Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (13 page)

The French effort by early 1950 seemed mired in torpor. The government was paralyzed by complacency, its senior military leadership riddled with infighting, making the planning of operations and the setting of objectives—exceedingly difficult enterprises in the best of circumstances—all but impossible. After the futility of Operation Lea in 1947, the French abandoned efforts to crush Giap’s base of operations and training in the jungles of the Viet Bac despite clear intelligence of impressive growth in Vietminh numbers and combat capabilities.

The FEF had expanded to 150,000 troops by this point. These forces were certainly sufficient to stave off defeat, even to preserve a precarious stalemate. Yet still, Paris and its commander in the field, Marcel Carpentier, persistently underestimated the caliber of Giap’s recruiting and training capabilities—and the high motivation and toughness he instilled in his warriors. Carpentier decided to keep the vast majority of the FEF in static garrison positions, guarding the largest bases and towns throughout the three regions of the country. To curry favor in Paris, he refrained from asking for more troops, thereby maintaining the illusion in the minds of French policymakers that so long as the string of frontier “hedgehogs” was kept intact, Giap’s forces were safely contained in the Viet Bac, posing little threat to French control over the Delta. It was an assessment tinged with more than a modicum of arrogance.

The complacency of Carpentier is all the more curious given the burgeoning power of revolutionary forces elsewhere in the country. Giap’s chief commander in Cochinchina, Nguyen Binh, had thoroughly infiltrated Saigon’s governmental apparatus with a vast overlapping network of Vietminh cells, both political and military. The steel-nerved head of the French Sûreté in Saigon, Monsieur Bazin, told a journalist in late 1949 that it was only a matter of time—and not much of it—before he himself would be assassinated. “The whole town is riddled with Viet cells,” said Bazin. “They are everywhere. They kill anyone they choose and they make everyone pay taxes. . . . There are thousands of networks giving their daily
orders and carrying out their propaganda, spying and tax gathering almost openly.”
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Bazin himself was indeed killed a few weeks later by one of the Vietminh’s highly trained assassination squads. Terrorism was rampant in Saigon until the end of the summer of 1950, when a shrewd, intelligent Vietnamese secret policeman named Tam, the “Tiger of Cailay,” ruthlessly ferreted out the Communist infrastructure in the city. He used a lethal combination of torture, payoffs, and assassinations, effectively employing the Vietminh’s own tactics against them.

But Cochinchina was distracting the French from the war’s true center of gravity, Tonkin. General Carpentier and his commander in Tonkin, General Marcel Alessandri, had three viable options to challenge Giap’s growing power. They could withdraw their overextended forces from the hedgehogs along the Chinese border to positions inside the Delta to challenge the Vietminh’s guerrilla operations. They could take a far riskier tack: reinforce the hedgehogs with additional forces drawn from central and southern Vietnam and go after Giap’s newly minted divisions before they were fully operational. Or they could invade the Viet Bac and try to crush the PAVN in its main base.

General Alessandri, no friend of Carpentier, believed that Giap and his Chinese advisers had not yet sharpened their claws to a point where they could strike effectively against either the frontier hedgehogs or the strong French defenses around the Delta. In May 1950, he presented to Carpentier a meticulous plan for a massive fifty-battalion attack into the Viet Bac. The FEF would launch columns of five to six battalions from six different points of access, smashing Giap’s army right in the heart of the jungle with overwhelming force. French journalist Lucien Bodard describes the plan:

In the first phase they would seize the approaches and the lines of access, and in the second they would fan out in the mountains and forests in groups of five to six battalions . . . and drive into the heart of the enemy jungle. The blows were to come from everywhere at once, otherwise the Viets would slip through his fingers like quicksilver. . . . Parachute troops were an important element and so were fighters; but there was to be no artillery—it was essential the men should travel light, that their movement should be rapid, and that everything should be carried out at great speed. It was to be pure fighting, man-to-man combat in the tradition of the columns of the colonial days.
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Carpentier turned Alessandri’s plan down out of hand. He chose none of the viable options. He decided to leave the understrength garrisons strung out along the Chinese border where they were, maintaining the fiction that they could challenge Vietminh control of northern Tonkin.

