Forces Engaged:
Viet Minh: 50,000 men.
Commander: General Vo Nguyen Giap
French: 16,000.
Commander: Colonel Christian de Castries
Importance:
French defeat led to the end of the French colonial experience in Southeast Asia and formed the groundwork of U.S. involvement in the region.
Historical Setting
By the 1890s, the French had established their hegemony over much the Southeast Asian peninsula, which was called Indochina. The area had long resisted any colonial expansion by China to the north, but the population was unable to maintain their independence in the face of superior French firepower. The French established a colonial administration and introduced to the region the basics of French culture and education. Advancement in the local administration came via literacy in French, so the people that came to dominate local society were educated by the French and often converts to Catholicism. Herein lay the seeds of France's colonial destruction.
100 Decisive Battles
From Ancient Times to the Present
by Paul K. Davis
The world's major battles and how they shaped history. From Oxford University Press.
First, by teaching French history, the tenets of the French Revolution — liberty, equality, and fraternity — were disseminated to the dominated population. Liberty and equality are hardly compatible with colonial society, so as the intelligentsia learned to cooperate with the French, they also learned the ideas necessary to overthrow them. Second, by establishing a Catholic elite in a predominately Buddhist society, those in power became less religiously tolerant of the majority of the country. Neither was this designed to promote a harmonious colonial relationship. By the time of World War I, nationalist movements were starting, aimed at freeing Indochina from French rule.
The figure that rose to prominence in the liberation movement was Nguyen Ai Quoc, who later took the name Ho Chi Minh. He traveled to France in 1919 to appeal to the participants of the Versailles Conference to bring an end to all empires, not just of those of the vanquished nations, but failed to achieve his goals. Then, with some training in Marxism and revolution from the new Soviet regime, he returned home to lead the struggle of liberation. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Ho moved throughout Indochina and China organizing resistance to the French regime, creating a movement called Viet Minh, the Vietnam Independence League. When the Japanese took over Indochina in 1940, the Viet Minh began fighting against them. In 1945, U.S. agents from the Office of Strategic Services met with Ho Chi Minh. He asked for U.S. assistance in establishing a free Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but the U.S. alliance with France overrode such considerations. Thus when France reestablished it colonial administration in 1945, Ho Chi Minh's followers returned to their prewar resistance movement...
U.S. President Harry Truman's administration was critical of French military action against the Viet Minh until 1950, when Ho Chi Minh's Communist leanings inflamed the rising anti-Communist movement in the United States. Chinese aid to North Korea in 1950 gave the United State the impression of a potential Asian Communist bloc, so U.S. aid began to flow freely to French troops in Vietnam.
When the Communist regime was established in China in 1949, military aid to the Viet Minh began to flow... but it tapered off significantly when the Korean War began. That coincided with the arrival in Vietnam of French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. He brought a new sense of duty an intensity to the French troops, and for a time the initiative went over to the French, while the forces of Ho Chi Minh and his chief commander, Vo Nguyen Giap, suffered severe losses. De Lattre had success not only with French Foreign Legion paratroopers but with the establishment of hérissons, or hedgehogs. These strong points, bristling with machine guns and artillery, place deep in Viet Minh occupied territory or along supply routes, inflicted heavy losses on Viet Minh troops trying to overcome them.
All of this began to change when de Lattre died of cancer in January 1952 and was replaced by General Raoul Salan, a much more cautious soldier. Salan's strategy was to strike overland with heavy columns of troops and materiel against suspected Viet Minh strong points. This went on for about a year with poor results for the French... In May 1953, Salan was replaced by General Henri Navarre, more in the aggressive, confident mold of Lattre. Unfortunately for Navarre, public and governmental support for the war against the Viet Minh was waning in France, and he was ordered to win and do it quickly. His response was to reintroduce the hérisson strategy, and the site he chose was Dien Bien Phu, a village near the border between Vietnam and Laos.
The Battle
Command of the operation at Dien Bien Phu fell to French Foreign Legion Colonel Christian de Castries. His 1,827 paratroopers occupied the village on 23 November 1953 and began construction of nine fortified positions, each of which was given a feminine name. With aircraft, machine guns, lots of artillery, and large numbers of French troops, Navarre was convinced that [Viet Minh General Vo Nguyen] Giap would bleed his forces while attempting to capture this position; afterward, the French would easily be able to crush remainder of the Viet Minh...
General Giap, meanwhile was determined to reduce the French outpost, but he was in no particular hurry. He had learned the lessons of the earlier French hedgehogs, and this one he was going to attack methodically. For four months, he had his men drag artillery to the hills surrounding Dien Bien Phu and dig them into deep emplacements covered by trees. The fact that the French had not seized the high ground was critical in this battle, and Giap was not slow to capitalize on it.
On the afternoon of 13 March 1954, Giap's artillery opened up on position Beatrice. The entire position was pounded and early rounds destroyed the command bunker, paralyzing the defense. The following night, the Viet Minh launched an attack on position Gabrielle, the furthest north. Its garrison of 500 men were almost all killed or captured by noon [the following day]. Not only were two position lost almost immediately upon the battle's commencement but the Viet Minh artillery totally dominated the French airfield, making it almost useless from the beginning. A few medical craft were able to land and take off though the end of March. After that, the garrison was supplied completely by airdrops...
On the night of 6-7 May, Viet Minh forces finally captured Eliane and the defense began to collapse. Castries sent a message to [the French Headquarters in] Hanoi alerting them that he was destroying the last of his ammunition and surrendering his command.
Results
The defenders of Dien Bien Phu lost almost 2,300 killed with more than 5,100 wounded. The wounded, as well as the remaining soldiers that were captured, were not well treated. They were marched out of the Dien Bien Phu valley to prison camps up to 500 miles away. Perhaps 10,000 men died in the process; only about 3,000 prisoners were repatriated to the French later that summer. Although the defenders at Dien Bien Phu represented only about 5 percent of the total French military in Indochina, they were the cream of the crop. Approximately 8,000 Viet Minh died in the course of the battle, with at least 15,000 wounded. During the battle, General Giap had hurled his men at the French in virtual human waves, with the casualty county (approximately 46 percent) reflecting that tactic. Even for the long-suffering Viet Minh soldier, it was almost too much, for Giap's forces were at the point of mutiny at time during the siege.
The timing of the victory was all important. Representatives from the Viet Minh and French sat down in Geneva in mid-May to discuss the future of Indochina, and the French entered the talks on the defensive. The was had become increasingly unpopular in France with both the government and the public, and few were desirous of continuing it. France agreed to to grant independence to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and within 2 years to have its personnel removed and elections held. In the meantime, the French sponsored administration based in Saigon was to oversee the area of Vietnam below latitude 17 degrees whereas Ho Chi Minh's administration would dominate the area above that line. Each would remove its troops from the other's territory, and free elections in 1956 would determine the nature of the new government...
The Geneva Accords were honored by the French and the Viet Minh, but not by the United States and the Vietnamese administration in the south. Although the United States had not been a signatory to the Geneva Accords, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower felt the need to get involved. U.S. foreign policy by this time was firmly rooted in containment of Communism, and Eisenhower could not allow Communist regimes to survive unopposed. Thus, with U.S. support, the Republic of South Vietnam was created in 1956, before national elections could be held. Ho Chi Minh's popularity was such the he almost certainly would have won an easy victory as leader of the entire nation. Instead, the 17th parallel became a political boundary that caused continued fighting, now among the Vietnamese themselves.
— 100 Decisive Battles From Ancient Times to the Present
© 1999 by Paul K. Davis
Oxford University Press
pp. 424-430