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

by Fredrik Logevall

More and more, Mendès France was the figure around whom opponents of the war coalesced. L’Express, indeed, had come into existence explicitly for the purpose of bringing him into power.

In fact, the figure was even higher, as Ambassador Dillon ruefully noted in a cable to Washington: If Communist votes were added, it totaled 406 votes in favor of withdrawal from Indochina.

One wonders: Would it all have been different had he won the vote and become premier? Would he have sought to terminate the war in short order? Probably yes and yes. With hindsight’s advantage—and arguably even in the context of the time—it’s hard to argue against his claim that the French negotiating position was more favorable in spring 1953 than it would likely be a year thence.

gauge. To the surprise of many, in his investiture speech he had suddenly turned vague on the war, saying merely that the war was a “crushing burden, which is sapping the strength of France,” and promising a “precise plan” in due course. This ambiguity, some analysts speculated, may have cost Mendès France the necessary votes; it may also have signified uncertainty in his mind about the proper course of action on Indochina.

The president assured his guests he had done his best with congressional leaders, but there was no telling if it was enough, and that’s why he had devoted so much of the Seattle speech to the subject. Congress had to be convinced, he said, to support an “all-out” effort in Vietnam for a year or eighteen months. Without such congressional backing, American aid would end.29 By “all-out” effort, did Eisenhower mean potentially using U.S. ground forces? It’s hard to be sure. He knew that lawmakers would be in no mood to send soldiers back to Asia immediately on the heels of the long and frustrating struggle in Korea, and he himself was not keen on such a prospect.

Already Congress had approved the administration’s request for $400 million for Indochina for fiscal year 1954, despite complaints among some in the Senate—notably freshman Republican Barry Goldwater of Arizona—that the money would merely support France’s colonial oppression.

KNOWLAND’S VISIT, HOWEVER, WAS NOT THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL by a U.S. senator to Vietnam that fall. That honor belonged to Mike Mansfield,

Consequently, “I believe that military shipments should be stepped up considerably to that area.”

time, as we shall see, Mansfield would become Diem’s great champion in Washington,

As part of that effort, he ordered the reoccupation of a post near the Laotian border. This seemingly innocuous action would trigger a series of moves and countermoves in several world capitals and ultimately bring the war to its climax. The post bore the unlikely name of “Big Frontier Administrative Center,” or, in Vietnamese, Dien Bien Phu.

Dien Bien Phu could be further vindication—following the example of Na San in 1952—of the theory of the base aéro-terrestre (“air-ground base,” or, in American military parlance, “airhead”), by which a small number of air-supplied “hedgehogs” would be planted in the path of the advancing enemy and held for only limited periods by mobile units from the general reserve.

Retaking Dien Bien Phu would ensure that the opium crop remained in effective French control.

The myth would take hold that top officials were from the start divided on whether the operation should be undertaken at all. In reality, the French command initially acted at Dien Bien Phu with a large degree of unity and with faith that the enterprise could succeed.

Although the site was ringed by mountains, the French—who considered themselves the master artillerists of the world—deemed these to be beyond artillery range, even if occupied by enemy forces.

Navarre chose the second interpretation. “After all,” he said, “Dien Bien Phu will not cost me anything more than Na San cost Salan.”

Colonel Jean Nicot, commander of the transport arm of the French Air Force, registered his opposition on November 11; he could not, he said, guarantee a steady flow of supplies to Dien Bien Phu. Navarre was unmoved.

A two-week supply of rice would mean a load of thirty to forty extra pounds per soldier. When added to his other gear, this exceeded the optimum load for a soldier moving by foot in the rugged landscape of the northwest. Porters were thus essential, but a porter too needed to eat. If he started with sixty pounds of rice, at the end of two weeks he would have only enough left to feed himself on the return journey to his starting point. By day fourteen, therefore, he could turn over only enough rice—two pounds—to feed a soldier for a single day. For Giap, there was no way around it: His units, operating at least part of the time without access to motorized resupply, would face immense challenges in a major operation in this area. If Navarre chose to garrison a division or so at Dien Bien Phu, virtually the entire Viet Minh corps de bataille would be required to launch an effective attack.

Giap came gradually to the conviction that he should accept battle at Dien Bien Phu.

The plan’s fundamental premise was that the fortified French camp would be a formidable defensive complex, but that it suffered from a grave weakness, namely its isolation.

French garrison would have to be supplied largely by air, completely so if the People’s Army could surround it. That would be the aim: to encircle the encampment with a ring of steel, and then close

The battle envisioned in the plan would be the largest set-piece engagement of the war and would require the deployment of nine Viet Minh infantry regiments and all available artillery, engineer, and antiaircraft units, for a total of some 35,000 men.

Churchill’s choice of reading en route to the conference, it may be said, was not the most auspicious preparation: C. S. Forester’s Death to the French.

