Vietnam. Max Hastings
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hour of 1700, and launched infantry an hour later. Heavy rain had flooded trenches and made air support impossible. Meanwhile further north, Dominique was also beset: Langlais was obliged to watch grimly through his glasses as the position was hacked and harrowed. There were soon four separate infantry battles, in all of which the French were hard-pressed. The Algerian defenders of Eliane 1 began to take flight, prompting a paratroop officer to shoot down several, in an effort to stem the panic. It was all for nothing, and a gaping hole opened in the perimeter. After almost four hours of heavy action, the position collapsed. Similar scenes took place on Dominique 2: some Algerians ran towards the attackers with their hands in the air. By 2200 that position, too, was overrun.
A few brave men fought to the last, among them an eighteen-year-old Eurasian sergeant named Chalamont, who manned a machine-gun until encircled and cut down. Dominique 3 just held, thanks to the efforts of a twenty-seven-year-old officer named Paul Brunbrouck, a veteran of an epic December 1952 defence of Na San, another besieged French base. Now, he repeatedly rallied defenders and kept their 105mm guns in action, finally giving the dramatic order to fire over open sights: ‘Débouchez à zéro!’ Langlais radioed Brunbrouck to abandon his pieces. The young gunner responded: ‘Never!’ Early on the 31st he and his indomitable Senegalese gunners retreated with three howitzers that remained serviceable, having fired eighteen hundred rounds. Brunbrouck was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Legion of Honour; two weeks later he died of wounds after another equally heroic action.
Eliane 1 fell quickly, along with a position proudly named Champs Elysées. Morning found both sides exhausted. One attacking Vietminh regiment was so depleted that it had to be withdrawn from Giap’s line. The French lost a substantial part of their artillery and exhausted half their remaining ammunition stockpile, five hundred tons. Navarre arrived in Hanoi from Saigon to learn of these new misfortunes – and to discover that Cogny had been absent from his headquarters throughout the night, probably with a woman. This precipitated a slanging match between the two generals, whose predicament was now unenviable. The US Army’s Mike O’Daniel advanced a preposterous suggestion, that the French should dispatch an armoured force westwards from Hanoi to relieve the camp. This ignored both the wild country intervening, and the Vietminh’s record of savaging French road columns. President Eisenhower nonetheless later expressed surprise that the O’Daniel scheme was not attempted.
Navarre and Cogny embraced more futile gestures: that morning of the 31st, another para battalion jumped into the camp. Even now that it was plain the garrison was doomed, among such forlorn hopes was a procession of volunteers – Capt. Alain Bizard, for instance, abandoned a pampered existence as aide to the army chief of staff in Paris to join de Castries’ garrison. It seems fair to speculate that young career soldiers sought to atone for the shame of their nation’s collapse in 1940; to show that a new generation of Frenchmen possessed a willingness for sacrifice such as some of their fathers had lacked.
Late on the 31st, French counter-attacks briefly regained Dominique 2 and Eliane 1, only to see them fall to renewed Vietminh assaults. Enemy night attacks were repulsed on 1 and 2 April, but on the morning of the 2nd Huguette 2 was abandoned by the French, who now tardily laboured to strengthen the defences of their remaining hills. The defenders’ faith in the Foreign Legion received a blow on 3 April, when twelve of its men, survivors from Béatrice who had had enough, abandoned strongpoints to surrender. Like all deserters who fell into Giap’s hands, they were promptly set to work digging and carrying for his army. By 7 April, the garrison’s surgeons were struggling to care for 590 casualties. The Legion and para battalions mustered fewer than three hundred men apiece. Giap ignored a French request for a truce to allow aircraft to evacuate the wounded – and why should he have done otherwise?
