The battle petered out slowly. A ground operator aborted an incoming fighter-bomber strike, radioing call-sign César 5: ‘We’re blowing up everything – goodbye to our families … Adieu César.’ One position, Isabelle, held out for some hours more: its twelve hundred men attempted a sortie which ended with two companies cut to pieces in a chaotic night fight. A Moroccan gunner named Mohammed ben Salah is thought to have been the last man to die, manning a 105mm howitzer hours after de Castries quit. The Vietminh found themselves with 5,500 prisoners, of whom all but a thousand were wounded. The French command had formally recorded 1,161 deserters, who now joined the ranks of the PoWs: in all, sixteen battalions of French and colonial troops were wiped off Navarre’s order of battle. The Vietminh cadre and musical bard Van Ky said wonderingly: ‘This was an unbelievable victory, something beyond the bounds of our imaginations. No one could figure out how we could have defeated such a powerful force.’ Col. Tran Trong Trung justly asserted that the victory was above all ‘a triumph of the will’.
More of de Castries’ men perished in captivity than had died in action. Once in a communist PoW camp – and some never got that far – a commissar addressed the French officer prisoners in characteristic fashion: ‘You are here for an indeterminate period, to be re-educated by work. You will live the same life as those whom you have oppressed, you will suffer like them, come to understand them. We shall guide you in your search for truth.’ Some 3,900 members of the French garrison were eventually returned to their own people, 43 per cent of those captured. Sixty Thais and nineteen Europeans escaped from the battlefield and hacked through a hundred miles of jungle to safety. De Castries’ first question to the naval officer who received him on his release late in 1954 was: ‘Is it true they want to shoot me?’
Only one in ten of 14,324 Vietnamese troops taken prisoner in French uniform during the course of the war returned alive. In justice to the Vietminh, their own people lacked medical support, and existed on the edge of starvation. It is nonetheless plain that Giap and his comrades were indifferent to the survival or extinction of compatriots who had chosen the losing side. How could it be otherwise, when they had sacrificed an estimated twenty-five thousand of their own followers to secure victory at Dienbienphu? Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan, the mandarin’s daughter who had become a fervent revolutionary, served as a twenty-one-year-old medic in Giap’s army. In the wake of its triumph she was married to Cao Van Khanh, deputy commander of the 308th Division, at a ceremony held in de Castries’ command bunker.
On paper, the battle need not have been the decisive event of the war, because the French still possessed powerful forces. Giap’s army had exhausted itself, and was incapable of translating this local triumph into a successful general offensive. Yet France’s government and people could stand no more. Pierre Rocolle has written: ‘Dienbienphu became an imperious invitation to stop the shooting, because the will to pursue the struggle no longer existed.’ France’s American quartermasters had the worst of all worlds: they had provided sufficient military aid to fight a war, yet not enough to win it.
It is usually mistaken to assume that the outcome of any historical drama was pre-ordained, but there is an absolute lack of suspense about a narrative of France’s Indochina experience between 1945 and 1954: colonial rule there became unsustainable amid the strength of nationalist resistance together with the weakness of non-communist political elements – the mythical ‘Third Force’ which many Americans yearned to identify. Doug Ramsey, a US foreign service officer who would become a significant figure in Vietnam a decade later, said: ‘I wonder that we could have taken ourselves in, that many years in a row. It went back to Roosevelt making accommodations with the colonial powers. Think of the inanities of John Foster Dulles.’
There has been speculation about how much Giap’s success owed to his Chinese advisers. Mao’s men obviously provided technical instruction. For the most part, however, subsequent history shows that the North Vietnamese – as we might now begin to describe them, though many communist leaders came from the south and centre of the country – needed and accepted remarkably little guidance from others. A decade’s experience of war had made Giap and his comrades proficient, even inspired soldiers, fortified by the indifference to casualties common to all communist armies: foreign admirers later dubbed the North Vietnamese ‘Prussians of the Orient’. Hanoi’s histories pay effusive tribute to the personal role of Ho Chi Minh. Such claims are rooted in the demands of an authoritarian state’s official legend. Yet thus far, at least, they must be valid: Giap could not have accomplished what he did, nor survived so many bloody setbacks as commander-in-chief, without the support of Ho in good times and bad. The general himself was hugely respected, but his egotism made him little loved. In his subsequent writings about the battle, and indeed Vietnam’s wars, he tells a story of Giap, Giap, Giap, with scarcely a nod to the contributions of his subordinates. Nonetheless his victory at Dienbienphu stands as one of the military epics of the twentieth century.
3 GENEVA
News of the capitulation was broadcast in Paris at 4.45 p.m. on 7 May, and acknowledged in Geneva somewhat later, just hours before the assembled foreign ministers began to debate the political future of Vietnam. Georges Bidault, making the announcement, paid implausible tribute to France’s ‘civilising’ role in Vietnam, speaking of ‘this conflict that was forced upon us’. What was extraordinary about subsequent events at the conference tables – Dulles refused to sit at a common board with the Chinese – was that French humiliation yielded no triumph for the Vietminh. After expending torrents of blood to strengthen their negotiating position, they were eventually obliged to go home with half a loaf. How so?
The Geneva story began with the arrival of the first delegations, on 24 April 1954. Representatives of the world’s media thronged around the two-hundred-strong Chinese group, led by the urbane, handsome, supremely sophisticated Zhou Enlai, fifty-six-year-old scion of a scholarly family. Zhou bore to his grave the respect of the international community, despite serving as Mao Zedong’s instrument through decades of mass murder. The Russians arrived bearing a large consignment of caviar with which to enrich their hospitality at the multilateral feasts they intended to hold, though none eventually took place. John Foster Dulles sustained his usual standard of diplomatic courtesy, turning his back on Zhou when the Chinese extended a hand. The British were far more nervous of the US secretary of state than of the communists: they feared that Dulles’ rancour might provoke him to sabotage the proceedings. The obvious dominance of China and Russia reinforced the American conviction that Ho Chi Minh was their pawn: at Geneva the delegations of Zhou and Molotov were seen everywhere, that of the Vietminh only in conference sessions.
As the disparate national groups dispersed to their various hotels and mansions, Dulles led the only party stubbornly anxious to sustain the Indochina war. He expressed disgust that he had been invited to attend a diplomatic sell-out to the communists, comparable with that at Yalta in 1945. The veteran liberal columnist Walter Lippmann observed: ‘The American position at Geneva is an impossible one, so long as the leading Republican senators have no terms of peace except unconditional surrender of the enemy and no terms for entering the war except as a collective action in which nobody is now willing to engage.’
Yet the obduracy of the US secretary of state played a critical role in producing a settlement far less favourable to the communists than their victory at Dienbienphu made likely. In 1972, President Richard Nixon would fail in an attempt to convince the North Vietnamese that