Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (21 page)

PHASE TWO

Giap renewed the attack at 1700 on March 30, when the 312th and the 316th jumped off from their trenches to seize five key hills within strongpoints Dominique and Elaine, the eastern half of the MCR. Phase two had begun. Two hills within Dominique fell almost immediately as an Algerian battalion broke under the terrifying weight of an accurate artillery bombardment followed by waves of screaming infantry. The 312th assault battalions were on the verge of taking a third hill, putting them in a position to outflank the FEF troops defending the main headquarters bunker. Had they done so, the French defense of the entire fortress might well have collapsed. Disaster was averted at the last minute when a battery of French artillery on a neighboring hill lowered its muzzles and fired directly into the assault waves, cutting down hundreds of Vietminh in the vanguard waves and forcing later waves to break into disorderly retreat. In the end, the hill held.

Meanwhile, the 316th smothered all the French positions on one hill in less than an hour; by midnight they had taken half of another. As the
fighting died down early on the morning of March 31, the French hold on Dien Bien Phu was extremely perilous. A powerful FEF counterattack at 1330 hours retook two of the three hills, but to hold this hard-won ground, fresh troops would need to replace the exhausted assault units and dig in fast. Langlais, however, had no fresh troops to spare. He had no choice but to withdraw from both hills rather than risk the annihilation of the troops who had taken the hills in the first place. As if this weren’t demoralizing enough, the FEF’s artillery ammunition was almost exhausted. The dispiriting withdrawal from the eastern hills exposed yet another French blunder in the battle’s preparation phase: no counterattack maneuvers had been worked out in advance, and the three battalions reserved for counterattacks were stretched too thin to fulfill their role in a protracted siege.

Over the next two days, supplies were stretched thin as inadequate reinforcements and resupplies floated down out of the sky, and murderous PAVN antiaircraft fire forced transports ferrying a battalion of fresh reinforcements to turn back toward Hanoi. Early in the morning of April 2, Giap launched a successful secondary attack from positions northwest of the MCR against a hill protecting the northern end of the airstrip. A counterattack supported by three tanks forced the Vietminh to withdraw, but the defensive positions had been destroyed and, again, the French abandoned the hill.

The grueling pattern of attack and counterattack continued as Vietminh regiments ripped into beleaguered French companies, many of which were reduced to as few as seventy or eighty effectives. The Vietminh made little additional progress in the eastern hills after April 2. Had they done so, the battle almost surely would have ended within a matter of several days. Only herculean French efforts kept the eastern hills sector from complete collapse.

After April 5 the intensity of the fighting slackened somewhat as Giap adapted a more deliberate approach. Sapping and digging followed by short, fierce engagements by small units for limited gains were the order of the day. Between April 10 and 12, after the battlefield had taken on the macabre atmosphere of World War I trench warfare, a desperate battle swirled around what Giap referred to as “the most important of all” the eastern hills, Elaine 1.
²²
A hastily assembled two-company assault French force broke down into independent assault squads and fire teams and scurried up the hill, bypassing the outer defenses held by PAVN troops who were
momentarily dazed by artillery fire. Sharp hand-to-hand fighting followed. This time the French prevailed. Two relatively fresh FEF companies quickly replaced the assault troops in the defensive positions just in time to face a PAVN regimental counterattack. Miraculously, the French held despite additional counterattacks by two PAVN battalions on the evening of April 12. The French clung tenaciously to Elaine 1 until early May.

Meanwhile, the Vietminh made slow but steady progress against Huguette’s positions in the northwest. These gains paved the way for PAVN artillery and direct-fire heavy weapons to move in so close to the MCR that the crews could zero in on crucial targets—the already-diminished artillery batteries, the supply dumps, and even helicopters attempting to evacuate the wounded—with deadly accuracy. Giap’s 308th Division was able to gain control over much of the northern end of the airstrip in a punishing series of assaults around April 12, when the main axis of attack shifted from the east to the northwest, only to return once again to the eastern hills.

