Battle of Dien Bien Phu

11 Key excerpts on "Battle of Dien Bien Phu"

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  The First Vietnam War

  Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis

  • Mark Atwood Lawrence, Fredrik Logevall, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Fredrik Logevall(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  E L E V E N ◆ ◆ ◆ Assessing Dien Bien Phu JOHN PRADOS THE FIRST INDOCHINA WAR climaxed in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, a mountain valley in northwest Tonkin, where a decisive battle deter-mined the outcome of the conflict. Events of the first half of that year triggered major changes in many ways for France, for the United States, and for the Vietnams, North and South, that emerged from the fire of battle. Nevertheless the fight at Dien Bien Phu is much more often noted than analyzed. This is unfortunate because it has led to an in-complete understanding of the passage from the French war in Viet-nam to the American one. The siege of Dien Bien Phu put the capstone on the fight of eight or nine years (depending upon what dating the historian puts upon its origin), which had consumed France and Vietnam. This chapter will briefly outline the history of the siege of Dien Bien Phu in order to set the context for a larger discussion of its outcome and meaning. Assessments are possible at several levels. The more fa-miliar are analyses of Dien Bien Phu in the context of the Geneva Con-ference and the French war. These issues will be covered here as well, but a principal object of this chapter will be to examine the effects of Dien Bien Phu on U.S. policy in Vietnam and Indochina, as well as the impact of the experience on American presidents, both incumbents and future chief executives, who would have the key roles in ultimate U.S. decisions about Vietnam policy. 215 The Background and the Battle Following the visit to the United States by French general Jean de Lat-tre de Tassigny in 1951 and the acceleration of U.S. aid to the French in Indochina that then occurred, the war settled into an uneasy ca-dence. Viet Minh guerrilla forces made slow progress in the Red River delta of Tonkin, steadily establishing their presence in districts and vil-lages throughout the area and increasing their hold on villages already favorable to Ho Chi Minh’s side in the war.

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  Defeat and Memory

  Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era

  • J. Macleod(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Internationally, two of the most significant repercussions of Dien Bien Phu were the deepening of the American commitment to Indochina and the encouragement that the French defeat offered nation- alists in France's North African territories of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. 214 Stephen Tyre 215 When the Algerian War of Independence began on 1 November 1954, the Algerian nationalists' understanding of Dien Bien Phu's importance was matched by that of the French Right and the military. In spite of Dien Bien Phu's clear importance as a turning point in French decolonization, recent historical works on the dissolution of the French empire and on the memory and legacy of French colonialism and decolonization have focused on Algeria to the detriment of Indochina. Just as the outbreak of war in Algeria less than six months after the defeat in Indochina restricted the potential for considered reflection on the les- sons of Dien Bien Phu, so the much greater French military commitment to and loss of life in Algeria has tended to obscure Dien Bien Phu's unique and decisive contribution to the mental world of the veterans of France's wars of decolonization. Memories of the Algerian War have been extensively studied and memories of Indochina relatively overlooked in comparison, 2 but as this chapter aims to demonstrate, many veterans' and politicians' memories and judgements about the significance of the French war in Algeria were shaped in important ways by the way in which their memories of the defeat at Dien Bien Phu had shaped their attitudes to the subsequent conflict in North Africa. In the post-colonial period, memories of Dien Bien Phu evolved, in the light of the defeat in Algeria, and changed in nature, moving from personal memories of defeat and humiliation to collective ones of national decline in which Dien Bien Phu was often seen as a starting point.

