Embers of War (86 page)

At four
P.M
., the Viet Minh artillery bombardment began. Its purpose was mostly to cover the assembly of assault infantry in forward positions, and it featured the unleashing of a wholly new weapon in the 351st Heavy Division’s arsenal: the “Stalin Organs.” Modeled on the twelve-tubed Katyusha rocket launchers that the Red Army had used with devastating effect against the Wehrmacht in World War II, these projectors announced their presence with the terrifying screeching noise of their rockets, which one legionnaire likened to the sound of a passing train. The explosions that followed were louder and often more destructive than those of shells of larger caliber, for the explosive made up a greater proportion of the rocket’s weight. Several of the rockets scored direct hits, destroying munitions stores, pulverizing sodden earthworks, and doing serious damage to the medical supplies depot. That night the garrison’s senior medical officer cabled Hanoi: “Situation of the wounded extremely precarious due to flooding and collapse of several dugouts.… Urgent need of all medical supplies; my stocks are destroyed.”
³⁷

For two hours, the pounding by the Stalin Organs continued, whereupon the Viet Minh switched to their more accurate conventional artillery, unleashing a barrage on the whole of the entrenched camp. The heavy rain simultaneously resumed, flooding the trenches. Shortly before seven o’clock the soldiers came forward in massed groups at every point on the perimeter, the bodies of those killed bearing down the barbed wire and forming a bridge for those behind to cross upon. All the outposts were under attack, and by ten
P.M
. the Elianes were in deep peril and Claudine 5 had been overrun. Hard-pressed and undermanned though they were, however, the desperate defenders counterattacked and for a time even succeeded in driving the Viet Minh back. At ten-thirty a ragtag band of legionnaires from three companies counterattacked Claudine 5 and reclaimed it from the enemy regiment, three thousand strong, to which it had just succumbed. Bigeard and Langlais desperately shuffled their remaining manpower to meet the various dangers, but they knew the arithmetic of the battle ran inexorably against them. Dakotas in the air above carried a company from the First Colonial Battalion but could not make the drop; even had they done so, it would not have made an appreciable difference.

Sometime before eleven (accounts differ on the exact time), a massive explosion shook the earth under Eliane 2. In a tactic reminiscent of the Union at Petersburg in 1864 and the British at the Hawthorn Redoubt in 1916, the Viet Minh had driven a mine shaft under Eliane 2 and loaded it with three thousand pounds of TNT. Veterans recalled a muffled rumbling under their feet, followed after a pause by a giant geyser of earth and stones thrown into the air. The garrison suffered massive casualties, but the key French blockhouse did not fall, and the Viet Minh foolishly paused before advancing. This delay gave the defenders under Captain Jean Pouget precious time to man the lip of the crater and open a murderous fire on the approaching infantry. Three hours later, with Pouget’s men still holding out, he asked for reinforcements. He could hold Eliane 2, he told HQ over the wireless, with just one additional company. None was available, replied the major on the other end. “Not another man, not another shell, my friend. You’re a para. You’re there to get yourself killed.”
³⁸

Pouget did not die. After acknowledging the major’s message, he announced his intention to sign off and to disable the radio. A Viet Minh operator who had been eavesdropping broke in and told him not to wreck the set just yet—a song was coming on. Through the static Pouget could hear the strains of “Chant des Partisans,” a wartime anthem of the French Resistance. “The swine,” he grumbled, grasping the irony. He put three bullets through the radio and went out to join his men. A few minutes before five o’clock, he and his last handful of soldiers were surrounded and captured.
³⁹

The end was near. On May 7, the sun went up for the last time on the fortified French camp. Eliane 4 and 10 were still holding out at daybreak, but by midmorning both were gone. With the enemy now a mere three hundred yards from his command post, General de Castries’s only hope was to hold the west bank of the river until nightfall and then attempt the Albatross breakout. Via radio, he updated Cogny on the situation, then asked for, and received, authority to launch the breakout at his own judgment. A transcript of their conversation survives, and it is among the more poignant such documents to come down to us from any war. De Castries, despite the unrelieved gloom of his situation, is imperturbable, stoic, haughty—qualities that at the beginning of the siege seemed wrong to many but now are what give his senior officers the strength to carry on. Cogny, by contrast, from the safety of his perch in Hanoi, is the one stammering banalities. De Castries says he will stay behind with the wounded and the noncombatants and will send the breakout group southward toward Isabelle, whose troops he will order to break out at the same time. Cogny agrees.

