guns than I need.”

Someone asked if he was sure. “If I have thirty minutes warning,” Piroth replied, “my counterbattery will be effective.” The follow-up hung in the air, unasked: What if he didn’t have thirty minutes warning?
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As the afternoon drew to a close, Navarre turned to Jacquet: “We have the impression they are going to attack tonight. I would prefer not to expose a minister to any risks.” Soon thereafter the official Dakotas lifted off and disappeared in the clouds. There would be no attack that night either, or the next night, or the night after that.
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What happened? Why did the Battle of Dien Bien Phu not begin on that moonlit evening in late January 1954? For years, historians aware of the initial plan assumed that the Chinese got cold feet and prevailed on Giap to issue a cancellation. It now appears, however, that the decision was Giap’s and that he made it in the face of opposition, or at best grudging acquiescence, from the Chinese.

There were actually two postponements. The first was issued on January 24. That day a Viet Minh soldier from the 312th Division fell into French hands; under interrogation, he revealed what the French already knew, that the attack would commence the following day at five o’clock. Viet Minh radio monitoring of the French picked up on this leak, and Giap ordered that the attack be pushed back twenty-four hours, to five
P.M
. on January 26.
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