• U.S.

INDO-CHINA: The Fall of Dienbienphu

9 minute read
TIME

INDOCHINA

A deep stillness lay across the wasteland of Dienbienphu. A shroud of gunsmoke lifted from the dips and hollows where the French Union garrison had died. In the stillness, there was only a muffled tramp! tramp! tramp! as the worn-out prisoners moved north, or a sudden, shuddering thump as an ammunition dump went off, or a dull buzz in the sky where the French C475 were keeping their death watch. It was a graveyard world down there, the French pilots reported, a tornup world of broken stones and cluttered bunkers, while around it the jungle would soon regain its ancient inscrutability. For 56 nights and days the battle had gone on, down there in the wasteland. This was how it ended.

The Last Days. In the final 72 hours, a tropical rainstorm lashed the doomed 10,000-man garrison. Trenches sagged and crumbled in the blinding rain. Latrines filled and festered. The water supply turned foul. French Commanding General Christian de Castries checked his three surviving strongpoints—Claudine in the west, Eliane in the east, isolated Isabelle three miles to the south. All was quiet, save for the rain, and the occasional crack of a Communist rifle way off somewhere in the hills. That night, De Castries summoned his staff to Junon, his command post, for one last chivalric rite of battle: he decorated Lieut. Geneviéve de Galard Terraube, the only woman nurse in the fortress, with the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre. That night too, less than 500 yards from Junon, the Communist infantrymen burrowed close in through the mire. “Everywhere they are in close contact,” Dienbienphu radioed GHQ. “Everywhere they are within grenade range. When they attack, the fortress will be ready.”

At 1700 hours next day, Red General Giap laid down heavy 105-mm. and 75-mm. gunfire against the main perimeter. His gunners could not miss: the perimeter was less than 1,000 yards wide. For the first time in the battle, Giap brought up Russian rocket launchers (“Stalin Organs”) and struck at Dienbienphu’s sodden battlements—eight rockets per burst. De Castries checked the damage, then told GHQ: “This may finish us.”

At 2000, French lookouts spied Red concentrations in the flarelight, headed for Claudine and Eliane. At 2200, bugles shrilled through the damp night air, and four Red regiments attacked. By dawn, they had four outposts in Eliane. Then they overran Bald Head Hill, which commanded the center from the east.

This was the crisis, and old Cavalryman de Castries knew it. At 0700, he gathered his last reserves and hurled in three desperate counterattacks. But Giap mostly held his gains, then sent in his Red reserves to clinch the battle. De Castries had only one remaining 105-mm. howitzer, one 155-mm. field gun. His tanks were wrecked or embedded in the mud. His ammunition was all but gone. One outpost commander phoned De Castries: “We can keep on fighting for only ten more minutes. Should we surrender?” De Castries snapped back: “Keep on fighting for ten more minutes.”

The Last Stand. At 1000, the Communists won two more outposts in Eliane. At 1200, they went for the last three French positions on the east bank of the Nam Youm River. By 1600, the Reds were storming the French center. De Castries radioed GHQ: “The violent barrage from mortars and artillery continues. The Viets are infiltrating massively through the strongpoints on the west.” De Castries also spoke briefly to his wife, Jacqueline, who waited with the generals for the outcome. “Have faith for our wounded,” he asked her. Then, “Au revoir.”

At 1645, De Castries was on the air again: “The central redoubt is about to be fully overrun. Further resistance is becoming hopeless.” At 1700, De Castries made another call to his commander, General René Cogny, in Hanoi:

De Castries: “The Viets are everywhere. The situation is very grave. The combat is confused and goes on all about. I feel the end is approaching, but we will fight to the finish.”

Cogny: “Well understood. You will fight to the end. It is out of the question to run up the white flag after your heroic resistance.”

De Castries: “Well understood. We will destroy the guns and radio equipment. The radiotelephone link will be destroyed at 1730 hours. We will fight to the end.

Au revoir, mon général. Au revoir, mes camarades. Vive la France!” Then De Castries ordered artillery fire from Isabelle against his own command post.

The Communists swarmed on toward Junon, flushed with imminent victory. There was one last cutting and clubbing, and the helpless French pilots saw it: bayonet, knife and grenade in one ghastly arena less than 1,000 feet wide. Bearded French veterans, coal-black Senegalese and tough little Vietnamese even slugged at the Reds with chunks of wood and iron from their broken strong points. “It was like a spectacle of wild beasts in a Roman amphitheater,” said one pilot afterward.