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  The Generalship Of General Henri E. Navarre During The Battle Of Dien Bien Phu

  • Major Bruce H. Hupe(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Normanby Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER THREE — THE Battle of Dien Bien Phu

  The Setting

  Dien Bien Phu is the administrative title for an open valley in northwest Vietnam, centered on the village of Muong Thanh and located six miles from the Laotian border. Muong Thanh is in the part of Indochina that is home to the tribal people known as the T’ai. Translated into English, Dien Bien Phu means “seat of the border county prefecture.”{63} For centuries the region surrounding Dien Bien Phu had been a center for the opium trade. During the early years of French colonialism, the opium trade was a state controlled monopoly, and thus the village had attracted the colonial government’s attention as a source of revenue. During World War II, Dien Bien Phu’s remote location and working airstrip made it the center of French resistance to Japanese occupation of Indochina. The allies also used Dien Bien Phu to fly downed airmen out of the area and as an occasional supply point. When the Viet Minh began their armed struggle against the re-imposition of French colonial rule after the war, control of the highly lucrative opium trade became a crucial means by which General Giap’s new army financed the purchase of weapons and supplies. The local inhabitants preferred French taxation to the confiscation of their profits by the Viet Minh. T’ai riflemen thus became the natural allies of the French army in this part of Vietnam.

   

  Figure 2. French Indochina. Source: Joel D, Meyerson, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Images of a Lengthy War (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1986).

   

  The valley of Dien Bien Phu is the largest open area in northwest Vietnam. It is an expansive plateau that measures nine kilometers wide by sixteen kilometers long. It is surrounded by mountains as much as several thousand feet higher than the valley floor. The peaks are between ten and twelve kilometers from the center of the valley. The mountains are covered by thickly forested jungle, while the valley is slightly rolling, open terrain. The weather at Dien Bien Phu is changeable and difficult to predict. A thick fog frequently blankets the valley. The monsoon season lasts from March through August, and torrential downpours are common. Dien Bien Phu receives fifty percent more rainfall than any other valley in Indochina with an average of five feet of rain failing every summer.{64}

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  A War of Logistics

  Parachutes and Porters in Indochina, 1945–1954

  • Charles R. Shrader(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  12 Planning and Buildup for the Battle of Dien Bien Phu Foreshadowed by the establishment, successful defense, and eventual evacuation of the fortified airhead at Na San in the summer of 1953, and interrupted by diversions that dissipated logistical support, the operations around Dien Bien Phu between November 20, 1953, and May 7, 1954, reflected aspects of all three logistical campaigns of the war in Indochina. The objectives, forces committed, timing, and duration of the battle were all clearly dictated by logistical considerations, and Dien Bien Phu became the ultimate test of the efficiency and effectiveness of the logistical systems devised by the French and by the Viet Minh during the preceding eight years of war. The outcome of the battle hinged primarily on poor French intelligence, overconfidence, and tactical blunders, but logistical factors, particularly the difficulties faced by the French in resupplying their forces adequately and the success of the Viet Minh in doing so despite French air interdiction, also played an important role. The surrender of the French defenders of Dien Bien Phu was quickly followed by the Geneva agreements, a cease-fire in July 1954, and the last major French operation of the war, Operation AUVERGNE, to protect their withdrawal from Tonkin, itself a major logistical undertaking. The political, strategic, and tactical details of the creation of the French base aéro-terrestre at Dien Bien Phu (Operation CASTOR) and the ensuing battle are well-known and need not be repeated here. 1 The focus here is on the logistical aspects of the battle as seen from both the French and the Viet Minh perspective

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  Saigon

  An Epic Novel of Vietnam

  • Anthony Grey(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Open Road Media

    (Publisher)

  In 1953, a cease-fire in Korea allowed the Communists to concentrate all their military efforts on Indochina, and Russian and Chinese supplies to Giap’s forces increased dramatically. In response, the nineteenth government to hold office in Paris in nine crisis-wracked years made a last desperate effort to extricate France honorably from what had become a muddled, hopeless cause. It approved a plan by military leaders to lure the core of General Giap’s regular forces into a decisive set-piece confrontation behind Viet Minh lines in the remote northern valley of Dien Bien Phu, where it was thought French air superiority and greater firepower could easily destroy an enemy which possessed no aircraft, no tanks and only limited means of transport. Once before, the French had pulled off the bold stroke of dropping a fortress from the air into a narrow limestone valley behind Viet Minh lines at Na San; when General Giap attacked there without sufficient preparation, he had lost a whole battalion amidst the wires and mines of the fortifications, and the French high command hoped this success could be repeated more decisively. But instead of yielding a quick, easy victory, Dien Bien Phu in the event became the setting for one of the most fateful and historic clashes ever between East and West. 1 T he tangled mantle of green-black jungle vegetation which centuries of moist heat had woven into the dragon-backed mountainsides of Tongking showed only patchily through the banks of low cloud as the French Air Force Dakota lumbered through the gray dawn of an early February morning in 1954, heading for Dien Bien Phu. Its two-hundred-mile journey from Hanoi to the remote, northwest corner of Vietnam close to the Laotian border had taken an hour and a half, and during that time Joseph Sherman had crouched uncomfortably on a tip-up metal seat amidst a cargo of coffin planks, blood plasma, tinned food and a dozen illicit crates of French beer

