AT 4:30 ON THE AFTERNOON of May 7, 1954, the valley of Dien Bien Phu in Northern Vietnam was eerily quiet. Only hours earlier it had been shaken by the deafening roar of cannons.
French officers and soldiers who had earlier destroyed the remaining ammunition at Dien Bien Phu’s French garrison (military post) were now quietly drinking champagne, another valuable they didn’t want to leave behind. While these men solemnly toasted each other good-bye, they waited for the approach of the Vietminh, a guerrilla force that had just shocked the world by defeating them.
Waiting nearby with her patients was a military nurse named Geneviève de Galard.
During the 1930s Geneviève attended a grade school named Cours Louise-de-Bettignies. She was profoundly impressed with her teacher’s stories about the school’s namesake, a brilliant French agent who had worked for British intelligence during World War I and had died while in German captivity.
Geneviève’s own family had a long history of military service: one of her ancestors had fought with the famous medieval hero Joan of Arc. Her late father and uncles had been French army officers, and many of her male relatives had fought in World War I.
So it was hardly surprising when, in January 1953, 27-year-old Geneviève joined the military herself, becoming a flight nurse with the Groupement des Moyens Militaires Transports Aériens, or GMMTA, the air transport service of the French air force. The GMMTA evacuation planes flew to the areas where the French military was at war—Algeria and Indochina—and transported the French wounded to Saigon and Paris.
In late 1953 the French army—and the evacuation nurses who supported them—increasingly focused on a remote camp in Indochina situated near a small village named Dien Bien Phu. The commander of the French army in Indochina, General Henri Navarre, decided that it would be an ideal spot to place a garrison of soldiers, who could protect Laos, cut Vietminh supply lines in the area, and prepare for a battle he was sure the French would win. Although Dien Bien Phu was surrounded by jungle and could only be accessed by air, French soldiers were improving its airfield and readying it for use.
On January 12, 1954, Geneviève landed there for the first time to pick up a planeload of wounded men. The camp was preparing for war, as she described later:
From the air it was a universe of tunnels, trenches, and shelters whose entrances were revealed and reinforced by logs and sandbags. Machine-gun posts were spotted on the hillsides, and on the plain, and as we descended to land, I could see the brown tarps that still covered the shelters. Once I landed, the hills, green and wooded seemed suddenly less hostile than the vast jungle universe we had flown over with its menacing density. In the distance a few rice fields still quivered in the wind, but the camp was closed in by a threatening jungle where paths must be carved out by machete.
Geneviève at Dien Bien Phu in February 1954, wearing her flight evacuation uniform. Geneviève de Heaulme
The Vietminh, who had been creating diversions elsewhere while quietly digging artillery trenches and tunnels as close as possible around Dien Bien Phu, launched their first major attack on the French garrison on March 13, 1954.
Geneviève arrived in Dien Bien Phu once again, on March 28 at 5:45 AM. The morning fog was so thick her pilot couldn’t see where to land. His third attempt was successful except that he ran the plane into some barbed wire. The oil radiator was punctured, and the plane wouldn’t be operational until repaired.
But it would never be used again: after the passengers had disembarked and as the fog lifted, the plane became visible to the Vietminh, who took aim and fired. Geneviève watched it go up in flames.
With the plane destroyed, she had to wait for a return flight and spent the night in Dien Bien Phu. Meanwhile, soldiers eager to get in touch with their families, deluged her with personal letters to deliver for them.
The next morning, while waiting for the arrival of an evening plane that would evacuate her and 250 desperately wounded men, Geneviève distributed items the Red Cross was parachuting into the camp: cigarettes, milk, and oranges. As day wore into night, one Vietminh shell after another exploded on the landing field.
By midnight, rain was pouring out of an ink-black sky, and the damaged landing field was thick with slippery mud. The wounded were carried out to meet the plane. Geneviève’s jeep became stuck in the mud. As she sloshed her way to the landing spot on foot, she saw a plane approaching. She didn’t think it would be able to land safely. Apparently someone in the control tower shared her opinion, because, rather than landing, the plane kept going.
