Embers of War (72 page)

V

IN LIGHT OF WHAT WAS TO COME, IT SEEMS PREPOSTEROUS, THIS
idea that France could appreciably strengthen her military position—and therefore her diplomatic position—before Geneva. Yet Bidault was far from alone in believing it. As we have seen, at Dien Bien Phu de Castries struck a tone of serene certitude in these weeks, seemingly out of conviction. Giap, he reasoned, had wisely avoided battle on January 25, knowing his forces could not prevail, and since then the garrison had only become stronger. Sure, Giap had shelled different points in the valley on a regular basis since late January, but these were desultory bombardments, in the late afternoon or early evening, that seldom did real damage; to de Castries, they merely confirmed that the Viet Minh were outmatched. Piroth, the artillery commander, puzzled over his failure to locate the enemy’s guns but nevertheless exuded confidence, even refusing to dig his own guns in to provide shelter for their crews. Who could hit them, after all? Much better to have open emplacements, so as to be able to fire at all angles of the compass. Piroth would go no further than to place his guns in pits with sandbag walls to protect against mortar shells.

Lieutenant Colonel Jules Gaucher, commander of both the central sector of the camp and of the Thirteenth Demi-Brigade at Béatrice, wrote to his wife in February 22: “For now, the Viets leave us almost in peace. This is a decisive period.… One has to ask oneself if the Viets are really going to attack us. We have created such a defensive system that it would be a big mouthful to swallow, and that gives pause to the gentlemen opposite, who have already countermanded the order to attack [on January 25]. But I still believe that for the sake of prestige they’ll have to come, though we are already causing them heavy loss with our artillery and aircraft.” In another letter, this one dated March 5, the colonel expressed no fear at the prospect of battle: “Things are still calm, but they tell us that a brawl is coming soon. Is it true? It’s true they must wish to do something spectacular before Geneva. But I believe that if they do, they’ll break their teeth.”
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Visitors to the camp—and there was a constant stream of them in February and early March, as there had been in January; typically they arrived from Hanoi in the morning and departed in the late afternoon—often got caught up in the fervor. The bustling activity, with thousands of men digging and building, hauling and stacking, against the constant droning of C-47s landing and taking off, was reassuring even to the most seasoned military tourist. U.S. General John “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, for example, though troubled by the positioning of some of the strongpoints and the seeming weakness of the bunkers, declared that the base could “withstand any kind of attack the Viet Minh are capable of launching” and summarized the military situation as one where “the French are in no danger of suffering a major military reverse. On the contrary they are gaining strength and confidence in their ability to fight the war to a successful conclusion.”
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In Saigon, Navarre told Ambassador Heath privately and journalists publicly that he’d be disappointed if no battle developed at Dien Bien Phu, for it was there he saw a golden opportunity to inflict a major defeat on the enemy. The camp, he told Heath on February 21, was “a veritable jungle Verdun” that would cause huge Viet Minh losses and would not fall. The Communists had not achieved their major objectives in the current campaign season, he reminded reporters four days later, having failed to take Dien Bien Phu and having seen their offensive against Luang Prabang blocked.
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Most of the scribes were skeptical. Robert Guillain of
Le Monde
, who had just published a series of probing articles on Dien Bien Phu, after traveling by rail through Thailand and Laos to reach Hanoi, reportedly said to some colleagues after Navarre left the room: “Ours is a wonderful profession. The Commander in Chief has just explained everything to us dogmatically, and I, a humble journalist, would stake my life on it that he is either making a terrible mistake or lying to us. I would be ready to swear that the situation he has described has nothing in common with reality. What the Commander in Chief lacks, like his entourage, is our fresh, unbiased view of events.”
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Graham Greene came for a visit too. Once again wintering in Saigon, he was on assignment to write a piece on Indochina for
The Sunday Times
. He flew into Dien Bien Phu early on a Tuesday morning and stayed twenty-four hours. A guide gave him a tour of the camp, whereupon de Castries hosted him for lunch at the senior officers’ mess. The commander, Greene recalled, “had the nervy histrionic features of an old-time actor,” and the novelist observed with fascination de Castries’s reaction when artillery commander Piroth and another officer mentioned the Na San evacuation of the previous year. “Be silent,” de Castries thundered, hitting the table with his fist. “I will not have Na San mentioned in this mess. Na San was a defensive post. This is an offensive one.” Puzzled, Greene asked his guide after lunch what de Castries had meant by “offensive post.” The officer scoffed at the notion. What we need for an offensive base, he told the Briton, is not a fleet of tanks but a thousand mules.
⁴⁴

