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, equipped with rags and peasant palliatives.
As for the guns, Vietminh officer Tran Do described a routine repeated through weeks: ‘Each night when freezing fog descended into the valleys, groups of men mustered … The track was so narrow, [and] soon an ankle-deep bog, that the slightest deviation of the wheels would have caused a gun to plunge far into a ravine. By sheer sweat and tears we hauled them into position one by one, with men playing the part of trucks … We existed on rice either almost raw or overcooked, because the kitchens had to be smokeless by day and sparkless by night. On ascents, hundreds of men dragged the guns on long ropes, with a winch on the crest to prevent them from slipping. The descents were much tougher, the guns so much heavier, the tracks twisting and turning. Gun crews steered and chocked their pieces, while infantry manned the ropes and winches. It became the work of a whole torchlit night to move a gun five hundred or a thousand yards.’ Vietminh propaganda made a posthumous hero of a man who threw himself beneath a wheel to check a slipping gun’s escape into a chasm.
French intelligence, striving to monitor this fevered activity in the north-west, estimated that Giap could muster just twenty thousand porters, who could feed only a matching number of soldiers. In reality, however, the communists mobilised sixty thousand. Strengthened bicycles became a critical link in the supply chain, each bearing a load of 120lb, rising in emergencies to 200lb. Communist leaders inspired not only their fighters, but also the porters, to levels of physical effort and sacrifice that few Frenchmen or mercenaries proved capable of matching. A prisoner was deeply impressed when ten Vietminh raised their hands in response to a cadre’s call for volunteers to dispose of delayed-action French bombs.
The campaign developed in slow motion, with a lapse of more than a hundred days between the initial parachute landing on 20 November and Giap’s first assault in March. From the outset, French attempts to advance beyond their perimeter were punished: in December two para battalions that probed towards a village nine miles distant were mauled by the besiegers and obliged to retire. Navarre gave new orders to de Castries: he must simply hold the camp at any cost. Once the French had landed four 155mm guns, as well as 105mm howitzers and 120mm mortars, they felt confident about outgunning the Vietminh. Yet it proved frustratingly difficult to pinpoint targets: the poor quality of local maps impeded air and artillery observers; the enemy’s heavy weapons were seldom visible.
Through December the French high command received a steady trickle of intelligence that disturbed Navarre and Cogny – though not nearly as gravely as it should have done. They now knew that four Vietminh divisions were moving in the northern mountains, but remained uncertain of their destination – enemy diversionary actions in the Central Highlands and the Red River delta fed vacillation in Hanoi. Throughout the war hitherto, Vietminh assaults that met strong French resistance were aborted: the generals thus believed that Giap’s army would respond to a costly repulse at Dienbienphu by folding its tents. A correspondent of Le Monde who visited the camp told his readers that the prevailing spirit was On va leur montrer! – ‘We’ll show them!’
As the year end approached, Navarre became aware that the Vietminh were deploying howitzers: on 31 December he reported to Paris that the camp might become indefensible. Yet through the first weeks of 1954, boredom was the garrison’s principal enemy. Col. Langlais returned from hospital with a heavily-strapped ankle, and rode about on a little pony. Patrols suffered a steady stream of casualties. Many men yearned for the Vietminh to attack, so that they might be hurled back into their mountain fastnesses, freeing the defenders to adjourn to the fleshpots of Hanoi. Yet some also were apprehensive: Lt. Col. Jules Gaucher wrote to his wife on 11 January: ‘Time passes slowly and nothing interesting happens. They tell us of hard times coming, that will shake us out of our routine. Rumour has it that we are destined for sacrifice.’
During the weeks that followed, the garrison launched several sorties against the enemy’s artillery, all of which failed. Attempts to interdict Giap’s supply routes from the air were also unsuccessful, partly because of the limitations of French B-26 Marauder crews: Langlais once found his positions undergoing an apparent Chinese air attack, then discovered that they had been hit by an errant Frenchman. This was unsurprising when many bombloads were released from twelve thousand feet. Far away from Dienbienphu, the Vietminh staged night commando attacks designed both to sap French air strength and to distract Navarre’s attention. Twenty aircraft, most of them precious C-47s, were destroyed in raids on airfields around Hanoi and Haiphong.
From December onwards Navarre and his colleagues had ample intelligence, shared with their superiors in Paris, to show that they faced the prospect of a full-blooded disaster. Yet they persevered because a lethal cocktail of pride, fatalism, stupidity and moral weakness prevented them from acknowledging their blunder. If the garrison of Dienbienphu had been evacuated, nobody outside Vietnam would ever have heard of the place. There would have been merely a local withdrawal of a kind that had become familiar. Navarre bears principal responsibility, but France’s entire political and military leadership deserves to share. It was the country’s misfortune to be governed and commanded by men burdened with the humiliations of the previous decade, and thus constrained in every decision by a yearning to restore national honour, revive la patrie’s glory. In a spirit of defiance they perpetrated one of the least inevitable military fiascos of the twentieth century.
During the last week of January, the defenders were placed on high alert: intelligence reported that the Vietminh would launch their big assault within hours. Intelligence was right: that was the plan; but then Giap changed it.