DIENBIENPHU: Could It Happen Again?

FROM Pyongyang to the Yangtze, Asia's Communists last week celebrated the tenth anniversary of Dienbienphu, the savage battle that cost France her century-old Indo-Chinese empire. In Hanoi, loudspeakers blared a specially composed song, Liberation of Dienbienphu, and thousands of North Vietnamese massed to commemorate the feat of arms that General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Red victor of Dienbienphu, called "one of the greatest victories in the history of the armed struggle of oppressed peoples."

Nor did the anniversary go unremembered in France. At a round of reunions in Paris, business-suited survivors of the debacle hoisted nostalgic toasts to "the Angel of Dienbienphu," Genevieve de Galard-Terraube, who was the only woman nurse on the battlefield. (Now 39, Genevieve is a retiring Paris housewife and mother of two children, married to a former French paratrooper.) They were poignant get-togethers, for Dienbienphu holds as deep emotional implications for Frenchmen today as Verdun or Waterloo did for earlier generations.

Tanks & Tablecloths. Many veterans of the fighting blame France's defeat on General Henri Navarre, his government's commander in chief for Indochina. But Navarre, a World War I infantryman, only personified the Maginot mentality of most French career officers. Though warned that it would be fatal to fight a conventional engagement from a fixed base, Navarre concentrated 17 battalions in the North Viet Nam outpost, which lay in a ten-mile-long river valley. His strategy was to draw the Communist Viet Minh guerrillas into a set-piece battle in which French heavy weaponry would prove decisive. Along with tanks and artillery, his officers moved in their mess silver, embroidered white tablecloths, stocks of wine.

Though Dienbienphu was surrounded by hills, Navarre was unworried, since he was convinced that the Reds had no artillery. Dienbienphu's two air strips, its only lifeline to the outside, were within easy field-gun range of the mountains. Under Cavalry Colonel Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries, who was promoted to four-star general during the battle, the garrison had been organized into ten separate commands. With Gallic gallantry, each had been given a woman's name--Gabrielle, Beatrice, Anne-Marie, Franc,oise, Isabelle, Dominique, Claudine, Huguette, Eliane and Junon.

Bicycles & Backs. What the French did not know was that Red China had armed the Viet Minh with 200 artillery pieces. Hacking paths through jungle trails, traveling up to 50 miles a day on foot, the guerrillas lugged the dismantled guns into positions on their backs, then set up the batteries under rock cover. To fill Viet Minh bellies, 50,000 Chinese coolies bicycled in relays down the narrow mountain footpaths, each straining under a load of 600 lbs. of sacked rice. From November to mid-March, while his 60,000 guerrilla troops sparred with patrols from the fortress, Guerrilla General Giap quietly laid his noose around Dienbienphu. Then one morning Viet Minh artillery boomed a death knell.

In four days, Beatrice, Gabrielle and Anne-Marie fell. As monsoon rains set in, French tanks became immobile. "To go on the offensive," despaired one French officer, "we would need 10,000 mules." With both air strips raked by Red shells, the French had to rely on airdrops for supplies. More than half the food, ammunition and medicine--as well as De Castries' brand-new general's stars and a bottle of congratulatory cognac --drifted behind Red lines. Unable to locate the Viet I Minh's well-hidden big guns, Dienbienphu's guilt-stricken V artillery commander committed suicide.

Corpses in the Chamber Pot. While Paris tried clumsily and in vain to obtain a U.S. bomber strike, outgunned, outmanned French forces were pounded for 56 days by human-wave attacks. By night, the Reds tunneled like ants under many outposts. Dienbienphu's defenders fought back with machine guns, flamethrowers, hand grenades and bayonets. Latrines filled and festered, the water supply turned foul; French officers bitterly endorsed their valley's nickname: "le pot de chambre." The living grew too weary to bury the dead, and the stench of putrefying flesh even forced the guerrillas to wear gauze masks.

On April 2, Command Post Francoise was abandoned. In the first days of May, Dominique and Huguette crumbled. Ordered not to surrender, De Castries on May 7 radioed Hanoi: "It is the end. The Viet Minh are only a few yards from where I speak." His operator added: "Say hello to Paris for me. Au revoir." By that night, the last three commands--Eliane, Claudine, and isolated Isabelle to the south--were overrun, and for the first time in six months the smoke-shrouded valley lay silent.

Lessons Learned. Of Dienbienphu's 12,000 defenders, 2,293 were killed, and the rest, including most of the 5,134 wounded, began the long death march to Viet Minh prison camps. The debacle resulted in the partitioning of Viet Nam and thrust ultimate responsibility for Indochina on the U.S., which today grimly supports South Viet Nam's struggle against the Communist Viet Cong. Whether from lingering humiliation or its dreams of reasserting French influence in a neutralized Southeast Asia, or both, the France of Charles de Gaulle holds that the U.S. will inevitably meet its own Dienbienphu in Viet Nam.

U.S. military planners virtually rule out any such prospect. For all their difficulties, South Vietnamese troops and U.S. advisers command enormous fire power and mobility, have learned never to box themselves into a static defense against fast-moving guerrillas. The Viet Cong of late have launched several attacks in battalion strength, but their numbers are nowhere near comparable to the Viet Minh, which moved entire divisions into Dienbienphu. Moreover, Dienbienphu was only 80 miles from Red China; the circuitous supply line to South Viet Nam is ten times longer. The Viet Cong have yet to deploy artillery or antiaircraft guns. And French air power was puny compared to the swarms of rocket-firing helicopters, transport craft and fighter-bombers that the U.S. has in South Viet Nam. With so great an advantage in air and fire power, U.S. advisers would like nothing better than to see the Viet Cong blunder into an open, pitched battle.

Giap's Goal. Biggest difference between the two wars, of course, is that the French were defending a tired colonial regime. They had scant encouragement from the government of Premier Joseph Laniel in Paris, which insisted that it could spare no more men or money. The U.S., by contrast, has repeatedly pledged full support for Viet Nam's defenders until the Viet Cong are finally routed. And, unlike the French, the Vietnamese are at least attempting an ambitious civic reform program.

The main dangers today, after two coups in six months, are that yet another upheaval might bring a neutralist government to power in Saigon, or that a series of coups could erode the people's will to resist. As General Giap has suggested, Communist strategy now envisages not one big Dienbienphu but a lot of small, frustrating engagements. Says Giap: "The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive and be caught in a dilemma; he has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long-drawn-out war." What the Communists hope for, clearly, is a Dienbienphu of the spirit.

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