Vietnam. Max Hastings
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They were most uncomfortable about now disagreeing with Washington on a matter to which the administration attached such importance. Yet it is hard to doubt that London’s caution was well-founded. Churchill is often and justly said to have been a shadow of his old self during his 1952–55 premiership. On this issue, however, he displayed admirable clarity and stubbornness. The British feared that the real objective of any US action would be to punish China. The administration’s indignation about Chinese military aid to the Vietminh seemed bizarre when the US was already providing vastly more weapons and equipment to its own French client. In British eyes the Korean conflict had represented an intolerably protracted mud-wrestling match with the communists. A plunge into Indochina could precipitate something worse – conceivably, a big war. Churchill told the Americans that he declined to collude in misleading Congress by backing Western military action that could not save Dienbienphu, but might have untold implications for peace.
Radford was furious, and so was Eisenhower, who wished to see the communists ‘take a good smacking in Indochina’. It is plausible that resentment about what Washington branded as British pusillanimity contributed two years later to the president’s renunciation of Eden in the Suez debacle. Yet no Western action in the spring of 1954 could have saved Dienbienphu, short of unleashing insanely disproportionate conventional or even nuclear firepower. The later American commitment to Vietnam was seen by much of the world as implicitly colonialist: such action in 1954 would have been explicitly so. Almost entirely absent from the Washington debate was an understanding that Indochina’s future would be principally determined by political, social and cultural forces. Discussion focused solely upon what weight of firepower should be deployed. It was taken for granted in 1954, as it would be a decade later, that should the US decide to deploy its might against rubber-sandalled peasants, Giap’s army would suffer defeat, even obliteration.
If the French were then losing in Indochina, the Americans reasoned that this was because they were – well, French. Bernard Fall recoiled in disgust from a US official who dismissed France’s presence in Indochina: ‘The whole damn country is degenerate, admit it. And the French are scared of the Germans, and the whole damn French Army is in Indochina just to make money and they have no fight left in them anyway.’ Since no US military commitment was made in the spring of 1954, events in the remote north-west of Vietnam ran their course. A cartoon in Le Figaro was captioned ‘The Final Redoubt’. It depicted government ministers in Paris using their last bullets to kill themselves. If most French people had become resigned to the fall of Dienbienphu, among the elite this was thought to signify the end of France as a great power.
Navarre and Cogny clung to hopes either that worsening monsoon weather might render Giap’s assaults logistically unsustainable, or that a ceasefire-in-place might be imposed by the Powers meeting in Geneva. The two generals urged Paris that further reinforcements would improve the garrison’s chances: ‘As well as military honour, there is at least hope of a favourable outcome that justifies additional sacrifices.’ This was absurd, of course. Aircrew, few of whom made any pretence of exerting themselves, were pushing supplies out of their planes from ten thousand feet, so that almost half fell into Giap’s hands. Much of the bombing was conducted blind, through cloud. On 28 April one wing, Groupe Franche Comté, reported the claims of its commanding officer, his adjutant and eight pilots to be medically unfit to fly. Their colonel said defiantly: ‘My refusal to send them [over Dienbienphu] in daylight, at low altitude, to certain death, is a matter between me and my conscience. The sacrifice would be futile.’ De Castries complained bitterly to Hanoi about aircrew who flinched, while his own soldiers were passing the stations of the Cross: ‘There cannot be a double standard.’
Among the American mercenaries who performed more creditably than did the French over Dienbienphu was the huge, bearded figure of CAT pilot James McGovern – ‘Earthquake McGoon’ to his buddies. On the last of countless missions to the camp, his C-119 was hit as he approached the drop zone with a load of ammunition. He turned away with one engine out, rejecting a bail-out: he had once performed an epic hike after coming down in China, and declined now ‘to do all that walking again’. This time around, his efforts to nurse the plane to safety failed: McGovern crashed into the ground, precipitating a spectacular explosion.
