Embers of War (88 page)

Of course, Giap did not attack on that final Monday in January. He waited seven more weeks, until twilight on March 13. By then, it had long since become clear to Navarre, to Cogny, and to de Castries that their hopes of operating beyond the valley, indeed beyond the range of their own artillery, were in vain. By then, they grasped that the Viet Minh had defied the forecasts and assembled an enormous stock of ordnance as well as superiority in numbers. A battle of position and attrition now seemed more or less inevitable, and the question is whether the French commanders could have done more in tactical terms to prepare for the encounter. The answer must be yes, even if some things were beyond their power to remedy—notably the inability of the French Air Force, stretched to the limit and lacking sufficient aircraft and crews, to provide adequate air cover. They might have, for one thing, used that limited airpower more effectively. They committed the common error of overestimating the strategic capabilities of airpower, dropping huge tonnages of bombs on Routes 41 and 13 to interdict Viet Minh supplies and having little to show for it. The Viet Minh proved too adept at getting the materials through. French planners would have been better off concentrating their bombing effort on the basin itself.
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Inside the valley, the layout of the position left much to be desired. The network of defensive strongpoints was poorly conceived, with Isabelle too far away to really support the central position with artillery fire, and Gabrielle and Béatrice too weakly defended to play their assigned roles in defending the airstrip. At no time did Cogny order de Castries to test whether his reserve forces could reach these strongpoints at night and under fire. Probably none of them, and certainly not Isabelle, should have been occupied, for although they forced the Viet Minh to begin the assault farther from the airstrip, the battalions that ostensibly defended them would have been better used to launch counterattacks from the central position. Such counterattacks often showed good results when Bigeard and Langlais launched them and indeed were a major reason the garrison held out as long as it did. The U.S.-supplied Chaffee tanks proved crucial in these raids, and it seems undeniable that de Castries should have demanded, and received, another dozen tanks—or as many as could have been flown in and reassembled. But de Castries seems never to have grasped the importance of the counterattacks, both to retake hill positions once they had been lost and to get at the Viet Minh’s antiaircraft artillery, much of which was close to the airstrip and an ideal target for sallies from the main position. Though a courageous and intelligent commander, he was miscast for this role, being inadequately attuned to the particulars of trench warfare—and Dien Bien Phu was, in Bernard Fall’s words, “in many ways a piece of Argonne Forest or Verdun transported into a tropical setting.”
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Even matters so basic as strengthening the gun pits and reinforcing the roofs of the essential service installations, including that of the hospital, would have made a big difference. Most of the bunkers were too weak to stand up to the Viet Minh artillery fire, or for that matter to the monsoons; nor was any effort made to camouflage them. The meager resources of the valley didn’t help in this regard—even wood, it will be recalled, was not readily available—but certainly de Castries and his engineering commander should have done much more than they did to prepare the position for the assault they knew was coming. As it was, the flimsy fortifications made the garrison much more vulnerable than it should have been.

Finally, mention must be made of the personal schism between Henri Navarre and René Cogny, which grew deeper and wider as the spring progressed (and which, after the war, led the latter to file suit—unsuccessfully—against the former). By the end, the two men felt a profound and abiding mutual disdain and were barely speaking, a situation hardly conducive to nimble and imaginative decision making. Nor was Navarre willing to relieve Cogny of his command in favor of someone with whom he could work. Instead, in a stunning failure of leadership, he allowed the feud to fester, week after crucial week.

How the battle would have run had some or all of these problems on the French side been rectified is of course impossible to know, but it’s not fanciful to imagine a different outcome. Giap scored a tremendous victory and showed tactical brilliance in his use of antiaircraft and artillery and his employment of World War I siege tactics and techniques. The sequence in which he attacked the three northern strongpoints—first Béatrice, then Gabrielle, then Anne-Marie, which the demoralized Tai abandoned without a fight after seeing at close hand the fall of the two stronger outposts—has been justly praised by military historians, and did much to shape the outcome of the battle. Nevertheless the French could have held Dien Bien Phu, if not indefinitely, then certainly through the rainy season and into the autumn. Even with the shortcomings and the mistakes on the French side, Giap was compelled to use the whole range of his resources, and his forces were severely bloodied by the end. He had his hands full throughout, even though the enemy had 3,000 to 4,000 “internal deserters” who decided to sit out the battle. (What if all these Rats of Nam Youm, or even half of them, had chosen instead to fight?) Had the fortress held out even just a few more days, Giap might have been compelled to order another pause—which in turn would have allowed the Condor column to arrive from Laos to bolster French defenses.

To argue for this counterfactual is not to say that, as a result, the French could have won the war. For even if French Union forces had held the valley and brought about the destruction of Giap’s main force divisions, and even if that result had seriously undermined the morale of Viet Minh troops elsewhere in Indochina, the overall balance of strength would still have tilted against France. The extent of the
pourrissement
(deterioration) in the countryside rendered the reestablishment of French control an unlikely prospect at best, not merely in Tonkin but in large swaths of Annam and Cochin China as well. The VNA remained a weak military instrument, while on the home front in France, morale was sinking ever further, as more and more Frenchmen and -women concluded that the war no longer had any valid objective and as the French Army continued losing officers at a frightful clip—an average of six hundred killed per year, the equivalent of a whole graduating class from the military academy at Saint-Cyr.

None of which diminished the momentousness of the occasion when the small and intense French foreign minister, who had been at the center of Indochina policy for eight years, who was as closely associated with this war as anyone on his side, arose slowly from his seat in the Palais des Nations in Geneva on the afternoon of May 8, walked to the lectern, and acknowledged before the delegates and the world the fall of Dien Bien Phu.