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  Building Ho's Army

  Chinese Military Assistance to North Vietnam

  • Xiaobing Li(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  6 Dien Bien Phu

  The Taste of Victory

  T he Korean War of 1950–1953 transferred the focal point of the global Cold War from Europe to East Asia. After intervening in the Korean War, China quickly adjusted its position in international affairs and willingly moved into the center stage of the ideological and military confrontations between the two contending camps headed by the Soviet Union and the United States. China’s active role in East Asia then turned this main Cold War battlefield into a strange “buffer” between Moscow and Washington. With China and East Asia standing in the middle, it was less likely that the Soviet Union and the United States would become involved in a direct military confrontation.1 China’s increasing political ambition and rising international position demanded a strong national defense against any foreign invasion, especially technologically advanced Western forces. China had to keep its neighboring countries out of Western “imperialist” control and enhance “China’s prestige and influence in the international arena.”2

  This chapter reveals that Beijing increased its military aid and advisory assistance to the Vietnamese Communists in their war efforts against the French in 1953–1954 to meet the new goal. Beijing sent political advisors to Vietnam in early 1953 to supervise the land reform.3 The large rural movement spread in the north and many provinces in the south. As a result of the land reform, more poor peasants supported the Vietnamese Communist Party, officially the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), and joined the PAVN. The peasants’ enthusiasm would bring about the PAVN’s final victory in the First Indochina War. The PLA sent Korean veterans to Vietnam after the Korean War ended in July 1953, including engineering, artillery, and AAA officers and troops, who played an important role in the siege of Dien Bien Phu in January-March 1954.4 Eventually, the PAVN was victorious in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. This chapter states that the Vietnamese Army had completed the second transformation from fighting small-scale battles to winning large-scale, decisive battles in war and that the PAVN was becoming a regular, modern armed force by the summer of 1954.5

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  The Road to Dien Bien Phu

  A History of the First War for Vietnam

  • Christopher Goscha(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  The road leading to this change in fortunes did not follow a straight line, however. In fact, no one in 1950 on the Vietnamese side could have imagined that the final battle would take place in the highlands. The focus still remained on the Red River Delta. Nor did anyone really grasp what they would have to do concretely to create the force that so impressed Dr. Ton That Tung as he looked down from the hills in 1954. It had all happened in the early 1950s.

  The Winding Road to Dien Bien Phu

  Between the Delta and the Highlands

  The Vietnamese failure to take the Tonkin plains during the first half of 1951 did not mean that Ho Chi Minh and his lieutenants had simply given up on the Red River basin. They did not. From the stinging defeats of 1951, four interconnected orientations in Vietnamese strategic thinking emerged. Each reflected the degree to which the Democratic Republic of Vietnam straddled the lowlands on the one side and the highlands on the other. We have seen some of them earlier; but we need to lay them out again here, for they are essential to understanding how Dien Bien Phu became possible.

  For a start, rather than favoring one zone over the other, the Vietnamese combined the Indochinese highlands and the northern lowlands into one strategic theater. They could do this thanks to the upland corridor they had consolidated after the victory at Cao Bang in late 1950. Within a few months, readers will remember, it arced along the western perimeter of the Red River Delta. It stretched from the provinces on the Chinese border via the resistance capital in Thai Nguyen to make its way to Zone IV. Viewed from above, it looked something like a half-moon wrapped around the French delta. Then, from Zone IV, a ‘handle’ jutted out southwards to lower central Vietnam as far as Qui Nhon in Zone V. This long, sickle-shaped territory permitted Vietnamese decision-makers working from it to look both ways at the same time—deeper into the highlands behind them and straight ahead into the lowlands at their feet. The handle, however, had colonial “chips” in it—in the areas in and around Dong Hoi, Hue, Da Nang, and Nha Trang.