Fears of asphyxiation gripped the entire FEF garrison by mid-month. It was clear to every FEF soldier left alive that the flow of supplies and replacements would continue to dwindle. In the last week of April came another lull, as Giap rested his battered assault units and brought them up to full strength in preparation for the last assault phase. The French were now compressed inside a circular perimeter only a mile in diameter. Giap summarized developments in the battle during the lull and the second phase of attacks as follows:

Our offensive on the eastern hills of the central sector [the MCR] had obtained important successes, but had failed to reach all the assigned objectives. . . . We have therefore decided to continue to execute the tasks foreseen for the second phase of our offensive: To advance our attack and encirclement lines, improve our positions and occupy new ones; progressively tighten further our stranglehold so as to completely intercept reinforcements and supplies . . . utilizing trenches which have been driven forward until they touch the enemy lines, the tactic of gnawing away at the enemy piecemeal.
²³

By April 13, one reliable source puts Giap’s total casualties at Dien Bien Phu around 19,000 men, including 6,000 killed. Another three weeks of fighting remained. Not surprisingly, morale began to flag in the Vietminh
infantry divisions. Troops refused to leave their trenches, and political officers were reduced to forcing them out at gunpoint. Giap’s response to the rise of morale problems was predictable and effective. He instituted an intense, all-encompassing program of indoctrination and “remolding” courses to correct “negative rightist thoughts” and to heighten “revolutionary enthusiasm.” As Giap explained,

To maintain and develop . . . [the] determination to fight and win was a whole process of unremitting and patient political and ideological education and struggle,
tireless and patient efforts in political work on the front line. . . . In accordance with the instructions of the Political Bureau, we opened in the heart of the battlefield an intensive and extensive struggle against rightist passivity, and for the heightening of revolutionary enthusiasm and the spirit of strict discipline with a view to insuring the total victory of the campaign.
²⁴

As we have noted earlier, Giap always conceived of military activity in a broad political context. The sacrifices of fighting a positional battle on the scale of Dien Bien Phu were justified in Giap’s mind by his conviction that a victory there was sure to have a salubrious effect on the looming deliberations at Geneva, as well as on the morale of the revolution’s supporters throughout all Vietnam.

THE FINAL PHASE

The final phase of attacks commenced at 1700 hours on May 1, when powerful elements of three divisions—the 312th, the 316th in the east, and the 308th in the west—jumped out of their trenches in a massive assault on the battered shambles of the MCR. Elaine 1, the critical eastern hill strongpoint, fell, this time for good; so did Dominique 3, despite heroic resistance by paras and Legionnaires. At 2005, General Cogny in Hanoi received a telling cable from the main CP in the headquarters bunker at Dien Bien Phu: “No more reserves left. Fatigue and wear and tear on the units terrible. Supplies and ammunition insufficient. Quite difficult to resist one more such push by the Communists, at least not without bringing in one brand-new battalion of excellent quantity.”
²⁵
Yet the terrible fighting went on.

The delegations of the main powers and the participants prepared their final briefs on Indochina for the Geneva summit in the first week of May.
During this time, it rained almost constantly in the valley, intensifying the suffering as Vietminh regiments attacked swamped, partially collapsed fighting positions held by battered companies frightfully reduced by combat, exhaustion, and sickness. On Elaine 2, the French held on. More than 1,500 corpses between the two armies were strewn about the hill in grotesque poses. At 2300 hours on May 6, Giap’s sappers set off a 3,000-pound charge of TNT directly under the hill, killing most of the two companies manning the defenses and blowing its bunkers and blockhouses to smoldering ruins. At 1500 hours on May 7, Giap ordered simultaneous division-size attacks on what was left of the MCR. At 1730 hours, Captain Ta Quang Luat and his assault team burst into Castries’s command bunker and took him prisoner. Within minutes, the Vietminh flag fluttered above the corrugated steel roof of the bunker. It was all over at last.

