The Cold War (45 page)

The Battle of the R.C. 4 was a major turning point in the Indochina war. Both the psychological and the strategic balance of the war had shifted in favor of the insurgents, and the stage was set for the final confrontation four years later in another remote highland valley in upper Tonkin, Dien Bien Phu. That battle would end the French war in Vietnam and signal the beginning of the American war.

WILLIAMSON MURRAY

Once Vo Nguyen Giap swallowed up the garrisons along the R.C. 4, the French had all but lost the struggle for Indochina. In retrospect, that seems clear now. But they did not see it that way at the time, and the war would go on, bloodily, for the next forty-five months. Through that time they would try to bring about the kind of set-piece battle in which Western armies excelled, the conventional stand-up slugfest in the open— one, they hoped, that would prove decisive (which battles rarely are). It became the obsession of each successive commander in chief. In the spring of 1954, they would achieve their wish in a mountain-ringed valley whose Vietnamese name, Dien Bien Phu, might be translated as “Seat of the Border County Administration.” But by that time, Giap was pursuing the same aim.

As Douglas Porch has written, “perhaps the greatest strength possessed by the Viet Minh was patience.” Giap, ever the model Communist military leader, followed Mao Tse-tung's three-step prescription for victory in revolutionary warfare, and in the process added some elaborations of his own. What had worked for the Chinese Communists, he believed, would work even better for their brethren in the jungles of Indochina. He was right. The first phase was the strictly guerrilla combat that Giap practiced through 1950. Its main purpose was to wear down the French and eventually to establish a balance of strength. (The secondary object, of course, was to avoid being destroyed himself.) Phase two saw guerrilla and conventional ground warfare combined, with attacks in the open based on concentrations of mortars and, as time went
on, artillery. (Here, the help of the Chinese Communists was imperative.) Giap's R.C. 4 attacks were the model for the transition from the first phase to the second. Then, in this “war of long duration” (Giap's phrase), came the point when his forces would take the offensive. “We shall attack without cease,” he wrote, “until final victory, until we have swept the enemy forces from Indochina. During the first and second stage, we have gnawed away at the enemy forces; now we must destroy them.”

Only once did Giap deviate from the Maoist formula. In January 1951, flush from his R.C. 4 triumphs, he tried to leap from the first stage to the last, without the crucial intervention of the second. “Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi for the Tet,” Communist leaflets proclaimed—in other words, by the middle of February, when the Chinese lunar new year generally falls. For five days in January, Giap sent human-wave attacks against the French outpost at Vinh Yen, some thirty miles northeast of Hanoi. Again and again, French fighter-bombers would lay down a curtain of napalm, roasting the attackers. In this biggest of French victories, Giap lost six thousand dead. He returned to patience and stage two.

Henceforth, Bernard Fall has written, the Viet Minh would “refuse combat on any terms but their own.” They inevitably chose to strike in places where the French could not use tanks or other heavy equipment; where they could not detect the presence of camouflaged troops hidden under the canopy of the jungle; where the hit-and-run nature of Viet Minh tactics kept them forever off balance. Fall speaks of their “uncanny tactical sense.” They made ambush a fine art. Attacks on fixed positions seemed to come out of nowhere, sudden mortar barrages “smashing barbed wire, ploughing passages through the minefields, and knocking out French gun crews.” Within minutes Viet Minh infantry appeared on top of battered dugouts. French air support often arrived “just in time … to witness the departure of the prisoners, with their hands raised, between a double column of Viet-Minh guards.”

But the French were in for ruder and more psychologically debilitating shocks. In his extraordinary history/memoir,
Street Without Joy,
Fall quotes a paratroop commando on a perilous flight through the jungle in October 1952: “You should have seen us. Along the route of retreat of the paratroops, the Viets had planted on bamboo pikes the heads of the soldiers they had killed, like so many milestones. Some of the men went
berserk from it, other cried hysterically when they recognized the head of somebody they had known….”

It was that kind of war.

