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THE BATTLE AND COLONY LOST
By Douglas Niles
Hubris knows no nation. . . .
One of the most significant, yet underrecognized, effects of the Second World War was the sundering of the great empires that several European powers had established on the continents of Africa and Asia. The overseas holdings of the Netherlands and Belgium bent beneath these winds of change and gradually broke away, while the vast territories of France and England convulsed more quickly under the nationalist independence movements heralding the advance of the modern age.
Although the latter two nations counted themselves among the victors in the largest war in human history, both had suffered terrible losses in personnel, property, and prestige. England, although physically battered by bombing, was mostly intact. But France had been ravaged by more than four years of Nazi occupation, and deeply scarred by combat, as much of the nation became a battleground during the summer of 1944.
After the war, England retained some control over her most important colony, India, but the inevitability of independence was written on the wall. In fact, there had been a growing independence movement in that South Asian nation even before the Second World War. India, like other British colonies in the Middle East and Africa, would move gradually, but inexorably, toward nationhood.
France, which, in addition to physical losses, had suffered severe insults to her legendary Gallic pride, was more reluctant to part ways with her overseas territories, and chose to wage war in an attempt to restore imperial power. The nation’s colonial power was split between several territories around the Mediterranean Sea (including Algeria, Tunisia, and Lebanon) and the valuable Southeast Asian realm of French Indochina. The latter was a trove of wealth, especially valuable for its natural resources, most notably rubber and timber.
French Indochina encompassed the countries that would come to be known as Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. French rule of these colonies had ended, for all practical purposes, in the summer of 1940, when the Nazi conquest of the home country left Indochina open to exploitation by Germany’s Asian ally, Japan. The armed forces of Nippon wasted no time in occupying and garrisoning Indochina, and made most profitable use of Vietnam, which, with its large cities, long coastline, and excellent ports, would prove to be a significant power base for the massive war of conquest that Japan would launch at the end of 1941. It was also a key source of rubber, necessary for any nation to wage modern war.
After the war, and the utter defeat of Japan, France moved swiftly to reassert control of her former colonies. But the population of Indochina—and especially the Vietnamese—was tired of being dominated by foreigners and eager to assert their independence. After French intervention in 1946 crushed a nascent local government in a matter of weeks—as the Europeans used their naval power to bombard coastal cities, killing thousands of Vietnamese civilians—an organized resistance group called the Viet Minh, who had previously fought the Japanese, took up arms against the French.
The Viet Minh was composed of a mixture of Vietnamese nationalists and dedicated Communists, united mostly by their determination to create a free nation. These fighters willingly battled the French Far East Expeditionary Force, which had been dispatched to seize control of Indochina. Under the charismatic leadership of Ho Chi Minh, and the military skill of his chief military commander, Vo Nguyen Giap—and with steadily increasing support from Communist China and the Soviet Union—the Viet Minh gradually progressed from an irregular force of guerrillas into a veteran, highly motivated army. They were bolstered by a sense of national identity and had inherited a history of resistance to foreign oppression against the Chinese, the French, and the Japanese.
From 1946 to 1953, the war was waged at a stage of low intensity highlighted by many small but bloody encounters. The French seized control of the cities and other population centers and, with superior artillery and armor, were able to hold off a succession of enemy attacks, gradually driving the Viet Minh into the country’s interior. The guerrillas had no air force and began the war with no artillery arm, but the French were slow to recognize their enemy’s growing capabilities in both guns and tactical ability. This failure would eventually prove catastrophic.
A succession of French commanders, supported only by lukewarm enthusiasm from the home country, tried to lure the Viet Minh into open battle. When they did so, they often inflicted heavy casualties on Giap’s troops. The Vietnamese general continued to rely upon guerrilla tactics, even as he was being increasingly supplied by his Communist allies. After the Chinese Communists took control of China’s border with North Vietnam in 1949, the shipments to the Viet Minh increased substantially, thus aiding the rebels considerably in their attempt to forge a modern army.
Even so, the French were no strangers to warfare, and had a long history of military accomplishment. After the humiliation of WWII, they were desperate to return to the status of an international power. Yet it is hard to reconcile that pride, and the desire to regain the status of empire, with the laundry list of poor decisions that were made during what became known as the First Indochina War.
