The Fall of Dien Bien Phu

 

Today marks the 60^th anniversary of the surrender of the French fortress outpost at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. The siege of that French fortress was an epic of colonial warfare and one of the most significant battles of the 20^th Century.

Through the early 1950s, the French had been battling to hold their Indochina colonies against a powerful, communist-led insurgency. The French established Dien Bien Phu in the mountains west of Hanoi to interdict Viet Minh supply lines out of Laos. They thought it would be impregnable to attack, since there was no way for the Viet Minh to bring up the heavy artillery it would take to reduce the fortress.

Except they did. In one of the most impressive feats of sheer will in military annals, General Vo Nguyen Giap mobilized thousands of laborers and soldiers to haul artillery through the jungle and up and over mountains, foot by foot. The French found themselves surrounded, with the Viet Minh commanding the heights. The heavy guns were positioned not in batteries, but singly and in pairs in fortified and camouflaged positions. When they opened up a massive bombardment in January, the French could not locate and fix the guns for effective counter-battery fire.

The French commander of artillery retreated into his bunker and blew himself up with a hand-grenade out of sheer mortification.

What followed was a series of savage assaults and counter-assaults for control of the multiple outposts that made up the fortress of Dien Bien Phu. The airfield was rendered hors d’ combat and the garrison had to be resupplied by parachute airdrop (the U.S. was footing the bill and providing almost all the material of war).

Let the BBC pick up the tale:

“The last weeks of the battle of Dien Bien Phu were atrociously gruelling. The ground turned to mud once the monsoon began, and men clung to craters and ditches in conditions reminiscent of the battle of Verdun in 1916. On 7 May 1954, after a 56-day siege, the French army surrendered. Overall on the French side there were 1,142 dead, 1,606 disappeared, 4,500 more or less badly wounded. Vietnamese casualties ran to 22,000.

“In this year marked by two other major anniversaries – the centenary of the outbreak of World War One and the 70th anniversary of D-Day — we should not forget this other battle that took place 60 years ago. In the history of decolonisation it was the only time a professional European army was decisively defeated in a pitched battle. It marked the end of the French Empire in the Far East, and provided an inspiration to other anti-colonial fighters. It was no coincidence also that a few weeks later a violent rebellion broke out in French Algeria — the beginning of another bloody and traumatic war that was to last eight years. The French army held so desperately on to Algeria partly to redeem the honour it felt had been lost at Dien Bien Phu. So obsessed did the army become by this idea that in 1958 it backed a putsch against the government, which it believed was preparing what the generals condemned as a ‘diplomatic Dien Bien Phu.’ This putsch brought back to power Gen. de Gaulle who set up the new presidential regime that exists in France today. So the ripples of Dien Bien Phu are still being felt.”

The U.S. inherited Vietnam and suffered through its own decade-long battle against the Communist insurgents, a battle that ended ignominiously. The Vietnam War created — or exposed — fault lines in American culture and society that plague us to this day.

In successive wars against the Japanese (World War II), the French, the Americans, and the Chinese (in a short but violent border clash) the Vietnamese died in their millions. They won their nation, which is still Communist, but now an important player in the global economy.

So, yes, the ripples of the titanic struggle on the Indochina frontier are still being felt, 60 years on.