Geneviève and the wounded returned to the garrison.
The following afternoon, at 4:00, a new Vietminh attack began, this one with Soviet-made howitzer cannons. “I felt as if it was the end of the world,” wrote Geneviève later. “The impacts shook our bunker. Pieces of earth fell from the roof…. Nobody said a word. All around there were wounded men bearing their sufferings with courage, and I knew that at dawn, when the battle decreased, the stretcher bearers would bring the new wounded. How could I sleep?”
She couldn’t. “The shelling lasted all night,” she wrote. “The din was terrifying.”
When the shelling stopped, it was clear that Geneviève would be staying indefinitely at Dien Bien Phu. The Vietminh had moved closer to the garrison, rendering the landing field impossible to use. Geneviève wrote later that although the high command didn’t want women at Dien Bien Phu, and although she was a flight nurse, not a ground medic, there was only one thing she could now do: “care for and stay with the wounded.”
Major Paul Grauwin, MD, was the surgeon in charge of Dien Bien Phu’s main 44-bed underground hospital. He put Geneviève to work there. While the two surgeons “performed miracles,” Geneviève gave shots, changed bandages, and distributed medicine by the light of an electric lamp.
Because the wounded were no longer being evacuated, the main hospital became overwhelmed with wounded men. Hundreds were also placed elsewhere throughout the camp, including battalion dressing stations and hastily dug shelters. Geneviève made a point to visit everyone she could, distributing Red Cross items and checking on the wounded soldiers’ progress.
Dr. Grauwin was very nervous about Geneviève leaving the main hospital, and he had reason to be: there was danger not only from Vietminh artillery assaults but also from the continuous rains. Mud was everywhere: the tunnels, the shelters, the lower-level beds. Once, while outside, Geneviève sunk hip-deep into the mud and had to be pulled out by two medics. The humidity also brought a proliferation of biting insects, which afflicted everyone, especially the men wearing casts, who were already in agony with humidity-induced skin irritation.
It seemed like conditions in Dien Bien Phu could not get much worse for the French. But they did. On April 3 the Vietminh announced a half-hour cease-fire so that both sides could remove their wounded from the battlefield. When the French soldiers walked toward the enemy lines, however, they made a horrible discovery: the Frenchmen they found on the stretchers were not wounded; they were dead, their bodies mutilated. Morale sunk even lower among the French troops.
Yet as the enemy moved in, Geneviève’s very presence lightened the profound sense of hopelessness falling upon the garrison. Later that day a large group of French paratroopers landed in the area. One of them, when he saw Geneviève, exclaimed cheerfully, “What do you know? There’s a woman here!”
Though overwhelmed with medical work, Geneviève tried to attend to the men’s emotional needs as well, explaining later that “when wounded, the toughest man becomes as vulnerable as a child and needs to feel supported…. In Dien Bien Phu I was, in a way, a mother, a sister, a friend.”
One man whose legs were paralyzed told Geneviève, “Every time you walk into my room my morale goes up 100 percent.” So Geneviève visited him every day, praising him as he tried to wiggle his toes.
As the battle raged, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Langlais, whom Geneviève considered to be “the soul and mind of the defense of Dien Bien Phu,” sent her a message: A large American press agency in Hanoi, representing the famous American war correspondent Marguerite Higgins, wanted to help Geneviève write her memoirs. They would pay her well.
Geneviève laughed, returned to her work, and never responded to what she termed “that astonishing offer.”
On April 29 Geneviève received two offers she did accept: a Legion of Honor and a Cross of War from Lieutenant Colonel Langlais. He had found the Cross of War in the camp, and the Legion of Honor had actually been intended for him. (The one intended for Geneviève had accidentally landed in enemy territory.)
