Embers of War (87 page)

This was a classic glass-half-full reading of things. Navarre knew it was possible to argue a very different case, at least with respect to Tonkin: to see a glass with hardly any drops at all. As recently as two years earlier, in the spring of 1952, the Viet Minh had had only about 15,000 men in the Red River Delta; by March 1953, the figure was 50,000, and now it was close to 100,000. Eight million Vietnamese resided in this triangle-shaped, Connecticut-size plain, the vast majority of them hostile to the colonial overlord. Though theoretically held by the French, the delta was also the Viet Minh’s main base of operations, supplying 80 percent of the People’s Army’s food and 70 percent of its recruits. Whereas the previous autumn it was possible still to say that the delta was French by day, Viet Minh by night, now it was mostly Viet Minh at all hours. The French held only Hanoi and Haiphong and a handful of the larger towns. Connecting roads were insecure—even by day. As for the vital sixty-mile rail and road link between Hanoi and Haiphong, it was more vulnerable with each passing week. No French traffic moved before noon; even then the convoys would have to speed up, some seven miles out of Hanoi, to run the Viet Minh gauntlet. Often they would be cut down as the mortars and bazookas opened up. With Giap now free to shift the bulk of his forces to the delta, would France be forced to give up Tonkin altogether and shift her efforts to maintaining control of Cochin China and southern Annam? Publicly Navarre denied that this was so and that all was lost in the north; privately he understood that the outlook was bleak and getting bleaker.

VII

AS THE FRENCH COMMANDER SUSPECTED, GENERAL GIAP OPTED
, even before the smoke had cleared at Dien Bien Phu, to shift the bulk of his fighting force there to the delta. By the last week of May, advance elements of the four divisions that had overrun the fortress reached Moc Chau, seventy-five miles west of Hanoi. He was not yet prepared to launch an all-out assault on French positions in the delta—his troops needed a period of rest and recuperation, and the Geneva negotiations must be given a chance to play themselves out—but he wanted to be fully prepared when the day and hour came. French intelligence analysts were probably correct in estimating that his Dien Bien Phu divisions would be ready to attack the delta by June 15–20.

Giap’s more immediate concern was the disposition of hundreds of enemy wounded at Dien Bien Phu, and thousands of enemy prisoners. With the fighting over, it was possible, for the first time since the battle began, for him to determine the real strength of the garrison. The total was astonishingly large: When the shooting stopped on May 7, more than ten thousand French Union service personnel of all nationalities, including the lightly wounded, emerged into the open.
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The discrepancy between that figure and the number of fighting troops at General de Castries’s disposal in the final weeks can be explained in part by the sizable number of noncombatant personnel at headquarters and elsewhere. But by far the largest addition to the sum was supplied by the Rats of Nam Youm, the slackers who early on had decided to sit out the battle in abandoned dugouts and trenches along the banks of the river. Their number, at the end, approached four thousand.

In short order, the prisoners were put on the road, the better to keep them under control and to prevent any French rescue attempt. Some were destined for camps along the lower Song River in Thanh Hoa province, 300 miles to the southeast by road; the majority was marched in a northeasterly direction, to Bac Kan province in the Viet Bac, upward of 450 miles away. The seriously wounded remained behind, along with some medical staff and engineers. The Viet Minh, lacking the medical or transport facilities to care adequately for the gravely ill either on the spot or their own rear areas, agreed, with a curiously old-fashioned conventionality that they on occasion exhibited, that about nine hundred of the wounded should be evacuated by air from the basin to French hospitals. Some wounded started out on the march but were returned to the valley when it became clear that they were not remotely up to the ordeal of walking even a few hours through the jungle. Also sent back: a group of mostly North African POWs, needed for reconstructed scenes of “the fall of Dien Bien Phu” staged for the film cameras.
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The ordeal of the marchers, who numbered some nine thousand, has been told before.
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A harrowing story it is. As a group, they were in poor physical condition even before they set out from the valley floor, and now they would be compelled to cover some twelve miles per day for forty days over difficult terrain and during the rainy season. The daily ration of 800 grams of rice, supplemented by the occasional banana or handful of peanuts, provided insufficient nourishment, and the prisoners soon shed whatever body fat they had been able to retain during the siege. Their immune systems thus compromised, many proved unable to fight off infection and disease, and malaria, beriberi, and dysentery were endemic. Nor, in their weakened condition, could prisoners long help carry bamboo litters bearing ailing comrades; soon the seriously ill were simply left to suffer and die, all alone, with the jungle and its rats and ants closing in around them. The few doctors among the marchers were kept separated with the other officers and forbidden from giving even minimal care to the French wounded, forcing desperate men to resort to desperate actions—such as the soldier who cut off his own gangrenous arm with a pocket knife.