With reckless disregard for security, on 24 April Le Monde revealed the launch of Operation Condor, a ‘forlorn hope’ jungle march by three thousand men who set out from Laos to relieve Dienbienphu. It quickly became plain that Condor had no chance of success in impossible terrain and against Vietminh opposition, though rumours of such succour kept alive among a few optimists a vestige of hope. Most of the garrison, by contrast, were now resigned to death or capture. There was a distinction only between a minority who faced their doom with stoical courage, and those who succumbed to rage or despair. Men holding positions near the centre of the shrunken perimeter continued to receive rations to eat and wine in which to drown their sorrows. Others in outlying bunkers sometimes passed days without resupply, and spoke later of subsisting on stale bread and tomato sauce. In the hospital, Dr Grauwin reassured men who recoiled from the maggots in their wounds, saying that the creatures fed only on decayed tissue. On 26 April Algerians panicked during a struggle on Isabelle – then mutinied. Their colonel wished to shoot the ringleaders, but de Castries overruled him. On 30 April the Legion solemnly celebrated the anniversary of its 1863 fight to the death at Camerone in Mexico, now drenched by rainstorms that intensified the miseries of the exhausted, filthy, half-starved garrison.
On the following night of 1 May, Giap’s infantry assaulted Eliane 1, which they overran after ninety minutes of close-quarter fighting. Meanwhile on Dominique 3, Thai and Algerian defenders put up a tough fight before succumbing. In the Eliane 2 battle, de Castries lost 331 men killed or missing and 168 wounded, and now fielded not much above two thousand infantry against Giap’s fourteen thousand. The Vietminh showed off new weapons: Soviet Katyusha multiple rocket-launchers, formidable in their screeching moral impact. As the relationship between Navarre and Cogny became ever more sulphurous, the commander-in-chief threatened his subordinate with a court of inquiry, charged with leaking defeatist gossip.
The shades closed in upon Dienbienphu, where the stench of excrement, unburied corpses and decaying humanity was becoming intolerable. A trickle of reinforcements, volunteers to embrace catastrophe, continued to parachute into the camp, for the sole purpose of enabling the French delegation in Geneva to dispute the inevitability of defeat. Walking wounded were invited to rejoin their units: more than a few defenders manned trenches wearing mud-caked bandages. Langlais and Bigeard discussed a scheme whereby dispersed columns might break out through the jungle: they concluded, inevitably, that any sortie was doomed.
Then came another Vietminh attack. On the morning of 4 May the garrison’s wireless-operators heard a grim succession of voice messages from a lieutenant who had assumed leadership of the Moroccan unit on Huguette 4 after his company commander was hit: ‘There are only ten of us left around the CP … We are waiting for reinforcements … Where are the reinforcements? … Les Viets attaquent … I hear them … They are coming towards me down the trench … They are here … Aaah!’ On the evening of the 5th Cogny sent the hapless de Castries an imperious signal demanding ‘a prolonged resistance on the spot which now remains your glorious mission’.
During the ensuing twenty-four hours the garrison received a further air-dropped reinforcement of 383 men, of whom 155 were Vietnamese. On the morning of 6 May, intelligence warned de Castries to expect a big attack that night. Capt. Yves Hervouet demanded that Dr Grauwin cut the casts off his broken arms so that he could once more man his tank. At 2130 a Vietminh mine exploded beneath Eliane 2, which was then overrun in a brisk action fought in torrential rain; Capt. Jean Pouget led an unsuccessful counter-attack. Savage melees also took place on Eliane 4 and Eliane 10, which caused Langlais and Bigeard to radio aircraft overhead, cancelling a reinforcement jump: the perimeter was now so tight that parachutists were likely to land in the arms of the Vietminh. The last message from the officer commanding Eliane 4, lost soon after 2100, urged against shelling the fallen position, because every trench was crowded with French casualties. Meanwhile around the dressing station, in addition to the wounded and dead, clusters of men lingered slumbering through the long hours because – lacking weapons or a military function – they could do nothing else.
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