Lieutenant Colonel Langlais wrote Geneviève’s awards citation, which read: “Geneviève has earned the admiration of everyone for her quiet and smiling dedication…. With unmatched professional competence and an undefeatable morale, she has been a precious auxiliary to the surgeons and contributed to saving many human lives.”
Geneviève particularly loved the last phrase: “She will always be, for the combatants at Dien Bien Phu, the purest incarnation of the heroic virtues of the French nurse.”
On the morning of May 6 Geneviève heard a “terrifying noise … a sort of howl followed by an explosion.” She heard one of the men say, “That is Stalin playing the organ” (referring to the sound of Soviet-made rocket launchers nicknamed “Stalin’s organs”).
All night long the battle raged. “A counterattack succeeded,” Geneviève wrote later, “raising again a high wave of hope. One position was regained. Everyone sensed that the night would be decisive…. The French artillery, lacking ammunition, had almost stopped firing while Stalin’s organs fired in relays and increased by tenfold the power of the Vietminh artillery.”
“The battle was now so intense that the injured could no longer reach our unit and had to wait where they fell until the usual lull at dawn,” she described.
Geneviève went to Lieutenant Colonel Langlais’s command post to hear the latest news of the battle so she could relate it to her patients: “I shared with the combatants moments of high hopes, when a position was retaken by our men, and the awful moments, during the heartbreaking adieux of the unit commanders: ‘The Viets are thirty feet away. Give our love to our families. It is over for us.’ My heart tightened as though I were hearing the last words of the condemned.”
“By dawn, all hope had disappeared,” she wrote later. Some of the officers considered breaking through enemy lines that evening in the direction of Laos. But they abandoned the idea. None of the remaining combatants were strong enough to do anything of the kind. Geneviève wrote, “The fighting would cease to avoid the massacre of the wounded.”
She was told that the cease-fire would begin at 5:00 PM, May 7. Around 4:30, as she said good-bye to the officers, she saw that they “were all close to tears.” As one captain shared champagne with the men and Geneviève distributed last cigarettes, she noticed that a “strange silence settled over the valley.”
At 5:30 the Vietminh arrived. They ordered everyone out of the medical unit, even the stretcher cases. Geneviève was horrified by what she saw outside: dead bodies everywhere. The Vietminh ordered the able-bodied medics and wounded to march forward. As they did, their path crossed with “columns of French prisoners marching northwards, their shoulders hunched and their eyes filled with sorrow.”
The Vietminh camp commandant summoned Geneviève for an interview. He commended her for her work and praised his leader, Ho Chi Minh. Geneviève felt he was playing some sort of mind game with her, one she didn’t understand. She kept repeating, “Since you speak of the humanity and clemency of your president, the only humanitarian solution would be to authorize the evacuation of the wounded.”
Immediately following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, approximately 9,000 French POWs began their march to the Vietminh POW camps, one of them 300 miles away, the other 450. The men marched 12 miles per day for approximately one to two months. Most who began the march with battle wounds died quickly; a multitude of others succumbed to jungle diseases or dysentery from drinking unclean water. Some men attempted to escape but seldom with long-term success—any villagers they would have had to ask for assistance considered them the hated enemy. When the survivors arrived at the camps, they were met by thousands of other French POWs struggling to survive in shockingly rudimentary conditions. While the captives were not subjected to physical torture, if they didn’t fully cooperate with the daily enforced Communist indoctrination, their small rations were withheld.
The POWs were finally released between August and October 1954. Even those who had been in captivity only since May—that is, 3,900 of the original 9,000 veterans of the Dien Bien Phu surrender who had survived the march and imprisonment—were skeletal. They came home to a French public disgusted by the war and its representatives. Like the Americans who would follow them, these veterans were advised to wear civilian clothing to avoid attacks from their fellow citizens. Many suffered with substance abuse and relationship problems after returning home; some even took their own lives.