  Next, this new theater of war required the Vietnamese to operate an army capable of moving back and forth between the highlands and the plains. Following his defeats in the delta, in mid-1951 General Vo Nguyen Giap withdrew his regular divisions into the upland corridor. However, rather than leaving the delta to his guerrilla forces, he immediately detached battalions from selected PAVN regiments and redeployed them in the delta to operate with local forces in new combinations. As a rule, these mobile combat teams avoided direct clashes of a conventional kind in favor of expanding territorial control indirectly—village by village, day by day. But if ordered, they could engage in combat in a way far exceeding anything local militias could manage. From 1951, the PAVN operated in regular and irregular formations, just as the French had started doing.

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  Vietnam

  An American Ordeal

  • George Donelson Moss(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  General Navarre, concerned for the safety of Laos and wanting to disrupt the Vietminh offensive in northwest Tonkin, decided to take a strategic gamble. In mid-November 1953, he sent his paratroopers to occupy strong points, thereby blocking a major Vietminh invasion route into Laos and cutting off their major supply route from China. He also intended to tie down a sizable number of Giap’s forces to keep them out of the Red River Delta. He chose a site by the village of Dien Bien Phu that lay 170 miles northwest of Hanoi. Nearby were two airstrips located in a broad valley surrounded by hills and mountains.

  Navarre assumed that Giap would be forced to attack the new fortress. Knowing that the French would have control of the air over the valley and that he would install artillery at various strong points, Navarre anticipated that his forces would annihilate the attacking Vietminh soldiers. He intended to force the Vietminh to fight a set-piece battle at a place of his own choosing and then inflict a significant defeat on them that would improve the French military position in Indochina and rekindle domestic French support for the war. General Navarre fatally underestimated Vietminh artillery and resupply capabilities. The site he chose, Dien Bien Phu, would soon pass into history as a symbol of French futility and defeat in Indochina

  During his military campaigns in 1952 and 1953, General Giap had learned from his mistakes and had become a seasoned battlefield commander. He did not respond immediately to the French thrust into the valley. He postponed massive frontal assaults until after French defenses and morale had been weakened. Meanwhile, he encircled the fortress and kept the French forces tied down in the trap that they had set for themselves.

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  America's Vietnam War and Its French Connection

  • Frank Cain(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  12 French Attacks on the People’s Army and the Battle of Dien Bien Phu

  During the summer of 1953, General Henri Navarre, Chief of the French Union forces in Indochina, conducted discussions with his senior military staff which led to him ordering the establishment of a French garrison in the valley of Dien Bien Phu (DBP). The intention was to block the People’s Army from again invading Laos and spreading the war into the Associated States. His intelligence experts reported that the People’s Army divisions had moved towards DBP and those defeated at Na San were camped nearby. That French victory convinced Navarre of the use of air power to defend DBP. It had two landing strips, which gave the site an added advantage to be defended against any military offensive the People’s Army might launch against it. Certainly DBP was in a valley surrounded by a range of mountains, but the French believed that their counter-battery firing could destroy the enemy’s artillery emplacements. The French built nine forts in the valley, some linked together and others a few miles apart, but together forming a ‘hedgehog’ against which the enemy would batter itself to defeat. The forts were mainly built underground, from which it was intended that the commando-style forces would sally forth in armoured vehicles to defeat Giap’s forces.