For Guillain, Greene, and other outside analysts, it was not merely that Dien Bien Phu was much more vulnerable than official optimism allowed, or that the security situation in the Red River Delta remained dire (even though Giap had withdrawn four divisions from that area), or that Operation Atlante to the south was going less well than advertised, or that formerly pacified areas of Cochin China were increasingly under threat.
⁴⁵
These military matters, while important, were not ultimately going to decide the war. The real nub of the problem was political. France, though she had already granted more independence to Bao Dai than Ho Chi Minh in 1945–46 ever asked for, had not convinced the mass of Vietnamese that she would make good on her promise of full sovereignty. Partly for that reason, and partly because of its own dithering and infighting and corruption, the Bao Dai government enjoyed little popular support. In a December shakeup, Bao Dai had inserted his cousin Buu Loc as prime minister in place of the Francophile Nguyen Van Tam, but it had made little difference, perhaps because Bao Dai himself seemed more and more removed from the struggle. When he wasn’t ensconced at his villa on the Côte d’Azur, he looked as if he should be. “How do you think it feels getting oneself killed in the jungle,” complained a young graduate of the École militaire inter-armes in Dalat, “for that man who comes up here to swear us in wearing a Riviera suit, a polka-dot tie, and inch-thick crepe soles?”
⁴⁶

On March 8 began yet another round of negotiations, this one in Paris, between the French government and Bao Dai’s representatives. Back and forth they went on what constituted full independence, on what sort of association the two countries ought to have. A French observer spelled out his side’s interpretation of the Vietnamese position: “Having promised independence to the Associated States, we would have to leave Indo-China even if we won a total victory. So what are we fighting for, and for whom?” To which the Vietnamese replied: And what are
we
currently fighting for but to preserve your inequitable system?
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The questions still hung in the air a few days later when the anticipated yet still shocking news came in: Dien Bien Phu was under attack.

VI

IT BEGAN LATE IN THE AFTERNOON OF MARCH 13, A SATURDAY. A
distant thunder sounded from the hills. Then, within seconds, the ear-splitting noise of high explosives shook the earth in the camp, as 105mm and 75mm howitzers and 120mm mortars rained down from above.
⁴⁸
Strongpoint Béatrice, which for some days had been completely surrounded by enemy approach works, was the initial target, in part because of its crucial location and in part because it was manned by a first-rate unit, the Third Battalion of the Thirteenth Legion Demi-Brigade. “Bunker after bunker, trench after trench, collapsed, burying men and weapons,” one surviving legionnaire at Béatrice said of that first artillery barrage. At 5:10, two Viet Minh regiments from the 312th Division leaped from their approach trenches barely two hundred yards from Béatrice. Savage fighting ensued. At 6:15, Major Paul Pégot, the legionnaire commander, called for artillery fire on areas just in front of his final line of resistance. At 6:30, a Viet Minh artillery round hit the Béatrice command post, killing Pégot and his entire staff. Soon thereafter another shell tore open the chest and ripped the arms off Lieutenant Colonel Gaucher. He died within minutes. (The previous day he had written his wife of the impending attack: “Finally the long wait will be over and hopefully it will end in a positive way.”)
⁴⁹

Their two leaders gone, the men at Béatrice fought desperately to survive, but it was hopeless. At 10:30, the radio of the Tenth Company fell silent. At 11:00, the Eleventh Company radioed in that the enemy was just outside the command bunker. Shortly after midnight, the last radio went dead. Béatrice had fallen, with the French losing 550 men out of 750. Viet Minh dead totaled 600, with another 1,200 wounded.

