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       The Fortress That Never Was

      1 WAITING FOR GIAP

      So many ‘fatal decisions’ were made in Indochina that it would be invidious to single out any for primacy, but that which was made in November 1953 removed any lingering doubt about who was to become the victor, who the vanquished. Dienbienphu was a relatively small battle, engaging on the colonialist side barely a division. Yet it assumed decisive moral significance, because it was launched as a French initiative, with the explicit purpose of bringing the Vietminh to battle, and was then lost for reasons that reflected epic bungling. Navarre’s bosses in Paris were in those days almost as confused as was the general himself, being unwilling either to give up the struggle or to continue it. France’s Committee of National Defence concluded at a November meeting that the strategic objective was ‘to oblige the enemy to recognise the impossibility of achieving a decisive military outcome’. This could only be achieved by delivering punitive blows at some or all of Giap’s six regular formations, deployed in the north. Yet Adm. Georges Cabanier was thereupon dispatched to Saigon, bearing instructions for Navarre to attempt nothing ambitious: everything important should henceforward be left to the politicians.

      On 2 November, however, the general had determined to reoccupy in strength an old camp at Dienbienphu, 175 miles west of Hanoi and close to the border with Laos. The decision was made without much intelligence about the enemy’s whereabouts or intentions: Giap was always better informed than his French counterpart, partly through well-placed communists in Paris, whose first loyalty was to the Party rather than to the tricolor. Nonetheless, Navarre said afterwards, ‘We were absolutely convinced of our superiority in defensive fortified positions.’ His deputy responsible for Tonkin, Maj. Gen. René Cogny, was a big, self-important forty-nine-year-old who had endured Gestapo captivity in World War II. Cogny favoured concentration upon defence of the Red River delta, but acquiesced in Navarre’s new plan.

      By creating a powerful air–land base so far west, they reasoned that its garrison could sally forth to interdict Vietminh movements, and give the enemy a bloody nose if he dared to attack the camp. Occupying the cluster of hamlets known as Dienbienphu would deny Giap access to a big rice- and opium-growing area. Though its airstrip lay far from Hanoi, Cogny could call upon sixty-nine C-47 Dakotas to meet the garrison’s eighty-ton daily supply requirement. Most of the perils to French forces were deemed to lie in the initial drop onto a ‘hot’ DZ, where a Vietminh battalion was known to be encamped.

      Navarre, a fifty-five-year-old veteran of World War I, thought the risks acceptable. He was a chilly, personally fearless and strikingly handsome officer, with little experience of senior command, but a formidable presence and indeed conceit. He had arrived in Indochina the previous May with the sort of mandate that became grimly familiar among his American successors: to create conditions for an exit negotiation from strength. In Washington John Foster Dulles, the dour, unyielding, messianic sixty-five-year-old lawyer who served as Eisenhower’s secretary of state, cited the precedent of Korea, where United Nations forces had fought fiercely to the end – only six months earlier – to empower the UN delegation parleying at Panmunjom. Whatever Navarre’s subordinates said afterwards, there is no convincing evidence that any supposed the downside risks of Dienbienphu to be more than tactical headaches – certainly not that they might precipitate a disaster.

      The first two battalions of French and Vietnamese paratroopers jumped at 1035 on Friday, 20 November, just before Navarre met Cabanier, his visitor from Paris. The general almost certainly knew the nature of the directive the admiral bore – not to stick his neck out – and had deliberately pre-empted this. Unfortunately, the French initiative perfectly conformed to the hopes of Ho Chi Minh, Giap and chief ideologist Truong Chinh. At an October meeting in a simple bamboo house deep in the mountains, they had agreed that contesting the Red River delta merely enabled the French to apply forces and firepower close to their own bases. The Vietminh objective must be to tempt them instead to disperse, then strike where their troops ventured furthest. With a characteristic gesture and figure of speech, Ho raised his clenched fist and likened it to French strength in the east, then said, ‘But if you spread your hand, it becomes easy to break the fingers, one by one.’ Navarre, by extending a finger westward to Dienbienphu, fulfilled Ho’s appointed role for him.

      The opening gambit was played when French and Vietnamese paras began to leap from C-47s over their designated objective, as dispatchers gave the repeated ‘Go! – Go! – Go!’ that propelled them from the dim fuselages and engine roar into brief sunlit coolness six hundred feet above the steamy landing zone. Foremost among the tough, unyielding French officers swaying beneath their canopies was Col. Pierre Langlais, a forty-four-year-old Breton of boundless courage but limited intellect and notoriously vile temper. They landed into the firefight they had expected: a medical officer, making his first combat drop, took a bullet in the head before he hit the ground. By nightfall the attackers had forced the Vietminh to withdraw with substantial losses: they secured a perimeter, at the cost of fifteen of Langlais’ men dead and thirty-four wounded. He himself was cursing even more freely than usual, because he smashed his ankle in the drop, as many parachutists do, and had to be evacuated to spend a month in plaster.

      Next day US-built C-119 Flying Boxcars droned overhead, dropping heavy equipment and vehicles – nothing could yet land on the strip, cratered by the Vietminh. By the time the struggle at Dienbienphu finally ended, the French would have used there almost sixty thousand parachutes, so that white and coloured blotches, plague spots, came to dominate aerial photographs. Once bulldozers had rendered the airstrip serviceable, a stream of reinforcements arrived, enlarging the garrison towards its eventual peak of twelve thousand men.

      The camp’s appointed commander was Col. Christian de Castries, a fifty-one-year-old military aristocrat who boasted a marshal, an admiral and nine generals in his family tree. A famous off-duty equestrian who had won many medals and suffered grievous wounds from a mine in Indochina, he was afterwards accused of cowardice by his critics, who claimed that at Dienbienphu he lurked in his bunker. De Castries’ record makes such a charge implausible. On the moral side, however, the verdict is less assured: he lacked any gift for inspirational leadership. As his predicament became ever more burdensome, he lapsed into gloomy fatalism. He cannot justly be blamed for the outcome – Navarre and Cogny were the battle’s architects. But he made many tactical errors, both of commission and omission.

      The word ‘fortress’ was repeatedly used to describe Dienbienphu, yet it was never anything of the sort. Rather, it was a chain of low hills amid a plain overlooked by densely-wooded mountains, and now entrenched with shocking casualness. Scarcely any of the defensive positions created in the months before the Vietminh assault were adequately fortified: many of the garrison’s men were courageous enough, but regarded