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 imagine a more terrifying introduction to airborne warfare than a night jump into a tight perimeter encircled by the enemy. As planes approached the drop zone, men were told there was time for only six to exit on each pass. Tracer streamed up from communist flak guns, and one soldier in ten declined to jump – refusals are infectious amid the roar of engines, shouts of dispatchers, blind uncertainty below. Nonetheless, most of the battalion sprang courageously into the darkness, and landed in the French lines with surprisingly few losses. By a monumental act of bureaucratic meanness, survivors were subsequently denied paratroopers’ badges, on the grounds that they had not completed the prescribed course.
It was now 1 April, an appropriate date for another of Navarre’s black-comic gestures: an orgy of promotions for officers of the garrison, including the advancement of de Castries to brigadier-general’s rank. While Giap’s besiegers continued to dig furiously, advancing trenches and tunnels towards their next objectives, on the morning of 10 April the newly-made Col. Marcel Bigeard directed a counter-attack on Eliane 1. The men advanced singing, spearheaded by a flamethrower-carrier escorted by two sub-machine gunners, into a storm of communist fire. At 1130, after bitter fighting they reached the hill crest – then stuck, having suffered sixty casualties. At dawn on 18 April the hundred-strong garrison of Huguette 6, which was now thought indefensible, leapt from their trenches and ran for their lives, leaping over Vietminh foxholes towards the French lines. Sixty made it.
Throughout the Anglo–American crisis meetings that took place in April 1954, Dulles was obliged to mask his disdain for Britain as a nation, and for her leaders in particular. This sentiment was mutual: Churchill characterised the secretary of state as ‘a dull, unimaginative, uncomprehending man’. In London on 11–12 April, the visitor again rehearsed familiar arguments about the need to fight together against totalitarian threats. Eden was unfailingly courteous, unflaggingly sceptical. It was, of course, a large irony that he should in 1954 reject comparisons with the 1930s to justify Western military action, when two years later as prime minister he would deploy the same analogy to justify Britain’s disastrous invasion of Egypt. As it was, the two men parted with cold civility. The American visitor fared no better in Paris, where foreign minister Georges Bidault declined to agree that France should grant absolute independence to Indochina, an American precondition for intervention. Yet Washington’s hawks remained keen to act. On 16 April Vice-President Richard Nixon told newspaper editors, ‘the US must go to Geneva and take a positive stand for united action by the free world’. Far away in Indochina the French heard of his words, and nursed flickering candles of hope.
2 ‘A TRIUMPH OF THE WILL’
Between 14 and 22 April, the garrison of Dienbienphu lost 270 men. ‘Fragging’ by the disgruntled was not an American invention: one night a soldier tossed a grenade into a bunker full of NCOs, and was summarily executed for his pains. By 14 April, de Castries mustered 3,500 effective infantrymen; two thousand deserters lurked around the fringes of the camp, each night slinking out to compete in a scramble for parachute-landed rations. At the outset the French perimeter extended to twelve hundred acres; this had now shrunk by half. The battlefield resembled a fragment of the 1917 Western Front: a barren, mud-churned wasteland littered with debris, broken weapons and spent munitions, scarred and blackened by bombardment. Few men on either side ventured to expose themselves in daylight. French airmanship remained lamentable. On 13 April de Castries reported to Cogny three bomber attacks on his own troops, together with the parachutage of eight hundred shells into enemy hands. This message ended with a terse, acidulous ‘No Comment.’
The Vietminh displayed marvellous energy and ingenuity in sapping trenches and tunnels into the French positions, together with much courage in their infantry attacks. Yet to the end, the defenders inflicted far more casualties than they suffered. In 2018 Hanoi has still not credibly enumerated its Dienbienphu losses, surely a reflection of their immensity. Prisoners who fell into French hands testified to the dejection prevailing in many Vietminh battalions, among which malaria was endemic. The communist commander’s difficulties were sufficiently serious to cause him to abandon human-wave attacks in favour of more measured tactics, and to stage a succession of propaganda and self-criticism meetings. Political officers sought to inspire their overwhelmingly peasant soldiers and porters by promising that land reform – confiscation of landlords’ holdings – would be imposed in the ‘liberated zone’ within weeks of this battle being won. The most powerful stimulus for these simple men, however, was surely the knowledge that their sacrifices, unlike those of the garrison, were not in vain. They were winning.
On the night of 22–23 April, Giap’s men overran Huguette 1 after bursting forth from tunnels dug into its perimeter. Its senior officer was last seen fighting to the death in the midst of a throng of Vietminh. De Castries demanded a counter-attack, because without Huguette 1 there was little space left for supply drops. Paras were due to start such an operation at 1400 on 23 April, but an hour beforehand it became plain they would not be ready. Chaos ensued: it was impossible to cancel a scheduled air strike by four Marauders and a dozen fighters, which went in at 1345, when most of the available artillery ammunition was also fired off. The Vietminh on Huguette suffered severely, but then enjoyed a forty-five-minute lull during which reinforcements were rushed forward.
By the time two French companies leapt from their positions they met intense fire, exhausted momentum on open ground halfway to their objective, and by 1530 were pinned down and suffering heavy casualties. An hour later survivors withdrew, having lost seventy-six men killed or badly