Few of the grievously wounded survived more than a day or two, and even many of the technically fit succumbed before the end of the march. Those in their thirties and forties often held up better than those in their twenties. Senegalese and North Africans and Vietnamese had higher rates of survival than did French and Legion POWs, despite the fact that the Vietnamese—“traitors” for having fought on the side of the enemy—were singled out for tougher treatment. The predominantly central European background of the legionnaires, with their fair skin and hair, no doubt made them particularly ill equipped to deal with the harsh weather, and both they and the French troops also appear to have been more susceptible to disease than were the other groups. The individualistic, may-the-Devil-take-the-hindmost attitude of many in the Legion may also have made a difference, as they were sometimes unwilling to come to the aid of weaker comrades.
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These personal tragedies may rightly be laid at the feet of the Viet Minh. Instances of outright wanton brutality or sadism on the part of the guards were by all accounts very few; severe beatings generally were administered only to escapees who were recaptured—and then often only if these were Vietnamese or recidivist escapees. Surviving prisoners also recalled occasional acts of kindness by their captors, who themselves often had to get by on very meager rations. Overall, though, the Viet Minh guards and political officers (
can bo
) showed scant concern for the survival of the captives and for abiding by the Geneva Conventions, even as more and more of the POWs succumbed to the brutal conditions. In response, it could be said that the marchers had it coming to them, in view of the suffering the French had inflicted on Vietnamese over these past decades; this does not negate the point that the Viet Minh, from start to finish, showed callous disregard for the prisoners, only a minority of whom were French nationals. The
can bo
concerned themselves mostly with waging psychological warfare through evening lectures and self-criticism sessions in which the captives were told they were “war criminals” who must confess the error of their ways. The
can bo
also sought to turn prisoners against one another by appealing to racial differences and expounding on the evils of imperialism. Why, the North Africans were asked, did you come to fight in Vietnam when your own countries are still under colonial control?
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Those who survived to reach the camps (the first of which had been set up in late 1950, following the Viet Minh victory on the RC4) found conditions hardly better there. The relentless psychological conditioning continued, some of it now carried out by former French Union prisoners who had turned—“crossovers,” they were called—and been trained by the Viet Minh and Chinese in the use of Communist propaganda techniques. Malaria remained endemic, and the death rate from waterborne intestinal diseases—only the officers’ camp was provided with pots to boil water—skyrocketed. (Camp 70, for example, counted 70 deaths out of 120 in July–August 1954, many from amoebic dysentery.) Physical labor was compulsory, and those too ill or too weak to work received no rations.
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There is no way to know with accuracy how many prisoners died in the months following their march out of the valley, but certainly the period of captivity killed far more of the garrison than had the entire battle. One careful estimate, by a representative on the International Control Commission in March 1955, had the number of prisoners from the Dien Bien Phu garrison handed back by the Viet Minh at the time of the POW exchange (which began on August 18, 1954) at 3,900, or some 43 percent of those who began the trek. Not all the remainder died, certainly—some managed to disappear in the jungle, and as many as a thousand legionnaires may have been directly repatriated to Communist countries of origin. Nevertheless, the picture that emerges is extremely grim. Add in the roughly 3,500 dead or missing in action from the battle itself, and one is left with the following dark interpretation: Of the approximately 15,000 men who served in French uniform in the valley of the Nam Youm, fewer than half ever went home, wounded or unwounded. Historian Martin Windrow puts the death ratio at 60 percent, a statistic, he rightly notes, that rivals the very worst battles of the twentieth century.
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FRENCH UNION POWS ARRIVE IN HANOI AFTER THEIR RELEASE, AUGUST 25, 1954.
(photo credit 21.2)

The Viet Minh, of course, paid a heavy human price for their victory at Dien Bien Phu. Various casualty figures have been put forth over the years, including by a Franco-Vietnamese team that in 1955 began an aborted project to recover bodies for an ossuary; consensus remains elusive, but a safe estimate is that the Viet Minh suffered on the order of 10,000 deaths, from start to finish, and at least 15,000 wounded. According to internal sources uncovered by historian Christopher Goscha, Giap’s troops experienced an astonishing killed-in-action rate of 32 percent during the first-wave attack in March—that is to say, three out of ten Vietnamese men who went over the top in the initial assault did not return. In the subsequent waves the death rate dropped, but it never went below 20 percent. Among the wounded, these documents show, almost a quarter (23.7 percent) suffered injuries to the head or neck. Many, it goes without saying, would never recover, even if they lived.
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VIII

IT REMAINS TO BE ASKED IF IT COULD HAVE TURNED OUT DIFFERENTLY
. Might the battle of Dien Bien Phu, if the French command had conducted it another way, have yielded a different result? Could it have ended in a victory for French Union forces instead of a defeat, thereby perhaps changing the whole complexion of the war?

In strategic terms, Navarre’s original decision to make a stand at Dien Bien Phu had more to recommend it than conventional historical wisdom has suggested. He was not wrong to want to create an initiative outside the delta, or to see the valley as the best available place to bar Giap’s path to Luang Prabang, the royal capital of Laos, which France was committed to defending. Nor was it necessarily unreasonable to see in Operation Castor an opportunity to repeat the success of Na San the previous year, but on a greater scale: that is, Navarre believed he could create at Dien Bien Phu a focus of action that would draw into play, on terms favorable to him, the bulk of the enemy’s mobile force. And it made sense to try to deny the enemy the lucrative opium harvest of the area. The counterargument would be that Navarre would have been better off sacrificing northern Laos in order to husband his resources in the more vital Red River Delta and force Giap to attack him there, and that he should have anticipated much more readily than he did the logistical problems that ensued and that ultimately would be the garrison’s undoing. Fair points both. Then again, had General Giap followed the original plan and launched the attack on January 25—which, as we have seen, he came very close to doing—his troops might have suffered a colossal defeat. Navarre’s conception would have been fully vindicated. Castor would have gone down in history as a military masterstroke, its architect a strategist of the first order. Many of the same military experts—not least, it should be said, American ones—who after May 7 savaged Navarre’s decision to establish a garrison that could be supplied and reinforced only by air had earlier lauded his choice and predicted it would result in a smashing victory.