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 digging with disdain. Their commanders took for granted a 24/7 air link with Hanoi.
Meanwhile, far away in the hills, Giap learned of the deployment: the French press, of which his staff were assiduous readers, reported Navarre’s intention to stand and fight. The Vietminh general’s decision directly to challenge the enemy commander-in-chief – to commit large forces to attack the camp – was founded upon a shift in the military balance, at first unknown at French headquarters in Hanoi. The Chinese had supplied the Vietminh with American-built M2A1 105mm howitzers captured from the defeated Nationalists, together with 120mm mortars and 37mm anti-aircraft guns. These provided Giap’s artillerymen with much-enhanced hitting power, and above all range – a 105mm shell could reach targets from gunpits twelve thousand yards away.
The most important, and indeed historic, call Giap made, in which his Chinese advisers played an unproven but possibly influential role, was logistical: to convince himself and the politburo that his men could drag these weapons, each of which weighed over two tons, five hundred miles over some of the most intractable terrain in Asia, and sustain for months supplies for a four-division siege force. To achieve this, on 6 December a general mobilisation was decreed across the ‘liberated zone’, to muster a rotating host of peasant porters, each of whom served at least a month before stumbling home exhausted, emaciated, racked by disease. To motivate these men and women, new emphasis was placed on the imminence of land reform, their prize for victory. Alongside the familiar army slogan ‘Everything for the front, everything for victory!’ there now appeared a new one: ‘The land to the peasants!’
Giap shifted his advanced headquarters three hundred miles, to a cluster of bomb-proof caves and man-made tunnels nine miles from the French camp, where he laid out his map table on 5 January 1954. His staff began to publish a bulletin for the troops. Among its news reports and exhortations were lurid cartoons. One such depicted France as a grossly ugly woman who has given birth to Dienbienphu, and lies beset by tiny black-clad figures who are severing the umbilical cord of the air link – as indeed they would do, just a few weeks later.
Communist logisticians and engineers laboured on their supply route, some stretches capable of accommodating Soviet Molotova trucks which operated in relays, offloaded and reloaded by gangs of porters. Rice was rafted part-way from China, down the Black River. Giap demanded a battlefield stockpile of a thousand tons of ammunition – each 105mm shell weighed forty-four pounds. Vietminh infantry began moving towards Dienbienphu, where on arrival they were presented with spades to wield, ropes to haul. Along the length of the trail, close attention was paid to camouflage. In jungle, treetops were lashed together to form a tunnel, while bridges were created, invisible beneath river surfaces. In open country gangs followed trucks, brushing away telltale tracks. When French aircraft anyway caught them, the only succour for the wounded was provided by medical students,