Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

That was the key question: Would Giap be able to put his major weaponry to effective use? Navarre and Cogny in January still clung to the belief that he couldn’t. If he followed the conventional practice of firing his guns from behind the crests, the trajectory would be wrong and he’d be too far away to do serious damage; if he fired them from the forward slope, he would be easily identified and destroyed. The garrison’s artillery commander, the one-armed Colonel Charles Piroth, encouraged them in this belief, insisting that he could handle easily whatever Giap threw his way. Cogny, increasingly fearful that the outlying strongpoints—especially Béatrice and Gabrielle on the north end—would be swiftly overrun in the battle and be almost impossible to retake, hoped he was right. Artillery would be decisive, he knew, one way or the other.