CHAPTER 22
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

W
HEN GEORGES BIDAULT STRODE TO THE PODIUM AT THE PALAIS
des Nations that Saturday afternoon, May 8, 1954, the Geneva Conference was already approaching the end of its second week. The formal Indochina discussions would begin only now, with Bidault’s speech, but the behind-the-scenes jockeying on the war had been intense from the start, from the arrival of the first delegations on April 24–25. The Chinese, some two hundred strong and clad in blue high-neck suits, created a stir among the journalists who assembled at Cointrin airfield to greet prime minister and foreign minister Zhou Enlai’s plane on the twenty-fourth. This was, everyone knew, a kind of international coming-out for the Beijing government, and a horde of photographers clicked away furiously as the courtly and handsome Zhou, with his high forehead, wide mouth, and piercing black eyes, descended the stairway, flashed a smile, and made quickly for his waiting car.
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Neither Vyacheslav Molotov that evening, nor Anthony Eden the following day, nor even Bidault a day after that, caused anything like this commotion, and there was no journalistic frenzy when a somber John Foster Dulles emerged from his plane late on April 25 and read a statement he had drafted a few minutes earlier while en route. A “durable peace” in Indochina ought to be achievable, he said, but it was not up to the Western powers to bring it about. “We hope to find that the aggressors come here in a mood to purge themselves of their aggression.”
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Zhou Enlai, having declined to share a headquarters with the Russians, chose for his residence the splendid and ornate Le Grand Mont-Fleuri, a twenty-six-room mansion five miles from Geneva in the picturesque lakeside village of Versoix. Bidault, Molotov, and Eden found similar abodes, though in the case of Eden, only after several bad nights in the Hotel Beau Rivage. He railed at aides about the traffic noise outside his window and the lousy food service and said he could not bear the presence in the same hotel of Chinese support staff, whom he suspected of eavesdropping. A frantic search for new accommodations followed, and on April 29, Eden and his wife, Clarissa, along with a few top aides, decamped for Le Reposoir, a superb villa north of the city decorated with fine furniture and artwork. Only the Americans, more than a hundred strong, opted to stay together as a unit, in the ultramodern, cheerless Hotel du Rhône, a selection meant to show, some thought, that Dulles was merely passing through and that his delegation would be ready to leave at any time.
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And the Vietnamese? They were not yet there. They didn’t need to be, for the first item on the agenda was Korea, and moreover the question of who among the Vietnamese would attend had yet to be settled. The Paris government struggled to round up representatives from the Associated States, whose leaders, especially Bao Dai and his ministers, were suspicious of the whole endeavor and fearful of the probable outcome. These Vietnamese also objected to any DRV participation in the conference, and they initially received the backing of Bidault, less because he shared their views than because he hoped to have no Vietnamese participation at all. Mistrustful of the Viet Minh, the Frenchman also understood that Bao Dai’s cabinet, along with the U.S. government, represented the greatest obstacles to a negotiated settlement in Geneva; as such, it would be best to deny both Vietnamese entities a voice in the proceedings. Bidault’s conviction on this score hardened on May 3, when Bao Dai declared that his government would attend only if France guaranteed it would not partition Vietnam. But Molotov and Zhou Enlai rejected out of hand any attempt to deny a seat to the Viet Minh, and even Dulles, though he shared the emperor’s opposition to partition, told Bidault that Viet Minh participation was inevitable.

Bidault said he agreed, then changed his mind. Later he changed it again, and then yet again. It was his pattern, in these early days in Geneva, to go back and forth on the core issues, to temporize, as he waited anxiously for news from Dien Bien Phu and as the Laniel government, accused of insufficient ardor for a diplomatic solution, worked feverishly to survive a vote of confidence in the National Assembly. Ultimately Bidault agreed to the Viet Minh’s presence at the conference, and he secured the Bao Dai government’s participation by committing himself, in a letter to the emperor on May 6, to oppose partition. But his general indecision on all matters irritated the other chief delegates, including Dulles, who complained to Eden that the French seemed incapable of making up their minds on any subject.

Eden concurred. Privately, though, he fumed at the American’s failure to acknowledge the obvious: that U.S. policy was in significant measure responsible for Bidault’s lack of resoluteness. The Eisenhower administration, after all, like Shakespeare’s whining schoolboy, was “creeping like snail unwillingly” to Geneva and had made no secret of its dim assessment of the prospects for an acceptable deal. Even now, Eden suspected, they were whispering dangerous ideas in Bidault’s ear—that he should hold firm, that the Communists, being Communists, would never abide by any agreement, that there was still the prospect of a U.S.-led military intervention in support of the Expeditionary Corps should the talks fail. Such notions, the Briton knew, appealed to Bidault, for although he grasped that he had no option but to seek a diplomatic settlement—French public opinion demanded it—he still clung to the possibility that he could salvage something from the Indochina mess he had done so much to create. At the start of May he still hoped that the threat, and if necessary the reality, of American intervention might change the dynamics on the ground, saving if not Dien Bien Phu then at least the French position in the Red River Delta.

It was true: The Eisenhower administration was hardly in a position to complain about Bidault’s temporizing, given its own confused and uncertain posture as the conference got under way. Dulles, stern and unsmiling even in the most salubrious of circumstances, was in a sour mood from the get-go, as he contemplated having to appear on the same stage as the Chinese Communists. He was also dismayed at his government’s failure to secure a declaration of joint intention among the Western powers and annoyed with the British for, as he saw it, pressuring Paris to accept a cease-fire. He cabled Washington on April 29: “UK attitude is one of increasing weakness. Britain seem to feel that we are disposed to accept present risks of a Chinese war and this, coupled also with their fear that we would start using atomic weapons, has badly frightened them.”
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