The French initially fared better at Gabrielle. That first night the 312th Division made two separate attempts to take the strongpoint; both were repelled. Anne-Marie likewise held fast in the face of three separate assaults, though at heavy cost. At daybreak on the fourteenth, an impromptu truce was agreed to, allowing both sides to collect their dead and wounded. The entire garrison was stunned by the previous night’s events. Gaucher was dead, Béatrice in enemy hands. The supposedly invincible Thirteenth Demi-Brigade, which had fought Rommel’s Afrika Korps to a standstill at Bir Hakeim, had seen one of its battalions overrun—in a few hours. To make matters worse, the attack had not even been a surprise—radio intercepts had picked up both the date and the hour of the attack. Just as the French had always anticipated, the battle had begun when it was still light enough for Viet Minh artillery to find its targets, but too late for Bearcat fighters based at Dien Bien Phu to intervene effectively. For many days, moreover, enemy movements had made clear that Béatrice and Gabrielle would be the initial targets. (See map on
this page
.)

What de Castries and his subordinates did not know, however, was the full extent of enemy preparations. Since that crushing disappointment seven weeks earlier, when their commander in chief had canceled the attack mere hours before it was set to start, Viet Minh soldiers and porters had been hard at work, day after bruising day. General Giap ordered that artillery positions be better prepared, that more ammunition and supplies be on hand, and that overwhelming supremacy in men and firepower be established; only then would the operation commence. Huge effort was expended installing 75mm and 105mm guns in casements sunk into the forward slope of the hills surrounding the basin. It was riskier than the conventional deployment on the reverse slope, but it promised a bigger payoff: The gunners would be able to fire “down the tube” at the French targets. Many guns were placed singly in deep and narrow casements, thus preserving the integrity of the rock as protection from aerial attack and artillery fire. If done right, only the cannon’s mouth protruded when engaged. To draw enemy fire and air attacks, dummy guns were built and positioned. All the while, artillery officers and their Chinese advisers carefully mapped the French defenses and determined the coordinates of specific targets. Periodic shelling of the garrison in February and early March allowed gunners to fine-tune their targeting.
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Simultaneously, Giap ordered the digging of a vast trench system around the camp. The shovel now became the prime weapon, as hundreds of men toiled day and night to dig trenches and tunnels, often under fire and often advancing only five or six yards in a day. By early March, French listening posts were reporting the disconcerting sound of thumps and scrapes by shovels close to the camp’s perimeter. By March 12, the workers could be seen in broad daylight, brazenly digging under the protection of lookouts. By then, the trenches had snaked their way toward the fortress, in one observer’s words, “like the tentacles of some determined, earthbound devilfish.”
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Anxious to reduce the enemy’s air capabilities at the source, Giap ordered daring commando raids on French airfields in the Red River Delta. In early February, a handful of Viet Minh soldiers crawled through the drainage pipes undetected and entered the Do Son air base south of Haiphong, where they proceeded under the cover of darkness to destroy five Dakotas and one hundred thousand liters of fuel. On February 20, after some American air force technicians had arrived at the base (part of the two-hundred-man contingent authorized by Eisenhower in late January), it was discovered that infiltrators had contaminated the fuel stocks by pouring water in the tanks. On March 4, commandos entered Gia Lam air base and placed gasoline satchels wired with explosives under ten Dakotas, destroying all of them. Despite elaborate defenses at Gia Lam, all but one of the infiltrators got away. Three days after that, Viet Minh units destroyed four B-26 bombers and six Morane spotter planes at Cat Bi airfield, home to another contingent of uniformed U.S. mechanics. On March 10, Viet Minh guns shelled the Dien Bien Phu airstrip for the first time, and on the twelfth, the eve of the attack, a handful of commandos slipped past the garrison’s defenses to destroy some of the steel grilling of the airstrip—and, while they were at it, to confirm specific target locations for the Viet Minh artillery.
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