GIAP’S FIRST OFFENSIVE

Phase one kicked off in February 1950 with an assault on Pholu, a satellite hedgehog of earth and logs twenty miles east of Lao Cai, surrounded by a lake and an immense forest. Giap’s troops stormed the heights surrounding the 150-man garrison there. Stealthily digging a network of camouflaged shelters for their newly acquired bazookas, 120mm mortars, and recoilless rifles supplied by thousands of porters shuffling along jungle paths, the Vietnamese blew the fort to pieces, overran it, and set the place alight.
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When two battalions of French paras attempted a rescue mission, they were dropped twenty miles too far to the east. Slashing westward through rough terrain, they were caught by Giap’s roving companies and all but annihilated. Only 200 fighters from the two FEF battalions staggered into the main hedgehog at Lao Cai. And they’d managed that by the skin of their teeth: their white smoke distress signal was spotted on the ground by a squadron of French fighters. Six swooped down on the Viet infantry with napalm bombs and machine guns, blunting the attack.

After the victory at Pholu, the Vietminh went on to attack several other satellite bases, including Nghia Do, 30 miles to the southeast of Lao Cai. That hedgehog withstood the initial onslaught, only to be evacuated several days later when the commander recognized that it would not survive another strong assault.

Giap then withdrew his regiments for regrouping and refitting. He had one more test in mind before retiring for the monsoon season. This time he would strike near the border in the northeast. In April, the entire 308th Division smashed into Dong Khe, a satellite hedgehog of the major base at Cao Bang, manned by a single battalion of Foreign Legionnaires. Situated astride RC4, amid mountainous jungle prone to landslides, the road offered the Vietminh a multitude of opportunities to ambush any column sent to rescue Dong Khe. As usual, Giap’s preparation was meticulous. It took four battalions to lug heavy mortars and five 75mm cannons into the hills.
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After a relentless two-day pounding under low cloud cover
that prevented French fighters from coming to the aid of their comrades, Vietminh shock troops hurled themselves at the Legionnaires, wiping out most of the battalion.

On the morning of April 28, when the skies cleared, the French Third Colonial Parachute Battalion landed at Dong Khe, and thirty-four aircraft swooped to support the paras. The FEF caught the Vietminh off guard, and a vicious melee followed. In the end, the French prevailed, and 300 PAVN corpses were strewn about the battlefield. Giap learned one vital lesson from the loss: always attack with sufficient antiaircraft weapons in place to keep the infantry from being overwhelmed by reinforcements and air support.

It could be said that the French triumphed at Dong Khe, in the traditional sense that they regained their strongpoint. Yet, as historian Phillip Davidson observed, the 10,000 or so French soldiers who manned the forts along Route Coloniale 4, the men who had seen the skill and determination of the PAVN up close, “knew that when the dry season came in late September, the forts were doomed.”
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A French soldier found a revealing note on the body of a Vietminh political officer. It read:

Towards September 20 we shall attack once more. We shall be far stronger. Up until now there was only the 308th—by then there will be two or three other divisions ready. We shall take That Khe, then we shall take completely isolated Cao Bang, and then we will move in full force against Langson. That will be very easy, because the Expeditionary Force’s morale will have been deeply shaken by our earlier victories.
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The generals sitting in Hanoi and Saigon were having none of it. They refused to recognize their extreme vulnerability in the Viet Bac, and failed to evacuate the forts.

After near disaster at Dong Khe, reports began to pile up in Hanoi of Vietminh guerrilla companies all along Route 4 attacking the mile-long convoys bound for the string of hedgehogs between Langson and Cao Bang, bristling as they were with machine guns, armored cars, and truckloads of infantrymen. The FEF built defensive positions wherever ambushes occurred; they dispatched engineers to fix blown bridges and remove booby traps. By summer 1950, whole FEF battalions were going east to sweep through the jungle and limestone peaks that towered over RC4, clearing the path for new columns behind them. But the jungle was
just too thick, and the Vietminh too stealthy and numerous, for the sweeps to be effective. The eighty-mile road was drenched in French blood. A grizzled sergeant described one PAVN attack:

To begin with the Viets paralyzed the convoy. Mines went off behind the armored cars at the head of the column, cutting them off from the trucks. Immediately after that a dozen unattackable machine guns in those limestone cliffs opened up, raking the whole column. . . . Then came a hail of grenades. . . . Regulars went from truck to truck, gathering weapons and the goods that had been left behind; then they set fire to the vehicles. Other regulars attacked the French who were still fighting on the embankments . . . There were hundreds of single combats, hundreds of pairs of men killing each other. In the middle of all this mess the political commissars very calmly supervised the work in hand, giving orders to the regulars and the coolies—orders that were carried out at once.
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As the monsoon season came to a close in early September, a stronger and better-trained Vietminh main force emerged, reinforced with hundreds of communications and artillery officers, and well prepared to wage mobile warfare.