Evelyn Shuckburgh, private secretary to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, summarized in his magnificently readable diary what he saw: “Everybody very angry, appeals, sentiment, Bidault looks like a dying man, Laniel is actually dying upstairs.… Outburst by Eisenhower and Winston, former left the conference table in a rage, came back, having changed for dinner, sat another four hours.”

the smoothest relationship at this fractious summit was that between Eden and Dulles. The two lounged together on the beach, the extremely fair-skinned Dulles donning a pair of gaudy shorts, and Eden—still recovering from a difficult operation six months earlier—soaking up the sun.

Eisenhower generated nervous smiles from the Europeans with his graphic description of the new, post-Stalin Soviet Union. Russia, he declared, was “a woman of the streets, and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath.”

Churchill, visibly exhausted, thanked France for all she was doing for empire and freedom, including in Indochina, and said he regretted that Britain had given up India.

Eventually there would be nine of them, all given female names—reputedly those of former de Castries mistresses (though also representing letters of the alphabet).

The basin was almost completely devoid of trees, while the wooded slopes were trackless.

The chief engineer thus saw no option but to order the demolishing of local peasants’ dwellings to obtain what little wood could be had—thereby, of course, earning their enmity.

You had to forget that you were surrounded on all sides.

Vo Nguyen Giap announced that he was ready: He would move his command post from Thai Nguyen, three hundred miles away, to the immediate vicinity of Dien Bien Phu. He had to be right there on the scene, he told aides, for the task ahead was huge.

The two men shared one principal fear: that the French army would withdraw, as it had at Na San a few months earlier and at Hoa Binh early in 1952. Their

Giap says he had early doubts about the strategy of “swift attack, swift victory” (danh nhanh, thang nhanh), a clear reference to Chinese wave tactics as used in Korea. Better, perhaps, would be to proceed more slowly, through a method of “steady attack, steady advance,”

He had not forgotten Ho Chi Minh’s admonition: Unless you are certain of victory, don’t proceed.

A specially equipped bicycle—with wooden struts to strengthen the frame and bamboo poles to extend the handlebars and the brake levers—could take more than an elephant could carry. “We

Every supply bicycle was initially capable of transporting 100 kilograms, and this was later increased to 200 or even 300 kilograms. One civilian coolie laborer from Phu Tho named Ma Van Thang was able to transport a total of 352 kilograms on his bicycle.

The carrying capacity of transport bicycles was more than ten times greater than that of porters carrying loads on “ganh” [bamboo or wooden] poles, and the amount of rice consumed by the people transporting the supplies was reduced by a similar amount.

Unloaded from the trucks, the cannons were to be transported through a chain of mountains without going through a valley, in order to cut through the foothills of the 1,100-meter-high Pu Pha Song mountain; then they were to descend again in the direction of the Pavie Piste, which linked Dien Bien Phu to Lai Chau, which they would cross near Ban To; then they were to scale another new height in order to position the battery at Ban Nghiu, from where they would fire on the French garrison at point-blank range.

took seven days and nights of nonstop labor to get the heavy guns in place, with the use of block and tackle, drag ropes, and braking chocks to keep them from careening back down the slopes.

half-ton 75mm mountain guns were not the problem; they could be broken down into eleven loads that, while heavy and cumbersome, were manageable. The 105mm howitzers, however, represented an almost absurd challenge on inclines that reached as steep as sixty degrees.

Meals consisted only of rice, often undercooked, as the kitchens had to be smokeless by day and sparkless by night. And yet the work went on:

In this way, whole nights were spent toiling by torchlight to gain five hundred or a thousand meters.

When a staffer informed Pham Ngoc Mau, an artillery commander, that the 105mm cannon could be moved at a speed of approximately 150 meters per hour, he received a blistering reply. “Speed my ass! You can’t simply say like everyone else that we can’t do a fucking two hundred meters per hour!”

At one point, during a particularly grueling uphill stretch, a cannon began tilting, one wheel sinking into the side of the trail. For a time, it seemed the whole apparatus might thunder down into the ravine, taking the soldier-porters with it. The men moaned. “We’re dying for nothing,” they complained. “What good is it to have trucks if we’re using our own arms as motors?”

Though such moments of despair appear to have been relatively rare, meetings were organized to boost the morale of the troops and to seek ways to make ...

January 9, aerial photographs showed that 105mm howitzers had left Viet Minh rear-base areas in the direction of the highlands.

On the last day of the year, Navarre confessed to U.S. ambassador Donald Heath that Dien Bien Phu might be overrun despite his best efforts. The Viet Minh, he told the American, now might have the means to move 105mm cannons up on the heights overlooking the approach to the valley. The following day Navarre informed Paris that, “faced with the arrival of new possibilities which very serious intelligence has been announcing for two weeks … I can no longer—if these materials truly exist in such numbers and above all if the adversary succeeds in putting them to use—guarantee success with any certainty.”

That Cogny and Navarre actively disliked each other didn’t help French planning.

Now forty-nine, he had doctoral degrees in law and political science and had survived the tortures of the Buchenwald concentration camp, emerging at the liberation severely malnourished—he was down to 120 pounds—and with a limp.

that afternoon a contentious meeting at the Viet Minh commander’s post—during which several subordinate Viet Minh commanders pressed for going ahead with the attack that evening—ended with a postponement of the operation and a switch to the “steady” directive.