Embers of War (73 page)

Giap’s attack plan involved three phases. In the first phase, the outlying posts of Béatrice, Gabrielle, and Anne-Marie would be overrun. Viet Minh forces would then close in on the main positions crowded around the airstrip and the camp’s headquarters. The final phase would involve an attack on whatever remained, including the other outlying strong-point, Isabelle in the south. To undertake the operation, Giap had at his disposal the PAVN 308th and the 312th Divisions, both complete, as well as two regiments of the 316th, one regiment of the 304th, plus the 351st Heavy Division. The 308th was in the hills to the east and the 312th to the north. The 316th, recently returned from its incursion into Laos, waited in the background for the time being, while the 304th occupied the heights to the east of Isabelle.
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Nothing was left to chance. “We had observed everything and made a minute study of the terrain several nights before the attack, using models too,” a Viet Minh officer later told a French interviewer. “Every evening, we came up and took the opportunity to cut barbed wire and remove mines. Our jumping-off point was moved up to only two hundred yards from the peaks of Béatrice, and to our surprise your artillery didn’t know where we were. Finally, some Tai deserters had given us a lot of information.”
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In Giap’s mind, a great deal would hinge on the outcome of the initial attack on March 13. Victory on Béatrice would galvanize his men and prepare them to handle the inevitable setbacks later on, while conversely French morale would likely plummet if a strongpoint were lost right at the start. Ceaselessly Giap and his lieutenants hammered home the message to their men that they could win, that they would win; only an early victory, he knew, would really convince them. He had taken to heart the veteran warrior’s maxim: “Always win the first fight.”
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VII

COLONEL DE CASTRIES, EVIDENTLY HIMSELF A BELIEVER IN THE
maxim, was despondent on the morning after Béatrice succumbed, his mood matching the heavy gray clouds overhead. Already there were murmurings about his performance the previous night, about his tentative messages to the strongpoints, his decision to remain holed up in his command post the entire time, his failure to launch a vigorous counterattack. Now he had to fashion a plan, and fast, for the onslaught would resume within hours. One key strongpoint was gone, and hundreds of men with it. The airstrip had been rendered more or less unusable, pitted with holes and bristling with pieces of broken grids like the teeth of a saw. Chief gunner Piroth, meanwhile, had used up six thousand rounds of 105mm howitzer shells, or about a quarter of his total stock, in trying to answer Giap’s furious and deadly artillery barrage.

Piroth’s demeanor was worrying. Hitherto the picture of steadfastness, of breezy self-assurance regarding what his guns could accomplish, the forty-seven-year-old had become a morose automaton overnight. He seemed to be in trance, several officers later recalled, unable to comprehend what was happening. De Castries was concerned enough that he asked the chaplain to keep an eye on him. Later in the day, Colonel Pierre Langlais, Gaucher’s successor as commander of the central sector, happened by Piroth and saw the vacant stare.

“Is everything all right?” Langlais asked.

“We’re done for,” the artillery chief murmured. “I’ve told de Castries he must put a stop to it all. We’re heading for a massacre, and it’s my fault.”
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That night the Viet Minh resumed the attack. Heavy fighting continued throughout the night on Gabrielle, defended by the Fifth Battalion of the Seventh Algerian Regiment and a heavy mortar company of the Legion. The Viet Minh gained several footholds, but the tenacious Algerians just managed to hang on to part of the position. Early on March 15, the French launched a counterattack, using a new parachute battalion (the Fifth Vietnamese) that had been air-dropped in on the fourteenth, to restore the situation on Gabrielle. But the action, though supported by seven Chaffee tanks, was undermanned and poorly planned and had to be abandoned in the face of major losses. Gabrielle too was gone, with the loss for the Algerian battalion of 540 dead, 220 captured, and 114 escaped. The Viet Minh counted 1,000 dead. Heavy shelling by Viet Minh guns had made a shambles of French earthworks, not only in the northern sector but in the center too. As in the worst days of Verdun in 1916, enemy shells ground the whole top layer of soil into fine sand and caused bunkers and trenches to implode.
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French defensive fire, meanwhile, though more effective than on the first night, still had not proven equal to the task.