The Chinese and Vietnamese workers had completed a road network leading directly to Giap’s key objectives for phase two: he wanted to establish a cordon around Cao Bang and That Khe, then strike once again at Dong Khe and seize it. He reckoned this would force the French to try to consolidate their forces at Cao Bang or That Khe. When they did so, he hoped to ambush any and all convoys moving along RC4.

With an eight-to-one advantage in troops in the area of operations, and behind the veil of the late monsoon mists, the Vietminh launched a powerful artillery barrage against Dong Khe on September 16—Giap’s first significant artillery attack in the War of Resistance. The PAVN’s big guns, carefully camouflaged amid the cliffs and jungle, blasted away first at the four concrete blockhouses harboring the Legionnaire’s artillery. They fell one after the other, killing the crews and destroying the howitzers. Then came wave after wave of infantry, in tight formation. Vicious hand-to-hand combat ensued. Sixty hours after the attack commenced, the fort belonged to the Vietminh. Giap announced on the radio that he had captured ninety-eight prisoners. Weeks later, one French officer and a handful of soldiers stumbled out of the jungle, the only Legionnaires
to make their escape. For the French in Hanoi, Saigon, and Paris, it was a shocking loss.

Ironically, on the very day Giap assaulted Dong Khe, General Carpentier announced that Cao Bang would be evacuated with several other nearby minor hedgehogs. He was unwittingly playing his appointed part in his adversary’s plan. The evacuation, however, was so poorly conceived and executed that it led first to military disaster, then to widespread panic throughout French Indochina. Indeed, as General Davidson writes, “In a war in which the French consistently drew up unrealistic plans, Carpentier’s stands supreme.”
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Carpentier elected to send a motley force of fewer than 3,000 men, mainly North Africans of dubious fighting ability, from Langson toward Dong Khe, with a view to retaking the base, and linking up with the Cao Bang garrison, which was simultaneously to march down RC4. Then the united French forces would continue south toward the comparative safety of Langson. The commanding officer of the 3,000-man Langson “rescue” column was Colonel Marcel LePage, a sickly artillery officer who was haunted by a sense that his troops were insufficient for their mission and were therefore being sent into a trap. He was entirely correct. LePage headed northwest from Langson along Route 4 on September 16. For his part, the Cao Bang commander, Colonel Pierre Charton, a Legionnaire, called the evacuation plan “madness.” Cao Bang itself consisted of fifteen mutually reinforcing outposts, and Giap had old men, women, and children regularly reporting on all of their movements. Its chances of survival were as thin as those of LePage’s unit.

LePage’s column was beset almost immediately by ambushes, road blocks, and mines as it was heading north toward Dong Khe. The colonel opted to send his artillery and heavy engineering equipment back to Langson in order to speed his drive north. In doing so, however, he made the re-conquest of Dong Khe—an objective Carpentier had inexplicably neglected to mention to LePage as preeminent—impossible.

On September 19 LePage’s column straggled into That Khe, a satellite hedgehog of Dong Khe, where it was greeted by the First Foreign Legion Parachute Battalion, a formidable unit composed largely of former German SS fighters. They were under orders to fight at Dong Khe under LePage’s command, but the Legionnaires sensed immediately that LePage was way out of his depth.

On September 30 LePage tried to retake Dong Khe. His thinly supported attacks were easily blunted by the PAVN garrison that had taken up residence there. LePage was then ordered to bypass Dong Khe, march southwest into the dense jungle, and then head north along a narrow trail to Nam Nang, on RC4, five miles west of Cao Bang. There he would meet Cao Bang’s withdrawing garrison—all 3,000 of them, led by Colonel Charton’s 1,600 Foreign Legionnaires. LePage had neither guides nor maps of the terrain to the west of RC4. Several nearby regiments of Vietminh, consisting of men who knew the jungle in the area very well, soon found him. They cut up LePage’s column into small groups, and wiped out the largest of these, led by LePage, deep inside Cox Xa gorge, covered on both ridgelines by Vietminh machine gunners.