It could not go on. At 1730, De Castries called GHQ for the last time: “After 20 hours of ceaseless combat, just now man-to-man, the enemy has infiltrated right through our central bastion. Munitions are short. Our resistance is about to be submerged. The Vietminh are only a few yards from the radio where I speak. I have given orders for maximum demolitions. The ammo depots are going up already. Au revoir.”

The Dienbienphu radio operator added his piece with no show of emotion: “There is fighting around the door. The general has ordered me to destroy this equipment. Say hello to Paris for me. Au revoir.” Then silence. At GHQ, staff officers, generals, signalmen and clerks were leaden with a dread despair. “It was like hearing the tap on the hull of a submarine that lies helpless at the bottom of the sea,” said one who listened.

The Last Charge. The battle neared its end. The Communists regrouped and turned southward against Isabelle. Isabelle was ready. Its 13th Demi-Brigade,

French Foreign Legion, had 22 battle citations and the mystique of a great tradition: “The Legion is Our Country.” Many times the Legion had fought for honor in a losing cause, for Gambetta at Orleans, for Maximilian in Mexico. Now there were 1,500 Legionnaires in Indo-China ready to die for Strongpoint Isabelle. They were commanded by Colonel André Lalande from St. Cyr Military Academy, veteran of Narvik, El Alamein, Italy and the Vosges. Lalande was a tough customer: his Legionnaires called him “baroudeur,” a brawler. Lalande did not wait for the Communists to come, 20 to 1, to get him. At 0115, he ordered the charge.

One or two French pilots saw it in the flarelight, from far above. The Legionnaires advanced from their shattered trenches toward the massed Red infantry, and the guns. Like the Confederate rush at Franklin, it was forlorn; like the Old Guard’s serried march on Waterloo, it was final; like the Light Brigade at Balaclava, it was magnificent, but not war. At 0150, little more than half an hour later, the Charge of the Demi-Brigade was over, and very few men still lived. Isabelle radioed the Drench planes: “Breakout failed. We must break communications with you. We are going to blow up everything. Fini. Repeat. Fini.” The C-47s were rocked by the shock waves from exploding Isabelle. “They were enormous explosions,” said one pilot later, sadly. And the Red radio crowed:'”All the enemy troops who tried to break out were annihilated. All fighting has now ceased.”

The Last Full Measure. So ended the Battle of Dienbienphu, March 13-May 8, 1954. It was the one set-piece battle of the seven-year Indo-China war—a strange affray of bayonets in the age of atom and jet. Now there was only the stillness in the wasteland. The casualty returns:

French Union: about 4,000 killed and wounded, 8,000 missing, mostly presumably captured.

Communists: about 8,000 killed, 12,000 wounded.

“The victory is complete,” said Giap’s spokesman, via Peking radio. “The French garrison and its commander were captured. We wiped out 17 battalions. We shot down or damaged 57 planes. There were many enemies lying around on the ground.” Peking radio later named both De Castries and Lalande as prisoners of war. Said Cogny, weeping: “Dienbienphu is a new name to emblazon on the streamers of France.” Said Navarre, in a special Order of the Day to his remaining 230,000 French Union and 240,000 Vietnamese troops: “After 56 days of continuing combat, submerged by numbers, by odds of 5 to 1, the garrison has had to end its fight. . . The fall of the entrenched camp was accomplished only because the enemy, thanks to Chinese Communist assistance, was suddenly able to start a form of modern warfare entirely new to Indo-China. The defenders of Dienbienphu have written an epic. They have given [you] a new pride and a new reason to fight. For the struggle of free peoples against slavery does not end today. The fight continues.”

What kind of a fight would it be? If there was no solution at Geneva, Navarre predicted there would be “internationalization of the war”—meaning allied intervention. And for France? Henceforth from Dienbienphu, the old ways of war could no longer suffice. Robert Guillain, Le Monde’s able correspondent, cabled a bitter valedictory from Hanoi:

” ‘Let the enemy come,’ said our troops at Dienbienphu, ‘and we’ll show them.’ We’ll show them? We’ll show what, and to whom? ‘We’ll show those who face us in battle,’ they said. ‘We’ll show the enemy. And we’ll show them in Hanoi. We’ll show them in Saigon, the people busy sipping cool drinks on shaded café terraces or watching beautiful girls in the pool at the Sporting Club. We’ll show the people of France, the people of France above all. They have to be shown. They have to be shown what their neglect, their incredible indifference, their illusions, their dirty politics have led to. And how best may we show them? By dying, so that honor at least may be saved . . .’ Our dead of Dienbienphu died, I claim, protesting, appealing against today’s France in the name of another France for which they had respect. The only victory that remains is the victory of our honor.”

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com