Colonel Piroth fell into extreme despair. “I’m completely dishonored,” he muttered to a fellow officer. “I have guaranteed de Castries that the enemy artillery couldn’t touch us—but now we’re going to lose the battle.”
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Perhaps too he remembered his dismissive assertion to Marc Jacquet on January 26: “I have more guns than I need.” Sometime that morning of March 15, Piroth slipped away to his dugout. Being one-armed, he could not charge his pistol. He lay down on his cot, pulled the pin from a grenade with his teeth, and clutched it to his chest. De Castries initially tried to keep the circumstances of the death secret, reporting to Hanoi that Piroth was killed by enemy action. But news of the suicide leaked out and soon spread from one unit to the next.
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The morgue to which Piroth’s body was taken had long since filled to capacity. Scores of corpses lay jumbled together, on stretchers or on bare ground. In the surgery, Drs. Grauwin and Gindrey, stripped to the waist, had been operating almost nonstop for two nights and days. Within hours on the night of March 13–14, the hospital, located near the camp’s headquarters complex, had been crammed with wounded, many of them needing urgent attention to major trauma. French, legionnaires, Algerians, Africans, and Vietnamese; officers and men—all waited their turn in the cramped space, amid the stench of vomit and blood and voided bowels and bladders. The surgeons fought to save limbs and avoid the onset of gangrene, but for some it was already too late: That first night Grauwin and Gindrey carried out fourteen amputations. At one point, Grauwin complained that the battalion aid posts were sending him all their wounded rather than trying to treat them—until he learned that they too were overflowing. Some ambulance drivers had even risked the dangerous journey all the way up from Isabelle.
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TWO MEMBERS OF THE SIXTH COLONIAL PARACHUTE BATTALION RUN FOR COVER AT STRONGPOINT ISABELLE ON MARCH 16, THREE DAYS INTO THE BATTLE.
(photo credit 18.2)

March 15 was a low point for the men of the garrison, for—astonishing though it may seem in hindsight—their spirits in the days thereafter began to lift, or at least stopped sinking. There was a sense that they had weathered the worst of the storm. Even after Anne-Marie fell on the seventeenth (the Tai battalion serving as the backbone of its defense having deserted), many French officers saw no reason why victory could not come in the end. Giap might have gained effective control of the northern sector, but he had suffered enormous losses in doing so, with as many as 2,500 dead in the mass frontal assaults of the first days. Surely he could not keep that up. His success against the northern strongpoints, moreover, would be harder to replicate against the heart of the garrison’s defenses in the center.

