Embers of War (63 page)

In Paris, however, nerves were on edge. The civilian leadership was in no mood to launch a major military operation. On November 15, Marc Jacquet, minister for the Associated States, embarked for Saigon. He told Navarre, cryptically: “The fall of Luang Prabang would make impossible the prosecution of the war.” What did he mean? Let Laos fall in order to stop this war, which was costing France so much and which should be terminated? Or, to the contrary, keep Laos? Navarre chose the second interpretation. “After all,” he said, “Dien Bien Phu will not cost me anything more than Na San cost Salan.”
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Then, on November 18, Rear Admiral Georges Cabanier arrived in Saigon, sent by Paris to inform Navarre that he should try nothing extravagant and that, in any case, there was no longer any money in the treasury for the war. Possibly, Cabanier was even to tell Navarre to halt military operations and leave everything to the politicians, who would seek a cease-fire and negotiations. But Navarre was in Hanoi. He kept Cabanier waiting, fearing the admiral’s message. For by then he had given the order: Dien Bien Phu would be retaken. Already two weeks before, Navarre had instructed Cogny to begin planning for the operation, to be code-named Castor. Cogny had obliged, over the objections of his staff. Colonel Jean Nicot, commander of the transport arm of the French Air Force, registered his opposition on November 11; he could not, he said, guarantee a steady flow of supplies to Dien Bien Phu. Navarre was unmoved. On the seventeenth, he met all of his major subordinate commanders, who one by one registered their concerns regarding Operation Castor. Cogny was among them. Navarre listened politely, then asked, “Is it possible?” Everyone murmured that it was. Very well, then, the commander in chief replied, the operation would take place in three days, weather permitting.
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At 8:15
A.M
. on Friday, November 20, 1953, about sixty Dakotas took to the air one after the other from a Hanoi airfield, their noses painted blue, yellow, or red. Flanked by B-26 Invaders, they formed a column seven miles long. A little more than two hours later, at about 10:35, the first of them appeared from behind the crests above the basin. Twenty-two hundred “paras” (paratroopers), the cream of the French Expeditionary Corps, proceeded to drop into the valley north and south of the village. The operation, commanded by gruff, one-eyed Brigadier General Jean Gilles (he carried his glass eye in his jacket pocket when he jumped), was carried off with the loss of 15 dead and 53 wounded. The Viet Minh lost 90 men before giving way and allowing the French to dig in.
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THE FIRST LANDED “PARAS” KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON THE DESCENT OF THEIR COMRADES, AS OPERATION CASTOR BEGINS, NOVEMBER 20, 1953.
(photo credit 16.1)

II

THE NEWS OF THE FRENCH REOCCUPATION OF DIEN BIEN PHU CAUGHT
Viet Minh commanders by surprise. When word reached Vo Nguyen Giap, he was just preparing to present the 1953–54 offensive campaign to his division commanders at a forest camp in the Dinh Hoa district of Thai Nguyen province. The plan had taken shape over several months and was the product of considerable high-level discussion, involving also Chinese advisers. At the Fourth Plenum of the Communist Party (formally, the Vietnamese Workers Party), held in January 1953, senior strategists had determined to strike where the enemy was weak, in order to force the French to disperse their troops to the greatest extent possible, as far away from the Red River Delta as they could be lured. That was a main motivation behind the Laos invasion in the spring, and it remained the operating assumption throughout the summer. Giap gave close consideration to mounting a major operation against the heart of French defenses in the Red River Delta, but both he and Ho Chi Minh worried that the all-important “balance of forces” in the delta still tilted against them.

The Chinese too argued for a more cautious strategy centered on the northwestern highlands. “We should first annihilate enemies in the Lai Chau area, liberating northern and central Laos, and then extend the battlefield gradually toward southern Laos and Cambodia, thus putting pressure on Saigon,” the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee declared in a telegram in August. “By adopting this strategy, we will be able to limit the human and financial resources of the enemy and separate the enemy’s troops, leaving the enemy in a disadvantageous position.… The realization of this strategic plan will surely contribute to the final defeat of the colonial rule of French imperialists in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Of course, we need to overcome a variety of difficulties and prepare for a prolonged war.”
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The Chinese role in the decision to avoid a major clash in the delta should not be minimized, but neither should it be exaggerated. Responsibility was shared. Just as the Navarre Plan grew out of joint U.S.-French planning, so did the Chinese and Viet Minh consult each other over which course to take at this critical juncture. Certainly, Ho and Giap could not ignore Chinese recommendations. For one thing, Beijing’s aid had increased markedly over the previous year. For most of 1952, the monthly average was 250 tons, but by December it had risen to 450 tons. (U.S. aid to France, by contrast, now exceeded 8,000 tons per month.) In January 1953, the amount reached 900 tons, much of it in the form of arms and ammunition and motor vehicles. And with the end of the fighting in Korea in the summer, PRC aid could flow still more freely. Chinese military advisers and technicians also came across the border in larger numbers, while Vietnamese were sent in the other direction to undertake wireless and antiaircraft training in southern China. (In theory, at least, the antiaircraft weapons, mostly Russian 37mm, were to come in with a trained team of twenty operators per gun.)
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In October, Ho, Giap, and the other top party leaders met in high secrecy, around a bamboo table in a bamboo house on the side of a heavily forested hill in Thai Nguyen province. So sensitive were they to potential leaks that the party note taker was denied entry. By now reasonably well-informed about the details of the Navarre Plan—they were, as always, assiduous readers of the French press, and their intelligence network reached close to the French High Command—they formally agreed to concentrate during the coming campaign season on the northwest, where, as they saw it, the enemy was weak but would feel compelled to make a stand. In the process, he would spread his forces thinner and become more vulnerable to guerrilla and other attacks in his rear.
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“When you close your hand you make a fist that can strike a powerful blow,” Ho Chi Minh told the assembled, opening and closing his raised right hand as he spoke, and with a cigarette in his left. “But if you spread your hand out, it is easy to break your fingers, one by one. We must find a way to force the solid bloc of enemy mobile groups to spread out into a number of pieces so that we can gradually annihilate them, one at a time, thereby causing them to suffer complete defeat.”
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Truong Chinh, the party’s senior theoretician, concurred. “The Tonkin lowland is the place where enemy forces are hard, where their defenses are stiff,” he argued.