On May 19 the Vietminh allowed a group of wounded men to be evacuated in honor of Ho Chi Minh’s birthday. Two days later, they told Geneviève she must leave as well. She refused. Up to this point, the Vietminh had allowed her to nurse her patients with what medical supplies they hadn’t taken from her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them. But more to the point, she didn’t want to take up the space of a wounded man in an evacuation plane.
Three days later, however, the Vietminh would not take no for an answer; the international presses were implying that they were holding Geneviève at Dien Bien Phu against her will.
When Geneviève disembarked from the first flight of her trip home to France, in Luang Prabang, the capital of Laos, a group of legionnaires honored her with a formal presentation of arms.
It was night by the time she reached Hanoi. When the plane door opened, Geneviève was temporarily blinded by the flash of cameras. She was big news. The press conference that followed the next morning boiled down to two basic questions: “Were you scared?” and “Were you afraid to die?” Because she was deeply religious, Geneviève said she didn’t fear death. But she did admit to being afraid once: during her initial interview with the Vietminh.
When she arrived in Paris a short time later, she was hounded by the French press and offered money if she would agree to have her story made into a film. She refused the offer and did her best to avoid the press, instead busying herself with what she considered important work: corresponding with the families of men who had been at Dien Bien Phu and who were now prisoners of war. To accomplish this task, she took one month’s leave of absence from the French air force. Although she tried to remember everyone she had met at Dien Bien Phu, she often didn’t recognize them from the photos their families sent; the clean men in these photos looked so different from her unshaved patients.
Geneviève in Luang Prabang, in the paratrooper uniform she wore while staying at Dien Bien Phu, on the cover of the magazine Paris Match. Paris Match
Two months later, on July 26, 1954, Geneviève was in New York City being honored with a ticker tape parade. US president Dwight D. Eisenhower had invited her there and awarded her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Geneviève had felt overwhelmed by the invitation itself but didn’t think she could refuse; this was the first time since 1821 that a foreigner had been invited by an act of Congress to the United States on an official visit.
During the exhausting three-week tour that followed, the American press began to call Geneviève the “Angel of Dien Bien Phu.” Whenever she was asked to speak, she said something along the following lines: “I haven’t earned this honor, because I only did my duty…. My thoughts, at this moment are with all those who are still over there and who, far more than I, have earned this honor that you offer.”
Geneviève returned to Paris, but when her contract with the French air force expired on July 15, 1955, she decided to go back to New York for training at a rehabilitation center there. Then she returned to Paris and put her new skills to work, helping survivors of Dien Bien Phu who were learning to live with prosthetic limbs.
In 1956 Geneviève married Captain Jean de Heaulme, whom she met while in Indochina (but who had not been at Dien Bien Phu).
Decades later, they returned to Vietnam, but Geneviève couldn’t bear to visit Dien Bien Phu. During this trip, she encountered more Vietnamese people than she had during the war. Though she could not respect Vietnam’s government, she did greatly admire its people, who, she said, “have suffered so much throughout their history and manifest their attachment to the land … and who want to show to all the nations a … civilization of their own.”
Geneviève and Jean had three children and three grandchildren and today live in Paris, where Geneviève still receives communications—via letter and in person—from veterans of the battle and others interested in her wartime experiences. She is also regularly invited to attend official military ceremonies.
The de Heaulmes are members of Vietnam Esperance, an organization designed to help Vietnamese Catholics and that built a chapel for them near Dien Bien Phu. The organization recently received permission from the Vietnamese government to build a church in the center of the village.
In 2003 Geneviève wrote her memoir, and it was translated into English in 2010.
The Angel of Dien Bien Phu: The Sole French Woman at the Decisive Battle in Vietnam by Geneviève de Galard (Naval Institute Press, 2010).
“Geneviève de Galard: The Angel of Dien Bien Phu,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HK3Zeeg3wA.
French-language video testimony by Geneviève, with subtitles and images.
Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu by Bernard B. Fall (Harper Collins, 1966).