And indeed, Giap had his own problems, the high number of battlefield dead being only one. His ammunition was running low, as was medicine for the wounded. His units had only one full-fledged surgeon, Dr. Ton That Tung, who with his team of six assistants had responsibility for some fifty thousand men. Head injuries due to lack of steel helmets were a particular problem, and the situation was not made easier by the swarms of yellow flies that laid eggs in the wounds. The infirmary was infested with ticks, and there was an acute shortage of beds. The feeder roads built through the jungle in December and January, deteriorating under the French aerial attacks and the rains, were kept open, but passage was often excruciatingly slow, with high casualties among sappers, truck drivers, and laborers. Especially deadly were the latest American-supplied antipersonnel bombs. As the first phase of Giap’s three-phase battle plan drew to a close on March 17, his political officers accordingly took up the task of maintaining troop morale. Harangues and patriotic speeches hammered on the twin points: No lives had been given in vain, and victory must be achieved at any cost. Declared Giap in his special message to the troops: “His [enemy] morale is affected, his difficulties are numerous, but don’t underestimate him. If we underestimate him, we’ll lose the battle.”
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In Hanoi and Saigon, meanwhile, Cogny’s and Navarre’s staffs were left reeling by the previous days’ developments, as were High Commissioner Maurice Dejean and his aides. They now began to whisper the impermissible: that all might be lost. The comparative lull in fighting that began at Dien Bien Phu on March 17 was welcome news, as was the profession of optimism on the part of some commanders in the camp, but overall the situation looked extremely grim. Only the rapid intensification of air support to the garrison, together with a breakthrough in Operation Atlante, Navarre concluded, could avert out-and-out disaster.
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The airstrip had been rendered more or less unusable, so now the imperative was parachuting supplies and men, and somehow evacuating wounded. In addition, it would be essential to attack the enemy’s rear, harassing his supply lines, cutting his communications, neutralizing his artillery batteries, and drawing a ring of death around the garrison using napalm. Dejean immediately approached the U.S. embassy in Saigon for the top-priority dispatch of more B-26 bombers, Bearcat fighters, and C-47 transports. He also asked for American authorization to use the borrowed C-119s—with French crews—for the “massive use of napalm.”
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The requests were under consideration in Washington when a high-profile French visitor arrived for consultations with senior U.S. officials. It was chief of staff of the armed forces Paul Ely, France’s highest active officer, who only a few weeks earlier had accompanied René Pleven on his tour of Indochina. Important though that trip had been, this one would be even more so.
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For it would set in motion the most intensive period of Franco-American and Anglo-American deliberations on Indochina since the outbreak of war seven-plus years earlier. For more than a month the discussions would last, and they would reveal deep fissures in relations among the three Western allies as they debated the most pressing question of all: Should the United States, either alone or in concert with Britain and other allies, intervene directly in the war?

CHAPTER 19
AMERICA WANTS IN

L
ITTLE DID ANYONE IN WASHINGTON KNOW THAT WHEN GENERAL
Paul Ely’s plane touched down at National Airport on Saturday morning, March 20, 1954, after a fourteen-hour transatlantic flight, it marked the start of the most intensive period of American policy making on Indochina, a period that would last more than a month and would take the nation to the brink of war. Allied military leaders were always descending on the American capital, and if this wasn’t quite a routine visit—Ely was his country’s chief active military officer, and his forces faced a serious predicament in Vietnam—neither was his arrival greeted with a great deal of anticipation in a city where preponderant attention was focused on the Army-McCarthy hearings about to begin. News of the Viet Minh attack on Dien Bien Phu had filtered in and was a source of concern, but hopes remained high that the French could withstand the attack and that, regardless, the battle in remote Tonkin would not be decisive. When the NSC convened on March 18, President Eisenhower did not exhibit any particular urgency about Dien Bien Phu, even after CIA director Allen Dulles reported the agency’s assessment that the fortress had only a fifty-fifty chance of holding out. The soldier-president noted that France had air supremacy and napalm, as well as heavily fortified positions, which meant that the Viet Minh’s two-to-one numerical superiority mattered little. Director Dulles did not disagree and said the pessimistic French reports from Saigon might be a ploy to exaggerate the extent of their ultimate victory.
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If anyone did see Ely’s visit as a potential watershed moment, it was Admiral Arthur C. Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—that is, Ely’s American counterpart. An Asia-firster in the mold of MacArthur who had an abiding faith in the efficacy of airpower, Radford saw Dien Bien Phu as both an impending disaster and an opportunity: as the potential setting of France’s symbolic defeat in the war, and as a chance for the United States to strike a blow against the real menace in the region, the People’s Republic of China. The admiral would be a principal player on Indochina in the weeks to come, as the lead advocate of direct U.S. intervention in Vietnam, with airpower and if necessary with ground troops. On March 19, the day before Ely’s arrival, he met with General Jean Valluy, the former commander in chief in Indochina who now was chief of the French military mission and French member of the NATO standing group in Washington. Valluy had just returned from Paris, and he told Radford that Ely would bring a sobering message: Paris authorities had concluded that victory could not be achieved in 1954 or 1955 and that France could carry on the fight into 1956 only if the United States contributed military forces to the campaign.
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