In other battlefields the enemy’s dispositions are relatively weak and exposed, but they cannot abandon these areas, and this is especially true for the mountain jungle region. If we launch an attack into the Northwest region we will certainly draw in enemy forces and force the enemy’s strategic mobile force to disperse to defend against our attack.… The enemy may only be able to bring in supplies and reinforcements by air. If we can overcome the problems with logistics and supplies, our forces will have many advantages fighting up there and we will be capable of attaining and maintaining military superiority throughout the entire campaign, or at least in a certain sector of the campaign area. In that way we may be able to win a great victory.
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Behind these confident assertions was a genuine concern that comes through even in the official accounts of the meeting. Despite seven years of immense sacrifice, of constant hardship and deprivation, the goal of “complete victory” (
toan thang
) remained far, far away. The sagging support for the war in metropolitan France was encouraging, but militarily the French held pretty good cards, especially in view of their strong positions in the Red River Delta and in Cochin China. With Washington’s recent decision to massively increase U.S. aid to the French cause, a continuing stalemate on the battlefield was not out of the question.
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Then too there was the buildup of the Vietnamese National Army. The conferees heaped disdain on this French attempt at “using war to nourish war, using Vietnamese to fight Vietnamese,” as one delegate put it, but it’s clear that they worried about the implications of an expanded VNA, one that, if still inferior in all respects to their own People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), might show greater commitment and fighting ability than previously, and greater popular support. Victory would still come in the end, the delegates assured themselves and one another, but the task was far from finished.

Ho Chi Minh, hinting at possible morale problems among troops in the coming operation, concluded the meeting by noting that some soldiers, after the previous campaign in the highlands, had put their hands together and bowed toward the mountains and the jungles in a gesture of thanks and respect. These troops would have no desire to return to the area, Ho said, and they would have to be convinced of the importance of the mission. They would also need adequate supplies, including warm clothing: “Have we completed the sewing of this new style of padded jacket that I am wearing?” he asked. “When will we issue them to the troops? I want you men to go back and check on this. Warm jackets must be issued to each of our troops before they move out for this campaign.”
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The decision made to concentrate on the northwest, Giap in the midautumn resisted Navarre’s attempts to goad him into a major engagement in and around the delta. On October 14, Navarre personally supervised the launching of Operation Mouette (Seagull), directed at the important enemy supply center of Phu Nho Quan, just south of the delta. Six
groupes mobiles
, backed by tank and amphibious battalions as well as two French Navy marine units, broke through the limestone hills of Ninh Binh in a pincer movement designed to encircle the PAVN 320th Infantry Division. Regiments 48 and 64 stood fast and even counterattacked the vastly stronger French Union forces, in order to allow vital supplies and matériel to be removed from Phu Nho Quan. With that task completed, the Viet Minh troops withdrew again into the countryside, and the French entered a deserted town. All along the line, they had run into stiffer resistance than expected but without engaging the bulk of the enemy force. The 320th, considered less well equipped and trained than the 308th and the 312th, had been mauled, but it was far from decimated. Yet again the Viet Minh had shown their maddening ability (in French eyes) to slip away from serious trouble.
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Giap also ordered his ten-thousand-man 316th Division to leave its staging area near Thanh Hoa and move up the Song River toward Lai Chau.
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That force was still en route when word of the Castor airlift operation reached the Thai Nguyen meeting. Clearly taken aback by Navarre’s move, Giap told his assembled commanders: “This is an operation that works to our advantage.” But he also expressed uncertainty about Navarre’s intentions. According to a Vietnamese account of the meeting, Giap peppered subordinates with questions: Was this a temporary incursion? Did Navarre order it because he had learned of the movement of the 316th toward Lai Chau? Were the parachutists dropped into Dien Bien Phu to support Lai Chau, or would Navarre now abandon Lai Chau and move those troops to Dien Bien Phu? If the Viet Minh reacted strongly, would Navarre reinforce the airhead into a powerful entrenched camp like Na San, or withdraw? And how precisely were the French units deployed in the valley?

“We immediately telephoned our reconnaissance element preparing to go to Lai Chau,” one of the subordinates recalled, “and told them to leave immediately for Dien Bien Phu, to work with local units in the area, reconnoiter the enemy situation, and send daily reports back to the intelligence department.” At the same time, this officer continued, the Viet Minh command directed its technical reconnaissance (radio intercept) forces to continually monitor French activity not merely at Dien Bien Phu but also at Lai Chau and in northern Laos.
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These activities soon yielded valuable information, as did the loose lips of French commanders. It was a constant problem during the war, this habit of senior officers to speak too freely about plans and operations. The French and foreign press, taking good notes on what they heard, dutifully reported that an entrenched camp similar to Na San would be established at Dien Bien Phu and would provide support for a major Tai partisan movement. General Cogny rashly confided to a reporter that “if he could, he would have transported Na San
en bloc
to Dien Bien Phu.” More damaging still, a series of reports referred to the 316th Division’s progress toward Lai Chau, knowledge that could only have come from radio intercepts. The Viet Minh immediately changed their code for operational traffic, thus frustrating French intelligence operatives in the Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage (SDECE) for the better part of a week.
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