Even when they did win engagements, the French lacked the air- or the man power to exploit their tenuous victories. Thrusts at Viet Minh bases that seemed initially promising accomplished little except the siphoning off of mobile reserves from other theaters of war: The enemy would simply regroup and strike elsewhere. All the while the U.S. poured money (but never men) into Indochina, $2.6 billion in 1954 alone. But the U.S. sent mostly World War II surplus, already obsolete. Giap's forces also relied on American equipment, much of it captured in Korea or left behind by the fleeing Nationalists; the Communists sent it south, along with fire-control personnel and artillerymen. The Soviet bloc weighed in with regular shipments of mortars, artillery, automatic weapons, and Molotova trucks. By the end of the war, Viet Minh firepower was actually superior to that of the French—who were, in Porch's words, “outgunned, outmanned, and outmaneuvered.”

Indochina was a war of little dramas, ending with one big one, Dien Bien Phu. There was a piecemeal quality to French losses, but over the years they added up—as Fall puts it, “one convoy annihilated here, one battalion mauled there, a truck convoy lost in an ambush elsewhere.” The war took an especially high toll on young officers. Lieutenants died by the hundreds, 1,300 in all. (In 1953 alone, more junior French officers were killed in Indochina than were graduated that year from the national military academy at Saint-Cyr.) This was one of those rare wars in which the number of KIAs exceeded the wounded. The French and their Indochinese allies lost 94,000 dead or missing and 78,000 wounded. “To maintain major communications lines,” Fall has written, “cost on the average three to four men
per day
for every hundred kilometers of road.” The Viet Minh losses were even more appalling. No casualty figures were kept, but estimates go as high as four hundred thousand, with another quarter of a million civilian deaths. Victory would not come cheaply.

Nevertheless, at the end of 1953, a virtual draw existed. Giap had originally intended to mount a series of attacks in the Tonkin Delta: He hoped to capture Hanoi or Haiphong, preferably both. The Chinese
Communists, whose role in the war was becoming increasingly dominant, feared that the French, fighting from interior lines, would hold off the Viet Minh in a series of set-piece battles, just what they had been hoping for all along. The Chinese suggested that Giap strike instead at the Montagnard hill tribes along the Laotian border; they had long presented a significant guerrilla threat to the Viet Minh rear.

The bait in what they hoped would prove a trap for the French was opium, a largely unspoken reason for one of the major battles of the twentieth century. The Viet Minh wanted the Montagnard opium, much of which grew in the Dien Bien Phu area, because it was one of the principal sources of finance for their war effort. The French wanted the same opium because it paid for their special operations in the back country (and made some members of their secret service wealthy). The French commander in chief, General Henri Navarre, Porch has written, “calculated that he simply could not stand by and allow the Viet Minh to replenish their war chests with Montagnard opium. Therefore, the French occupation of Dien Bien Phu was neither a foolish nor short-sighted decision, as it has often been portrayed.”

However, when Navarre set up a fortified air-land “hedgehog,” or
base aéroterrestre,
far from his center of operations in the Tonkin Delta, he was taking a gamble. In addition to protecting his opium supplies and blocking the Viet Minh invasion route to Laos—the more customary explanation for Dien Bien Phu—Navarre was not averse to luring Giap into a set-piece battle. But did he reckon that Giap would respond with a gamble of his own, dispatching a hundred thousand men, or approximately half the force available to him, to the mountains that surrounded Dien Bien Phu? Could he have foreseen that Giap, with the aid of the Chinese, would build up a four-to-one superiority in artillery? Even so, the gamble was one that Giap came close to losing, had it not been for the stiffening the Chinese provided. They not only continued to supply him, especially with artillery, but, more important, they persuaded him to abandon human-wave assault tactics in favor of a tightening web of trenches, reminiscent of the French marshal Vauban's seventeenth-century siege tactics. The result, as Williamson Murray tells it here, was a first, a victory not just of Asians over Westerners—since World War II, that was no longer novel—but of colonial subjects over their former masters. Dien
Bien Phu would be the greatest single Communist military triumph of the Cold War.

WILLIAMSON MURRAY, a senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses, is a professor of history emeritus at Ohio State University and, with Allen R. Millett, the author of
A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War
.

T
HE BATTLE OF DIEN BIEN PHU
in the spring of 1954 ended a century of French rule in Indochina. It represented the triumph of an indigenous Nationalist movement, one completely dominated by fanatical Communists. It also confronted the United States with the question: Should it attempt to rescue a French garrison that was clearly going down to defeat? The American decision was a cold, rational statement that Indochina was not worth the price of success—that the conditions under which American land forces would have to fight in Southeast Asia were far worse than they had been in the just concluded Korean War.