  Navarre’s belief in his future success against the DRV was boosted by the American provision of freighter aircraft. French supply requirements for DBP were estimated at 80 tons daily, and together with troop reinforcements, these could be flown in from Hanoi, from where bombing raids against the enemy could be summoned by radio. Light aircraft fitted with photo-reconnaissance equipment could monitor the resupply movements of the enemy forces and their long trains of porters, or those detected in the open, could be strafed and napalmed by fighter aircraft. It was the backing, therefore, of the huge US military-industrial complex that would provide the basic strength to Navarre’s plans for defeating the communists. This trans-Pacific, US supply chain guaranteed the French success against the People’s Army so long as the weather remained fine and all aircraft movements were unhindered. That chain would ensure the delivery of a range of aircraft (transport and bombers), POL requirements, and ammunition of all types, napalm and cluster bombs. One essential element was the presence of skilled US Air Force mechanics to train the French operatives, and another was the US agreement to replace aircraft lost in operations.

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  A History of Jungle Warfare

  From the Earliest Days to the Battlefields of Vietnam

  • Bryan Perrett, Walter Walker(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Unfortunately, the planners omitted certain critical factors from their calculations. Dien Bien Phu lay so far from the Delta that, unlike the Admin Box and Imphal, there was no prospect of its being relieved by land forces. The nearest air base was 140 miles distant, but the Chinese frontier was only 80 miles away. The valley itself was ringed by heavily forested hills up to 1,800 feet in height, and during the monsoon season was prone to flooding and thick mists and rain which made flying extremely difficult. Worse still, the possibility that the Viet Minh might possess adequate artillery and an anti-aircraft capability was largely discounted.

  Operation Castor, the capture of Dien Bien Phu by the French, began on 20 November. Six parachute battalions, plus supporting heavy weapons and an engineer company, dropped on the old airstrip, driving off two Viet Minh companies which were training in the area. By 24 November the airstrip was in commission and transport aircraft began arriving in a steady stream to unload men and equipment. The low hills on the plain were turned into a loose ring of fortifications allegedly named after the former mistresses of the garrison commander, General Christian de Castries; these were surrounded by wire entanglements and minefields and contained bunkers roofed with layers of logs and earth. In the centre of the position was the village, which housed de Castries’ command bunker and an underground hospital. Strongpoint Huguette lay to the west, Claudine to the south, Eliane to the east and Dominique to the north-east; an outer ring of similarly constructed but isolated strongpoints was named Anne-Marie (one mile to the north-west), Gabrielle (two miles to the north), Beatrice (one mile to the northeast) and Isabelle

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  Empires at War

  A Short History of Modern Asia Since World War II

  • Francis Pike(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  10

  Hồ Chí Minh and the Battle of Diên Biên Phu Vietnam: 1945–54

  O n 30 August 1945, Hồ Chí Minh arrived in Hanoi to establish independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Swapping the simple tunic that became his hallmark, for a borrowed khaki linen suit, Hồ stood in front of some 500,000 cheering Vietnamese in Ba Dinh Square and, mimicking America’s own masterly Declaration of Independence, announced that ‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’1

  Reflecting Hồ ’s appeal to a broad front of nationalist support, Sunday 2 September was chosen as Independence Day to coincide with the feast of Vietnamese Martyrs. Celebrations followed with ceremonies both at the main Buddhist temples and at the Catholic Cathedral. More importantly, by lifting phrases from Jefferson’s Declaration of American Independence, Hồ did more than appeal to American support for a Vietnam independent from France; he recognised America as Asia’s new superpower and its likely role as arbiter of Vietnam’s future.

  During the Second World War, the French Vichy government in Vietnam had collaborated with the Japanese to ensure its survival. Governor Admiral Jean Decoux with some 90,000 troops under his command never wavered in his support for the Axis powers. The result was that French Indochina was the only colonial power in Asia to survive Japanese occupation. This fact somewhat belied the post-war Japanese justification of military adventurism on the grounds that they had set about the liberation of Asia from European colonial rule.

  It was a convenient alliance for both sides. In return for allowing colonial rule to continue, the Vichy French government in Indochina allowed the Japanese to use Vietnamese ports as a staging post for the war effort against the British in Malaysia and then Burma. Thanks to French compliance, there were never more than 60,000 Japanese soldiers stationed in Vietnam. It was from here that the Japanese launched the air attacks that famously sank the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser HMS Repulse

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