The war in Indochina
MENTION the names Isabelle, Huguette, Eliane or Natacha to anyone with a sense of history who has served in the French Foreign Legion or with the French paratroops, and the nod of wistful and romantic recognition is unmistakable. These are some of the code-names from long ago of the defended hill outposts and paratroop drop-zones set in the waving elephant grass of the Indochinese highlands at Dien Bien Phu.
It is the showdown between the French and the Viet Minh that took place in 1954 that is the subject of this account. Martin Windrow is a self-deprecating publisher and expert on the French colonial army who denies himself the title of “historian”, but his book proves that his modesty is misguided.
The reader can almost hear the parachute canopies cracking open as Operation Castor begins on November 20th 1953, when the airborne elite of the French colonial army was first parachuted into the valley of Dien Bien Phu. Seven years into a vicious, expensive, politically unpopular and largely ignored war being fought thousands of miles from Paris, the French expeditionary force under General Henri Navarre was under pressure from its political masters at home to grasp the military initiative from the Chinese-backed forces of the Viet Minh.
The French wanted a strong bargaining position in the forthcoming Geneva peace talks, and General Navarre was convinced that if the Vietnamese under General Vo Nguyen Giap could be brought into conventional battle, the French could win the day. To this end, it was decided to set up a massive air-supplied firebase seven miles from the border with Laos, 300 miles away from the French zone of control in the Gulf of Tonkin. Inside a defended area some 30 miles round, Navarre (pictured above, left) set up a series of parachute drop-zones, an airstrip and a string of heavily defended strongpoints, with now-famous codenames, including Eliane and Huguette.
The result, and General Navarre's dramatic failures of operational command, are history. General Giap refused to confront the French immediately, but waited until March 13th 1954 before launching “human-wave” assaults against outpost Beatrice. In the subsequent 57 days of battle, the French paras, legionnaires and colonial troops—outnumbered and out-gunned, cut off from re-supply except by air, flooded by monsoon rains, living underground under intense artillery barrages inside a steadily shrinking perimeter—fought and died in the mud as they struggled to hold back the suicidal waves of Viet Minh assaults.
The lessons that America, France's major supporter in the war, failed to appreciate in Indochina and at Dien Bien Phu were to lead to many of the difficulties that America's own forces suffered later on, in the jungles of Vietnam.
Success in battle, according to one military maxim, may not, on its own, assure the achievement of national security goals, but defeat will guarantee failure.Mr Windrow's vivid and well-writtenaccount confirms that this was certainly the case at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Hisbook is a tribute to his abilities both as a historian and as a writer.