Vietnam’s Agincourt

For 55 days in the spring of 1954, the Vietminh, as the nationalist-Communist independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh was known, besieged the French troops who had built up a seemingly impregnable fortress near the Laotian border. The French-Indochina War may have been primarily a guerrilla war, but the battle of Dien Bien Phu was a siege straight out of World War I. Today, you can wander around some of the remaining French fortifications—concrete bunkers linked by concrete trenches, all of them dug into the gently rolling floor of a valley 11 miles long and 3 miles wide. Here, more than 15,000 defenders—French troops all, but many of North African or Vietnamese origin—were supplied by air from Hanoi, 180 miles away across thick jungle.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, a self-taught soldier and one of the military geniuses of the 20th century, positioned some 50,000 assault troops backed by 50,000 support personnel, on the slopes around Dien Bien Phu. The French expected Giap to rise to the bait—that mass of colonial troops sitting in the middle of nowhere, just waiting to be attacked—and they were sure that they would be able to blast the Vietminh forces, once assembled, with their superior airpower and heavy artillery. But Giap frustrated their plans with an improbable feat of logistics: He managed to move more than 200 artillery pieces supplied by China, through the jungle, using tens of thousands of men to drag them by hand up the hills around Dien Bien Phu, where they were carefully camouflaged in bunkers invisible from above.

Giap himself took up residence in those hills, with his staff and Chinese advisers. Today you can wander through his simple command post, a thatched-roof hut with only enough room for a mat to sleep on. Next door is a concrete bunker dug into the mountain, where Giap could escape if French airplanes or troops found him—which they did not. The Vietminh commander survived, like his men, on rice and a bit of fish or meat, while the French troops below enjoyed multicourse banquets washed down with wine and brandy and spent their free hours visiting mobile bordellos flown in for their pleasure.

The fun ended on March 13, 1954, almost exactly 62 years before I arrived in Dien Bien Phu, when the hidden Vietminh artillery opened up on the French garrison. “Shells rained down on us without stopping like a hailstorm on a fall evening,” wrote a sergeant in the Foreign Legion. “Bunker after bunker, trench after trench, collapsed, burying under them men and weapons.”

Things only got worse. The Vietminh quickly closed the exposed French airstrip, making it impossible to evacuate the growing number of wounded who overflowed the aid stations. A French doctor likened “their slow, gentle groans” to “a song full of sadness.” The defenders could only be reinforced and resupplied by parachute, and even this proved hazardous, with the Vietminh’s antiaircraft guns shooting down 48 French aircraft.

Meanwhile the Vietminh infantry relentlessly pressed assault after assault on the French strongpoints, all of which carried women’s names: Dominique, Eliane, Huguette, Claudine, and so forth. (Rumor had it they were named after mistresses of the French commander, Brig. Gen. Christian de Castries, a dashing cavalryman who said he wanted nothing more out of life than “a horse to ride, an enemy to kill, and a woman in bed.”) The French fought valiantly, especially the elite paratroopers and legionnaires, but they were overwhelmed by the human-wave attacks. Eventually, in the words of historian Martin Windrow, “one-legged soldiers [were] manning machine guns in the blockhouses, being fed ammunition by one-armed and one-eyed comrades.”

The white flag finally went up on May 7. It was the worst defeat ever suffered by a European colonial power at the hands of its subjects—a defeat that ended not only the French empire in Indochina but the entire era of Western imperialism.

Seen from the vantage point of 2016, it all seems slightly baffling. What military commander in his right mind would willingly cede the high ground to the enemy? Yet that is what General Henri-Eugène Navarre, the senior French commander in Indochina, did when he launched Operation Castor, as the occupation of Dien Bien Phu was known. The only explanation for this folly—one of the greatest mistakes in military history—is sheer hubris: Navarre had nothing but contempt for his enemies, “Asiatics” who seemed tiny and backward to the heirs of Napoleon and Louis XIV. Navarre did not count on the steely courage and determination that the Vietminh would display—or their willingness to suffer staggering casualties to drive out their colonial masters. The Vietminh lost as many as 25,000 troops in the siege of Dien Bien Phu, while the French lost more than 10,000 men.

It is little wonder, then, that this glorious victory is celebrated in so many monuments scattered around Dien Bien Phu. Everywhere one looks, one finds massive stone representations of heroic Vietnamese fighters and peasants toiling together for the independence of their nation. (What one does not find are decent hotels or restaurants—Dien Bien Phu remains an impoverished, isolated place with few foreign visitors and almost no Americans.)

The Vietnamese are right to be proud of their achievement even if this hagiography necessarily leaves out a few messy details. Like the fact that many of the French soldiers died after being captured. More than 10,000 French troops surrendered on May 7, 1954. Four months later, at the conclusion of a peace treaty in Geneva, fewer than 4,000 were still alive to be released. The rest had perished in a hellish captivity that recalled the Japanese mistreatment of Allied POWs in World War II. There is no mention of the suffering of these surrendered soldiers, just as there is no mention of the heroism many of them displayed in a losing cause.

Another fact omitted: The Vietminh were fighting not just for independence from France—a goal universally popular in Vietnam—but also to impose a Communist dictatorship—a goal considerably less popular. So unpopular, in fact, that Ho Chi Minh and his successors never dared hold a halfway honest election to legitimate their rule.

To this day, the Communist regime in Hanoi, although pursuing capitalist reforms, remains leery of democracy. Two dozen non-Communist candidates risk harassment and even arrest for having the temerity to run for seats in May’s elections for the rubber-stamp National Assembly. As in Iran, so in Vietnam: The regime reserves the right to “vet” candidates for office and forbids those who openly challenge it from running.

Any way you look at it, the consequences of Dien Bien Phu were mixed: This military victory led to a divided nation and another 20 years of costly war by North Vietnam against the South Vietnamese and their American protectors. Contrary to Communist mythology, propagated at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as the Museum of American War Atrocities), it was the North that was the aggressor, not the United States. South Vietnam was an independent nation that had little desire to be conquered by Hanoi, not an American “puppet” that welcomed Communist “liberation.” The final Communist victory in 1975 led hundreds of thousands of “boat people” to flee and imposed a Stalinist tyranny that only began to loosen its hold in the 1990s when Chinese-style reforms were implemented.

Today Saigon, as Ho Chi Minh City is still generally called, is a bustling mega-city overflowing with cafés and consumer goods, new office buildings and new businesses, cars and motor scooters, and Vietnam is a budding ally of the United States. (The two countries are united by mutual fear of China.) It is a tragedy that history took such a long detour to arrive at this destination, and that even today Vietnam has a long way to go before it achieves the kind of freedom and prosperity enjoyed by countries such as South Korea and Taiwan that under American protection resisted communism.

Yet none of this detracts from the superhuman self-sacrifice of the heroes of Dien Bien Phu—the men who defeated an empire. One suspects that even if non-Communists eventually take power in Hanoi and allow genuinely free elections, they will continue to revere the fighters who secured one of the most important and least likely military victories of the 20th century.

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, and the author of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present Day (Liveright, 2013)