This Day in Vietnam History (French Establish Garrison at Dien Bien Phu, Destined for Disaster)

November 20, 1953—French colonial forces established a garrison in the valley of Dien Bien Phu, whose location on the border between North Vietnam and Northern Laos, it was hoped, would protect the latter country from Communist subversion and staunch the arms being shipped to Marxist revolutionaries in the former.

Instead of solidifying his position, however, French commander Henri Navarre fell into a trap that resulted in one of his nation’s worst military defeats ever—and began the long demise of its colonial empire.

In a postmortem of the catastrophe, the French War College noted that Navarre and his staff had ignored intelligence that did not correspond with their prejudices, and had instead “substituted their preconceived idea of the Vietminh for the facts.” Does this sound to you like Donald Rumsfeld dismissing the warning of respected generals like Eric Shinseki that occupying Iraq and quelling an emergency required many thousands more troops than he had committed to the task?

How often, for instance, does a commander get warnings from his three top subordinates strongly disapproving of the action? Yet that’s exactly what happened when Generals Cogny, Gilles and Dechaux protested Operation Castor, the airborne assault on Dien Bien Phu. Dechaux’s objections were especially cogent, lengthy and disturbing, citing weather, antiaircraft fire, aircraft maintenance issues, inadequate time-over-target, and attrition of fuel, engines and airmen. (You see, Dien Bien Phu was located 183 miles from the French airfield complex near Hanoi—meaning that planes could spend only 15 minutes over the airfield and carrying capacity would be curtailed.)

Now, if you or I were Navarre, I suspect we’d ask something like this: “Wait a sec, mon ami! I already knew we can’t reinforce or resupply the airhead from the road. Now you’re telling me there are going to be problems from the air, too? Let’s have some wine and come up with a good Plan B, okay?”

But no. Navarre could not believe that Vo Nguyen Giap, the military strategist of the Viet Minh—a former schoolteacher and lawyer, hardly a toughened soldier like himself—could defeat superior French élan.

Moreover, he could not conceive that Giap could adapt his tactics from earlier in the eight-year war, when he’d received a good pasting by the tough French troops. Instead of a full-fledged frontal assault, Giap was now readying a siege.

In his Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow quoted one Communist veteran of the battle as follows: “Now the shovel became our most important weapon. Everyone dug tunnels and tenches under fire, sometimes hitting hard soil and only advancing five or six yards a day. But we gradually surrounded Dienbienphu with an underground network several hundred miles long, and we could tighten the noose around the French.”

Most of all, Navarre could not imagine what Giap was prepared to do: lug heavy artillery up the mountains surrounding the valley, where they could blast the French garrison at will; even suffer appalling losses (20,000 Viet Minh vs. 3,000 French killed in the battle for Dien Bien Phu alone), as long as it meant that the French public’s will to resist was wearing thin.

Navarre had broken one of the major rules of military engagement: Never underestimate your enemy.

From the safety of his Saigon headquarters, Navarre gave the order that left the crème de la crème of France’s best fighters outnumbered, outgunned, and cut off from help. In March 1954, Giap began to close the trap by attacking the garrison. Two months later, the prize fell into his hands: the surrender of 9,500 French colonial troops.

Having bankrolled the French government in its nine-year war with the Communists, the American government was not faced with the question of what to do. At least one young senator had strong misgivings about the situation.

Midway through the desperate two-month siege, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts stood on the floor of the Senate and said, with cold-eyed realism: “I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”

The crucial figure, of course, was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Today, it’s clear that he was not the grinning simpleton that so many liberals of the time made him out to be. At the same time, it’s important to recall that he was not quite the critic of the “military-industrial complex” that he blasted in his farewell speech to the American people.

Eisenhower’s administration looked into the possibility of using nuclear arms to come to the aid of the French. He even contemplated putting American troops in harm’s way.

In the end, he decided not to, for a simple reason that made the aging soldier-statesman as much a realist as his eventual successor in the Oval Office, Senator Kennedy: he would not wage unilateral war against a foe thousands of miles away. “Without allies and associates,” he told his staff once, “the leader is just an adventurer, like Genghis Khan.”

“Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan,” President Kennedy would observe in the White House. So it proved for the French at Dien Bien Phu, as it would for the Americans’ own experience in Southeast Asia.