How had the French found themselves in a major battle in a gloomy valley in one of the most isolated parts of Indochina? What were the strategic, political, and operational factors that drew French military leaders in Hanoi to stake all, far from their centers of power, with tenuous lines of communications, and in an area of no great strategic significance?

The French had colonized Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) in the nineteenth century. Utilizing the weapons of the industrial revolution, they easily dominated the locals and established a colonial regime that represented both the strengths and weaknesses of the French empire. They brought a modern, relatively honest administration, technological and medical benefits, and French education. Not surprisingly, they also administered Indochina for their own economic benefit and ruthlessly suppressed any signs of dissent. But Vietnamese Nationalism smoldered under the surface.

Ironically, the schools the French established were to play a crucial role in their eventual defeat. In the early 1990s, an American-Vietnamese filmmaker interviewed Vo Nguyen Giap, who had played such a major role as the military leader in the wars against the French and Americans. Giap chose to speak in
French, not Vietnamese, and in the film
From Hollywood to Hanoi,
he conveyed the fanaticism of the French Revolution. He was the very embodiment of Robespierre: ice-cold, passionate, doctrinaire, prepared to make any sacrifice for the cause. In fact, he had received an admirable education at Quoc Hoc, one of the best lycées in Vietnam, where he had drunk deeply the lessons of the French Revolution. Giap had been second only to the man who would take the nom de plume of Ho Chi Minh and who would lead Communist forces in two wars.

In March 1945 the Japanese destroyed the pro-Axis French colonial administration in Indochina that had cooperated with them since 1940. Within six months, the Japanese themselves would surrender. Thus they provided Ho and his nascent Communist-Nationalist movement with a political vacuum, which Ho's movement eagerly sought to fill. In the immediate postwar period, Ho and his followers seized and then consolidated a tenuous hold over most of Vietnam, particularly over the northern sections. The French deployed major forces to Vietnam to suppress what they regarded as a local insurrection. These forces were led by a military embittered by the catastrophe of 1940 and never really controlled by the constitutional authorities in Paris. The war for Vietnam began in 1947—a war that lasted until 1975, at a terrible cost to all involved, with the greatest price paid by the Vietnamese themselves. Initially, French forces in Indochina received almost no aid from the United States, which regarded the struggle with considerable distaste because of its colonialist nature. The French government exhibited similar ambivalence and refused to allow conscripts to participate in the war. The result was a stalemate: The French dominated the countryside where their troops happened to be, while the Viet Minh tightened their hold when the French moved on.

The nature of the war changed in 1949, when the Chinese Communists arrived on Indochina's frontier after having chased the Chinese Nationalists to Taiwan. Supplied with substantial amounts of weaponry—much of it American, captured from the Nationalists—Ho's Viet Minh launched a series of attacks against French bases along the frontier in the fall of 1950. The garrison towns of Dong Khe, Cao Bang, and Lang Son fell in rapid succession. The French seemed on the brink of collapse. But the international situation again shifted. Far to the north, Kim Il Sung had unleashed the Korean War, and the rapid escalation of that conflict had a profound effect on the war in Indochina. Suddenly, the Americans loosened the purse strings to support the French
struggle against international Communism; American suspicion of colonialism disappeared in reaction to the desperate struggle in Korea. Now, at last, the French received massive amounts (at least in their terms) of weapons and ammunition to fight the Viet Minh. At the same time, Chinese aid to the Viet Minh substantially decreased as Mao concentrated on the war in Korea.

But their victories in the fall of 1950 led Ho and Giap to believe that success was around the corner. Early in 1951 they threw their forces against French positions in the Red River Valley in an all-out bid for victory. Giap even predicted that Ho would arrive in Hanoi in time to celebrate the lunar new year, Tet. But the French had received more than an infusion of American weaponry. They had a new commander, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, one of the outstanding soldiers in the French army. Lattre infused his troops with a new enthusiasm; in one case he flew into a beleaguered garrison and then radioed out to his forces to “come and get me.” The first Viet Minh offensive came in January 1951; the French held, while the Viet Minh suffered more than 6,000 killed and 8,000 wounded out of 20,000 attacking troops before Giap broke off the attack. By early summer the Viet Minh had withdrawn from the delta and were licking their wounds in the jungles that surrounded the Red River Valley.