The Viet Minh commanders, meanwhile, were surprised by the rush of events. They had anticipated ordering a lull for consolidation before storming the remaining French positions on the west bank of the river. By early afternoon, however, with reports coming in that the garrison was close to collapse and that a breakout attempt might occur, General Giap (or, some accounts say, his deputy chief of staff General Thanh, due to Giap’s temporary absence) ordered the immediate initiation of a general offensive and the closing off of any attempted French escape to the south. Units of the 312th Division crossed the river to the west bank, and the 308th Division advanced from the west to meet them. By four
P.M
. Eliane 3 had been taken, and there was hand-to-hand combat around Eliane 11 and 12. The French reported “massive V.M. infiltration over the entire western front of the central position.”
⁴⁰

The last radio contact with Hanoi occurred shortly before five o’clock. Some hours earlier de Castries and his principal subordinates had concluded the game was up, and that a breakout would only result in a massacre. The commanders of the units chosen to participate had sent word that their men were too weary to attempt a fighting breakout, much less a jungle journey of any length. Cogny now insisted that there be no capitulation:

“
Mon vieux
, of course you have to finish the whole thing now. But what you have done until now surely is magnificent. Don’t spoil it by hoisting the white flag. You are going to be submerged [by the enemy], but no surrender, no white flag.”

“All right,
mon général
, I only wanted to preserve the wounded,” de Castries replied, his voice calm and collected.

“Yes, I know. Well, do the best you can, leaving it to your [static: subordinate units?] to act for themselves. What you have done is too magnificent to do such a thing. You understand,
mon vieux
.”

There was a silence. Then de Castries bade his farewell: “
Bien, mon général
.”

“Well, good-bye,
mon vieux
,” said Cogny. “I’ll see you soon.”
⁴¹

Less than an hour later, a squad of Viet Minh soldiers, specially detailed from among the thousands who were now pressing into the center of the camp, entered de Castries’s post, where they found him impeccably attired in clean uniform and wearing his red spahi cap. They took him prisoner while another soldier hoisted the red flag of the Viet Minh on the roof above.

The work was not done, though. In the south, Isabelle remained unsubdued. Its commander, Colonel André Lalande, a tough veteran of Narvik, El Alamein, and the Vosges, had been given permission to try a breakout on his own and had decided to go for broke. Into the evening hours, he remained uncertain about which route to take, but at nine o’clock, a two-battalion mixed force of legionnaires, Algerians, Tai, Vietnamese, and Frenchmen crawled through the barbed wire and headed south along the banks of the Nam Youm, desperately groping for a way through the encircling Viet Minh lines. They didn’t find it. Instead they found waiting enemy units; firefights soon broke out to their front, flank, and rear. By midnight, it was all over. “
Fini
, repeat,
fini
,” the post radioed Hanoi. Lalande and his principal lieutenants were captured. Only about seventy men, most of them Tai, got away and made it through the hundred miles of hostile terrain to safety in Laos.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was over. The Viet Minh had won. Vo Nguyen Giap had overturned history, had accomplished the unprecedented, had beaten the West at its own game. For the first time in the annals of colonial warfare, Asian troops had defeated a European army in fixed battle.

VI

THE NEWS OF GENERAL DE CASTRIES’S CAPTURE AND THE HOISTING
of the red flag above his command bunker reached Paris—seven hours behind Dien Bien Phu—at about noon on May 7. It was a lovely spring day in the capital, with the chestnut trees in the Bois de Boulogne and along the quays in flower. The National Assembly chamber was packed at 4:45
P.M
. when Prime Minister Joseph Laniel, the big and stolid textile millionaire who had governed France for ten shaky months, rose to announce the garrison’s fall. Unbeknownst to him, half a world away Isabelle was going under at that very moment.

