If European colonial conquest triumphed first in Asia with the French winning the Battle of Adyar in 1746, it could be said that its end came with the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, fought over 56 days between March 13 and May 7, 1954 in a remote valley in the north-west of Vietnam abutting the border with Laos.
Visiting Dien Bien Phu 70 years later, as we did earlier this month (October 2024), was a strangely disquieting experience. For where there was nothing in 1954 but churned-up mud and massive destruction, overwhelmed by the stench of hundreds of unburied bodies and thousands of badly wounded men in screaming agony awaiting medical attention, there is now a gay little township of 15,000 souls leading a perfectly normal life.
The bougainvillea is in bloom. The shops are busy. Cafes and restaurants are open. Schoolchildren run through the streets. There is even an occasional traffic jam. Seventy years ago, there were only paddy fields, with the few villages that dotted the landscape having been moved to safer places and the French army building a formidable bastion to not only evict the Viet Minh, led by 33-year-old Gen Vo Nguyen Giap, from the surrounding mountains, but also to protect Laos from communist infiltration.
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The army had French commanders, but the soldiery was largely made up of Algerians, Moroccans, Thais, Vietnamese, and many Germans of the famed (or infamous) Foreign Legion. As the French principally relied on artillery, light and heavy, to win their battle, the overall command was entrusted to not an infantryman but a cavalry officer, Col. (later Gen) Christian de Castries. The defining argument was that the mountains around the valley were so remote from mainland Vietnam that Giap would find it impossible to haul matching artillery to the region and, therefore, would have to rely on masses of men to attack the bastion.
General Vo Nguyen Giap (in black) explaining operation plans to his aides next to a military map in Dien Bien Phu in March 1954. Second only to Ho Chi Minh as the most revered figure in Vietnam’s recent history, Giap’s only military lesson came from an old encyclopaedia entry describing the mechanism of hand grenades. | Photo Credit: AFP
The intention was to mow these men down with heavy artillery fire. A colonel, well known for his expertise in artillery warfare, Charles Piroth, was assigned to be the principal warrior at the Centres of Resistance built around Castries’ bunker to protect the French and give them a clear field of fire (360 degrees, tout azimut) to massacre the Viet Minh. The chief French objective, therefore, was to seduce Giap’s forces into the open valley so that they could slaughter them en masse as they attacked the fortifications.
At first, it seemed the strategy succeeded, for when Giap first attacked on January 26, 1954, Viet Minh losses were so great that Giap was compelled to withdraw. At which Castries wrote him an insolent letter challenging him to give battle and airdropping copies of the letter among the Viet Minh hiding in the mountains, awaiting their tryst with destiny. The letter mocked Giap: “What is holding you back from this battle which you consider decisive? Do you doubt your success? Have you lost faith in the competence of your commanders and the zeal of your troops? Come, I await you!”
Centre’s of Resistance
Giap replied with a heavy onslaught on Beatrice, the most fortified Centre of Resistance, to the north-east of Castries’ bunker, on March 13 with a stunning artillery barrage followed by a night attack through trenches dug silently right up to the barbed wire barrier surrounding the command posts. All the French officers commanding the troops at Beatrice were wiped out within minutes or hours of the attack, leaving the French troops to flee their posts before dawn or fall prisoner to the Viet Minh.
Vietnamese soldiers resting between two advances in a trench at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. On May 7, shell-shocked survivors of the French garrison hoisted the white flag to signal the end to one of the greatest battles of the 20th century. | Photo Credit: AFP
They were stunned by the Viet Minh artillery fire because they could not conceive that armies of bo dois (labourers) would be deployed to physically drag the dismantled guns in hundreds of pieces over harsh mountain passes and narrow winding mountain roads along with 500 kg of supplies on each of thousands of modified bicycles.
The artillery was then cleverly concealed in caves in the hills so that they could not be photographed by the French reconnaissance air force and could not be destroyed when their locations were revealed on firing, as the Viet Minh would haul back their guns into their hiding places immediately after they had fired their rounds. On the fall of Beatrice, the boastful but now bewildered French artillery wizard Col Piroth blew himself up with his hand grenade in bitter disappointment.
The French had built a series of Centres of Resistance (CRs) in the low-lying but steep hillocks that were sprinkled on the valley floor. They lay on both sides of the Nam Yum river that sliced the camp into two halves, with the only crossing being a Bailey bridge that led to Castries’ bunker. The CRs were built atop these hillocks and given French women’s names in the alphabetic order in which they were built: Anne-Marie; Beatrice; Claudine; Dominique; Eliane; Gabrielle; Huguette; Isabelle.
After Giap’s stunning overnight capture of Beatrice, the next target was Eliane on March 31. It failed. The French were so successful in learning the lessons of the disastrous assault on Beatrice that they were able to drive back the Viet Minh, who withdrew on Giap’s orders on April 1. Giap then targeted Gabrielle, Dominique, and Anne-Marie in succession so successfully that, after taking Isabelle virtually without a shot and destroying both runways that the French had built to supply their base, his hardened, motivated and unbelievably courageous Viet Minh troops returned on the first day of May to Eliane, having dug tunnels through hard rock by hand to fill with dynamite before attacking and blowing up the command post. After the most intensive artillery barrage of the battle for three long hours between 5 pm and 8 pm, Giap threw his elite divisions both at Eliane on the eastern bank of the river and Huguette on the west, thus bringing him within yards of Castries’ bunker.
With the Viet Minh shelling them from the hazy hills in the distance, the French troops tried to survive in their trenches during the war in 1954. | Photo Credit: Wikimedia
The French were simply outnumbered and outgunned. There was no alternative to a complete humiliating surrender. This happened on May 7, and the image of a doleful Castries emerging with his hands held in front of him, along with his principal commanders, is etched into Vietnamese memory. It was the most decisive defeat of their nearly century-long rule in Vietnam. The last French soldier embarked on the departing French ships on October 10, 1954, the 70th anniversary of which was being celebrated with great fanfare as we prepared to return from our trip to Vietnam.
An exercise of imagination
Today Eliane 1, known as A-1 by the Vietnamese, stands to the east side of the main street named after Gen. Giap. For all the world, it looks like a shopping mall! A few metres to its south, and west of the road, lies Castries’ bunker and the much-talked-of Bailey bridge. The township peacefully buzzes around these historic sites. The sites themselves have been left, as far as possible, as they were. So normal, however, are the surroundings that it is difficult, except by an exercise of imagination, to remember the fallen and the victorious, to conjure up memories of the agonised cries of the wounded, the prostitutes in the mobile bordello doubling as nurses, the surgical wards catering to scores as hundreds waited in dreadful pain for even their triage.
Captured French soldiers, escorted by Vietnamese troops, walk to a prisoner-of-war camp in Dien Bien Phu in 1954. | Photo Credit: Wikimedia
To help the imagination, the Vietnamese have built a great round Panorama that depicts the different stages of the battle. Although executed with great skill, the murals are lifeless and do not really convey the sense of the clash, but if the visitor is prepared to read up about the events before visiting the panorama, there is the thrill of seeing visually depicted what was only in the mind at reading.
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Perhaps the most fascinating part of the visit was the four-kilometre strenuous stroll up the steep mountainside to Giap’s headquarters. It was well worth the effort to be at the very heart of the operations—simple, bare bamboo tables, chairs and sleeping bunks—from where the historic battle had been directed.
In the trenches of Eliane and the bunkers of Giap and Castries, I caught a bronchial infection that hospitalised me on return, thus making me, I suppose, the last victim of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu!
Mani Shankar Aiyar is a former Rajya Sabha member
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