WHY GIAP PREVAILED

In seeking to explain the outcome of Dien Bien Phu, virtually all Western historians focus their attention on French gaffes and misconceptions. This is understandable, because the French mistakes were as egregious as they were numerous. What sort of battle did France hope to fight at Dien Bien Phu, and to what end? In truth, the French senior command’s answers to these questions were ambiguous and inconsistent from the planning stages until the garrison was locked into a desperate siege against an enemy force far larger and more capable than French intelligence had predicted.

Yet Western historians of the battle seldom point out that the French blunders wouldn’t have resulted in disaster if the People’s Army had lacked superior strategic and tactical leadership, and a well-trained, highly motivated fighting force supported by a logistical system nothing short of miraculous. Giap had brilliantly exploited French weaknesses, both political and military. He had indeed “trapped the trapper” by moving substantial forces in late November 1953 toward the front, convincing Navarre to stand and fight at Dien Bien Phu despite the objections of his senior commanders.

It was Giap’s organizational genius, more than anything, that was responsible for sustaining the assault troops in battle. He had supervised the construction of a vast logistical “tail” of the operation in exceedingly rough terrain, hundreds of miles from his army’s home bases and training camps in northern Tonkin and near Thanh Hoa south of the Red River
Delta. So, too, Giap correctly assessed the weaknesses of the enemy disposition. At the last minute, he rejected a method of attack that had considerably more risk than the method he ultimately adopted. In adopting the plan, Giap showed his faith and confidence in his entire army from the privates in the assault waves and supply units to the divisional commanders. When morale flagged, he turned to his tried-and-true method for rejuvenating fighting spirit: intensive reiteration of the key themes of the revolutionary doctrine, coupled with draconian incentives—threats of execution, imprisonment, and humiliation to those who refused to press on in the most trying circumstances. It was a harsh, even brutal system, but it got the job done.

In the end, it could be said that many French errors and misjudgments at Dien Bien Phu stemmed from Navarre’s egregious underestimation of his adversary, while a critical ingredient in Giap’s success was his correct assessment of his enemy’s strengths, as well as its weaknesses.

Fighting in Vietnam continued for several months after the battle, but it amounted to very little in the grand scheme of things. Giap’s victory at Dien Bien Phu sealed the fate of the French in Indochina, ensuring the demise of French empire there. According to historian Bernard Fall, it also “signaled in an unequivocal manner the coming age of the Vietnam People’s Army.”
²⁶

RAMIFICATIONS

Less than a week after the start of the siege, the French had appealed to the Eisenhower administration to use massive airpower to intervene at Dien Bien Phu. But the Americans found themselves on the horns of a profound dilemma. Eisenhower was deeply troubled by the Cold War ramifications of a French exit from Southeast Asia, but he was nonetheless dead set against unilateral American intervention, for it would taint the United States with the stigma of supporting French colonialism and might provoke the Chinese to intervene directly in the conflict.

Eisenhower had engaged in intense discussion with his advisers as to whether or not to intervene. Various rescue plans had been put forward by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and top civilian advisers, including one scenario involving the use of nuclear weapons. In the end, Eisenhower refused to mount any operation to save the day without the participation of a coalition of forces. The British were adamant in their refusal, and so the discussions ceased.

Ironically, it was during the Dien Bien Phu intervention discussions that Eisenhower first put forward publically the rationale for the American commitment to a “free” Vietnam. His White House successors would invoke that rationale for expanding the American commitment to South Vietnam for the next fourteen years. Eisenhower remarked in a press conference that “You have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty it will go over very quickly. So you could have the beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound consequences.”
²⁷
So it was that Dien Bien Phu formed a fateful bridge between the end of the French war in Indochina and the beginning of the American War.

Flush from victory at Dien Bien Phu, the Vietminh delegation at Geneva had high hopes for a negotiated settlement. The accords that resulted—a signed cease-fire and an unsigned declaration—were a partial victory for the Vietnamese Communists, whose interests were circumscribed by their own allies, China and the Soviet Union, as well as by the reactions of the United States. For complex reasons of international policy, neither Communist power wished to unduly antagonize the United States or France, and they put strong pressure on the DRV delegation to accept terms far short of what they expected given the strength of their military position on the ground.