Vo Nguyen Giap sketching out the big picture. Dien Bien Phu had represented a colossal defeat for France, he began, but she was far from defeated. She retained a superiority in numbers—some 470,000 troops, roughly half of them Vietnamese, versus 310,000 on the Viet Minh side—as well as control of Vietnam’s major cities (Hanoi, Saigon, Hue, Tourane [Da Nang]).