The debate in Washington about a possible US commitment – not to rescue the French, but to humble the communists – became much more important to history than was the fate of Dienbienphu. From late March onwards, Dulles conducted a media blitz designed to rouse the American people. The secretary of state characterised the enemy as catspaws of the Chinese. The US government, he said, would not stand idly by while Reds triumphed, though he remained studiously vague about what action might follow. Front-page stories prepared readers for intervention. US News and World Report said: ‘Blunt notice is given to communists that [the] US does not intend to let Indochina be gobbled up.’ Most of the world still supposed that, at Dienbienphu, superior firepower would ultimately prevail: the British Spectator observed on 19 March: ‘The French ought to be able to win this battle, and if they do win, it may for the first time be possible to see light at the end of the Indochinese tunnel.’ The magazine editorialised again on 9 April: ‘In spite of the terrible unpopularity of the war, the siege of Col. de Castries and his eleven thousand men has reminded France that she can still fight and still be the admiration of the world.’ Such remarks reflected both wishful thinking and extravagant francophilia, but emphasise that nothing about the battle seemed inevitable until its outcome.
On 3 April the US secretary of state presided over a meeting of congressional leaders including Democrats Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Richard Russell of Georgia, Earle Clements of Kentucky; Republicans Eugene Millikin of Colorado and William Knowland of California. Radford briefed them on the dire predicament of Dienbienphu. Dulles said that the president wanted a joint resolution of Congress endorsing the deployment of American air and naval power. Radford said that if Indochina was lost, ‘it was only a question of time until all of Southeast Asia falls, along with Indonesia’. Under sceptical questioning from the politicians, the admiral was obliged to admit that he was alone among the chiefs in favouring military action. One of the visitors demanded, why so? Because I know more about Asia than my colleagues, responded Radford, who, though not the sharpest knife in the box, never lacked self-assurance.
Then they addressed the key issue of unilateral versus multilateral action. Lyndon Johnson said: ‘We want no more Koreas with the US providing 90 per cent of the manpower.’ The domestic lesson of the 1950–53 war that wrecked Harry Truman’s presidency was that, though Americans were willing to pay other people to die combating ‘Reds’ in faraway Asian countries, they resisted seeing their own boys sacrificed. Dulles was asked explicitly: would the British associate themselves with a US operation in Vietnam? He admitted this was doubtful. The meeting’s outcome, unwelcome to the secretary of state and the president, was that they could secure their congressional resolution only if other nations signed up too. At the White House on the following evening of 4 April, Eisenhower said it had become evident that the British attitude would be decisive. Late that night, the French formally requested US air power for Dienbienphu. Navarre helpfully suggested that planes thus employed could be unmarked or wear French roundels, which emphasised his diminishing grasp upon reality.
On the evening of 5 April, Winston Churchill received an impassioned personal letter from Eisenhower, evoking the familiar spectres of Hitler, Hirohito, Mussolini – ‘May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?’ – in support of a request for British participation in an Indochina intervention. The following day Eisenhower told the National Security Council that the struggle was still ‘eminently winnable’. At a 7 April press conference, the president for the first time publicly articulated what became notorious as ‘the domino theory’. If Indochina was lost, he said, the rest of South-East Asia would ‘go over very quickly’. The French had already voiced their own variation – the ‘ten-pin’ theory, as in bowling.
The carriers Boxer and Essex were dispatched to the Tonkin Gulf, to be on hand if Eisenhower acceded to France’s pleas. Yet there were still plenty of doubters. On Capitol Hill the young Democratic senator from Massachusetts urged that it was time to tell the American people the truth: no US intervention could achieve anything useful, said John F. Kennedy, unless France conceded full independence to her colonies: ‘To pour money, materiel and men into the jungles of Indochina’ would be most unlikely to deliver victory against a guerrilla enemy which was everywhere yet nowhere, and ‘has the sympathy and covert support of the people’. Eisenhower nonetheless remained game to fight – if others would do likewise. Impatiently, testily, he awaited the outcome of deliberations in London.
At Dienbienphu, yet more reinforcements were committed. A dramatic decision was taken, to dispatch volunteers without parachute training. It is hard to