The fact is that Giap’s forces were not yet prepared for the immense task at hand; an attack on January 25 or 26 could easily have ended in disaster. From this perspective, neither Navarre’s original conception regarding Operation Castor nor de Castries’s and Piroth’s confidence before Jacquet and Dejean on the twenty-fifth seems so absurd. The People’s Army came much closer to military failure at Dien Bien Phu than is generally believed.