For one thing, the war suffered from a lack of popular support in France, which banned the use of conscripted troops in colonial campaigns. Thus, it was fought by professional soldiers, colonial troops, and units of the legendary French Foreign Legion; even in combination, this was too small an army for the mission assigned. The effort was also poorly funded, as the main threat to French security was readily recognized to be a rearmed Germany, closely followed by the threat of Soviet aggression. By 1953, dissatisfaction on the home front had grown into a political force and it began to look as though the war would simply be abandoned.
The supreme commander of French forces in Vietnam at that time was General Henri Navarre, and he decided that the time had come to try to force a decisive engagement. Though he was not at all convinced that the war could be won, he was determined to risk a significant number of his best troops on an important operation. He made the decision to establish a strongpoint deep in the territory held by the Viet Minh, blocking a key supply route between Vietnam and Laos. The intent was to force General Giap to attack the French position. At that point, Navarre believed, French artillery and airpower would deliver a smashing defeat to the rebellion and an honorable peace could be arranged.
Unfortunately for France, and especially for the men Navarre dispatched on his ill-fated campaign, the general seemed to ignore virtually every standard rule of warfare as he went about planning this crucial battle. The French plan would be a spectacular failure on all three levels of war: strategic, operational, and tactical. Before it began, it was opposed by virtually every ranking officer under Navarre’s command, but the general stubbornly insisted on going ahead. As the target, he selected a valley with an old airstrip, in a place called Dien Bien Phu. The location was far beyond reach of reinforcements or gunnery support, except from the air.
Next, Navarre made a terrible choice of commander for the operation, selecting a dashing cavalryman, Colonel Christian de Castries—a skilled proponent of mobile warfare—to lead a static force holding an entrenched, defensive position. Then he ignored a time-honored military maxim—“hold the high ground”—by placing his forces in a deep valley, leaving the rugged and forested heights surrounding Dien Bien Phu to the enemy. Finally, he drastically underestimated his enemy’s capabilities.
In November of 1953, nearly two thousand elite French paratroopers parachuted into Dien Bien Phu, quickly taking control of the objective, seizing the airstrip, and commencing to prepare defensive positions. Over the next few months, the garrison would increase to some sixteen thousand men, supplied only by air. Seven fortified strongpoints were established around the airfield, but none of these occupied any of the significant points of high ground.
The one principle of warfare the French successfully employed was surprise, as General Giap was quite unprepared for their tactics. Once he figured out what was going on, however, he was delighted by Navarre’s operation. Giap quickly ordered multiple divisions into the hills around Dien Bien Phu, and his dedicated men hauled many pieces of heavy artillery and antiaircraft guns with them through the mountainous jungle. Once they approached the French base, the Vietnamese tunneled through the mountain crests, bringing their guns into firing positions that would be essentially invulnerable to French return fire.
On March 13, 1954, the Viet Minh opened with an attack on the first French strongpoint, supporting their soldiers with a devastating artillery barrage. By the end of the first day of battle, Castries was forced to acknowledge that his own guns were completely unable to counter the enemy cannons. (In fact, on the third day of the battle, artillery commander Colonel Charles Piroth committed suicide, humiliated by this utter failure of French gunnery.) Meanwhile, Viet Minh antiaircraft gunnery took a heavy toll on French aircraft trying to support or resupply the garrison.
The battle would rage with varying levels of violence for nearly two months, but the outcome was preordained by the first day’s combat. The Vietnamese attacked French entrenchments in waves, suffering many casualties but gradually shrinking the defensive perimeter. The airstrip, in range and line of sight of attacking guns, was soon rendered unusable, and attempts to supply the garrison by parachute were completely insufficient.
Colonel de Castries himself withdrew to his bunker and seemed paralyzed by indecision—perhaps because he had no good options. His men fought bravely, but it was a hopeless fight. When the French surrendered on May 7, they had suffered a decisive, even historic, defeat. For the first time, an army of former colonials had used modern weapons and tactics to defeat their conquerors.
A peace conference in Geneva commenced the next day, and Ho Chi Minh arrived with news of Giap’s epic victory. As a result, France withdrew from Indochina and Vietnam was divided into north and south. Thus the seeds of the next, even bloodier, Indochina War were inevitably planted.
But what if the French had been willing to allow the Vietnamese to gradually obtain independence, as the British had with India? The country could well have remained a valuable trading partner of France, and would have stood a better chance of withstanding the all-consuming brand of communism that would eventually grip the nation with such deadly, divisive, and long-lasting consequences.
And the United States would never have had to send a single combat unit to Vietnam.