“The Government has been informed,” he declared, his voice choked with emotion and barely audible, “that the central position of Dien Bien Phu has fallen after twenty hours of uninterrupted violent combat.” Following a stunned silence, punctuated by gasps of disbelief, all but the Communist Party legislators and a few of their allies rose to their feet. A woman legislator could be heard sobbing as Laniel continued:

Strongpoint Isabelle is still holding. The enemy has wanted to obtain the fall of Dien Bien Phu prior to the opening of the conference on Indochina. He believes that he could strike a decisive blow against the morale of France. He has responded to our goodwill, to France’s will for peace, by sacrificing thousands of [his] soldiers to crush under their number the heroes who, for fifty-five days, have excited the admiration of the world.…

France must remind her allies that for seven years now the Army of the French Union has unceasingly protected a particularly crucial region of Asia and has alone defended the interests of all. All of France shares the anguish of the families of the fighters of Dien Bien Phu. Their heroism has reached such heights that universal conscience should dictate to the enemy—in favor of the wounded and of those whose courage entitles them to the honors of war—such decisions as will contribute more than anything to establish a climate favorable to peace.
⁴²

The archbishop of Paris ordered a solemn mass to honor the dead and the prisoners at Dien Bien Phu, and the Paris Opera postponed a much-anticipated series of performances by the Moscow Opera Ballet (its first visit since the end of World War II). Television canceled its evening schedule, and the radio stations replaced entertainment shows with French classical music such as the Berlioz
Requiem
. Many cinemas, theaters, and restaurants closed for two days as a mark of respect. Édouard Herriot, the former premier who at age eighty-one had experienced many of his country’s modern misfortunes, observed, “A veil of mourning has fallen over France.”
⁴³

It was as though a switch had gone off: The war that for seven-plus years had received only intermittent and fleeting attention from the French public suddenly was on everyone’s mind. The defeat coincided with two of France’s greatest holidays—the ninth anniversary of V-E Day and the feast day of Joan of Arc—but there would be little rejoicing this year. When Laniel’s car rolled past the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, passersby shouted and cursed. “Send him to Dien Bien Phu,” cried some. “Shoot him!” others yelled. At the same spot, Defense Minister René Pleven drew shouts of “Resign! Resign!” Asked
Le Franc-Tireur
: “Who placed de Castries and his men in this trap? Who is officially or unofficially responsible? Who? What party? What minister? What general?” Others cast blame on the United States for declaring France’s struggle in Indochina vital to the West’s security yet failing to intervene in the hour of need. Still others called on Frenchmen and -women to look inward. “The fighters at Dienbienphu died because we lied to ourselves,”
Le Figaro
declared. “What these sacrifices demand is an examination of our conscience.”
⁴⁴

Robert Guillain of
Le Monde
was savage in his judgment. “We’ll show the people, the people of France above all,” he cabled the newspaper from Hanoi. “They have to be shown what their neglect, their incredible indifference, their illusions, their dirty politics have led to. And how best may we show them? By dying, so that honor at least may be saved. Our dead of Dien Bien Phu died, I claim, protesting, appealing against today’s France in the name of another France for which they had respect. The only victory that remains is the victory of our honor.”
⁴⁵

A foreign observer, American correspondent Benjamin Bradlee of
Newsweek
, was not impressed by the appraisals. “France is stunned and intensely, patriotically proud of Dienbienphu’s defenders,” he wrote from Paris. “But there is no inclination to unite in patriotism—no desire to avenge defeat. France offers the shameful spectacle of a country almost unanimously looking for someone to blame.”
⁴⁶

Henri Navarre, interestingly, fared quite well in the early rounds of this blame game, despite being the principal architect of the disaster. It was Paris that had ordered him to defend Laos the previous summer, most analysts declared, and then inexcusably failed to give him adequate means to carry out his task. If the general took comfort from this metropolitan reaction, he failed to show it, for his mind was now focused on how to retrieve the military situation. As he looked at his chessboard, he saw hope: By concentrating his defenses on the Red River Delta and adopting a static posture in the rest of Indochina, he could maintain the situation until Paris sent out substantial reinforcement for the fall 1954 campaign season. Parts of the delta might have to be sacrificed in order to mass available forces in the crucial area around the Hanoi-Haiphong corridor, but there was no immediate danger of wholesale collapse. In the southern half of the country, meanwhile, including the Mekong Delta, the picture remained reasonably good, Navarre believed; Giap certainly did not have the necessary resources to mount a major challenge there anytime soon, especially after losing thousands of his best troops at Dien Bien Phu. His survivors were exhausted and would need a period of rest and recuperation, and the monsoon season, which still had months to run, would limit his ability to move men and matériel.