Vietnam War

In the 1950s, France was struggling to hold on to colonies around the world. The most troublesome region was French Indochina, specifically Vietnam. A well-organized independence movement, supported by communist China, had taken control of North Vietnam. French generals decided to use their air power to drop a base more than 100 miles behind Vietnamese lines, where they would be able to cut off Vietnamese supply lines and force the Viet Minh into an open battle.

The French picked an airfield called Dien Bien Phu in the northern hill country of Vietnam to carry out their plan. In November 1953, airplanes began moving thousands of troops into the valley; within a few weeks more than 10,000 soldiers were busy digging fortified positions around the airfield. The French forces included light tanks and artillery, Foreign Legionnaires, local troops and even a pair of "mobile field brothels" staffed by Vietnamese and Algerian women.

Had the French commanders taken a close look at a map, they might have noticed that Dien Bien Phu was in a valley, surrounded by high mountains on all sides. Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, who later led the Vietnamese army against American troops, called it a "rice bowl." Giap spent months quietly moving big guns â?? many of which were American, captured during the Korean War and given to the Vietnamese by their Chinese allies -- to the hills above the French base. By January 1954, Giap had the French surrounded and outnumbered 5 to 1.

Hubris—exaggerated pride or self-confidence—often afflicts Western military men when they confront Eastern armies, navies and air forces. So it was in 1905 at Tsushima when Japanese ships stunningly sank nearly every trace of the imperial Russian navy. So it was in 1942 when superior Japanese Mitsubishis flown by pilots whose skill stunned the Americans and British shot down Grumman Wildcats, Brewster Buffalos and Gloster Gladiators almost at will. And so it was again in 1954 when a Viet Minh peasant army dismantled haughty French commander Henri Navarre's 16,000 largely elite troops at Dien Bien Phu.

Navarre's biggest blunder was to underestimate the courage, capability and skill of General Vo Nguyen Giap and Viet Minh forces. How could rice farmers wearing black pajamas and shower clogs possibly defeat skilled French artillerymen and Legionnaires defending a fortified garrison supplied by aircraft—the latter a technological marvel to which the Viet Minh had no access?

Placing a garrison at remote, jungle-bound Dien Bien Phu in the first place was a decision an ROTC freshman might have questioned. The French depended on air support for everything from beurre to bullets—and, above all, reinforcements—but C-47s couldn't carry enough to keep the fortress supplied. Complicating matters, Navarre somehow got the artilleryman's credo backward and took the low ground (Dien Bien Phu was in a valley), which meant Giap's surprisingly skilled antiaircraft gunners could shoot down at landing planes. The weather between Hanoi and Dien Bien Phu was often dicey, and though the base initially had the luxury of two airstrips, the Viet Minh quickly put both out of action, forcing the French to parachute in supplies—about half of them, including stacks of artillery rounds, landed in enemy hands.

When the Viet Minh first attacked Dien Bien Phu in November 1952, it was little more than an outpost, and the tiny French garrison bugged out. It was a logical move, but one that rankled the French, who had been humiliated in World War II. The all-important honneur de l'armée was at stake, and they were intent on reoccupying and holding Dien Bien Phu at all costs. "Giap has no logistics," Navarre's advisers had repeatedly assured him. Au contraire, mon général. Giap had tens of thousands of worker ants chugging everything from trucks to bicycles over impossible mountain roads and trails to the hills surrounding Dien Bien Phu. Giap also understood the vulnerabilities of French logistics. His guerrillas snuck on to French air bases and destroyed countless planes on the ground. On Giap's orders, they ignored the French Bearcats and B-26s—powerful combat airplanes—and firebombed only the unglamorous cargo craft.

Navarre had imagined Dien Bien Phu as a powerful, ornery hedgehog, a prickly offensive base from which French infantry and armor could range at will. Instead, the garrison played possum, its starving defenders, outnumbered four to one, hunkered down in mudholes under relentless fire from artillery Giap had somehow manhandled to the site. The Viet Minh general had placed his main batteries in secure positions behind the ridges and concealed those guns on the forward slopes in spider holes the French artillery was unable to hit. In the end, Henri Navarre lost to a smarter, more focused commander whom he had totally underestimated. Hubris? Navarre conducted his war from an air-conditioned office in Hanoi. Giap commanded from a cave.

On March 14, 1954, Giap's trap snapped shut. Firing down on the French base from above, Vietnamese artillery obliterated Dien Bien Phu's defenses. French artillery spotters couldn't see the Vietnamese positions, much less hit them. (The humiliated French artillery commander killed himself with a hand grenade on the first day of the battle.) For weeks, the French - cut off from supplies and reinforcements and badly outgunned and outnumbered - fought fiercely to hold their lines against waves of Vietnamese soldiers.

But Dien Bien Phu was totally isolated. French planes dropped supplies by parachute and bombed Vietnamese positions, but it wasn't enough to break the siege. Perpetually short of food, water, and ammunition and utterly exhausted, French soldiers managed to hold out for 55 days. Their last trenches were finally overrun in early May. The Vietnamese took more than 11,000 prisoners.

The defeat at Dien Bien Phu spelled the end of French colonial rule in Indochina. The humiliating defeat inspired French colonies elsewhere in the world to push for independence. Within two years of the defeat, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia had all successfully fought wars of independence against France. Dien Bien Phu also marked the beginning of America's war in Vietnam - American planes flew bombing missions to support the French base, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles reportedly offered France nuclear weapons to use on the Vietnamese.

On the evening of July 8, 1959, six of eight American advisers stationed at a camp serving as the headquarters of a South Vietnamese army division 20 miles northeast of Saigon had settled down after supper in their mess to watch a movie, The Tattered Dress, starring Jeanne Crain. One of them had switched on the lights to change a reel when it happened. Guerrillas poked their weapons through the windows and raked the room with automatic fire — killing Maj. Dale R. Buis, M. Sgt. Chester M. Ovnand, two South Vietnamese guards, and an eight-year-old Vietnamese boy outright.

Buis and Ovnand were not the first U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam. Lt. Col. A. Peter Dewey of the Office of Strategic Services had been mistakenly gunned down by a Viet Minh band outside Saigon as far back as September 1945. And a daredevil American pilot, Capt. James B. McGovern — nicknamed "Earthquake McGoon" after a character in the Li'l Abner comic strip crashed to his death while flying supplies to the beleaguered French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. But the two were the first to die during the Vietnam Era, the official U.S. euphemism for a war never formally declared.

After Buis and Ovnand died, their names, along with the other 58,000 Americans who lost their lives in Vietnam, were etched on a memorial located within sight of the national monuments to Washington and Lincoln. The memorial, an angle of polished black stone subtly submerged within a gentle slope, is an artistic abstraction. Yet its simplicity dramatizes a grim reality.

Andrew Curry. Battle of Dien Bien Phu. .

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