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Which of these battles was the most important in terms of its lasting impact?
Zama - Hannibal Defeated
Waterloo - Napoleon Defeated
Normandy - Allies Break Through Atlantic Wall
Other
None Of Them
Too Close To Call




 
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Battle of Dien Bien Phu
Over fifty years ago, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu fell to the Viet Minh, in one of the 20th century's most decisive battles.

By Bernard B. Fall
Introduction by Dorothy Fall and William S. Richmond

This article by the late Bernard B. Fall is an account of one of the most significant battles to take place in Vietnam. A conflict between Communist Viet Minh forces and a French-established garrison, it occurred in a town called "Seat of the Border County Prefecture" or, in Vietnamese, Dien Bien Phu. Bernard Fall wrote that in comparison with other world battles, Dien Bien Phu could hardly qualify as a major battle, let alone a decisive one. "Yet," he said, "that is exactly what it was." The siege occurred while the 1954 Geneva Conference was ironing out agreements between the major powers, including the future of Indochina. When Viet Minh forces overran Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954, it was, according to Fall, the end of French military influence in Asia.

Fall was born in 1926 and grew up in France. Both his parents were killed by the Nazis in World War II. He gained firsthand guerrilla warfare experience while fighting in the French Underground from 1942 to 1944. With the Allied invasion of Europe, Fall joined the French army, serving in the infantry and pack artillery of the 4th Moroccan Mountain Division.

Following World War II, Fall worked as a research analyst at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. He first came to the United States in 1951 as a Fulbright Scholar, receiving his Master of Arts and Ph.D. in political science at Syracuse University. In 1953, in order to engage in field research for his doctoral dissertation, he traveled to war-torn Indochina. As a former French soldier he was allowed to accompany French forces on combat operations in all sectors of the country. In 1957 Fall joined the faculty of Howard University as professor of international relations, and he spent the summer of that year in South Vietnam. Awarded a grant from the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) for field study of Communist infiltration in Southeast Asia, Fall witnessed the outbreak of Communist hostilities in Laos. He spent the 1961-62 academic year in Cambodia on a Rockefeller Foundation grant. It was during that time that he succeeded in visiting Communist North Vietnam and interviewing Ho Chi Minh. In 1965 Fall again spent the summer with American and Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.

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French paratroopers dash for cover as Viet Minh artillery resumes its punishment of the besieged base at Dien Bien Phu on March 23, 1954.

Among his most important works are Street Without Joy, which became essential military reading about the war with no front lines, and Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. In the latter epic, Fall describes in extraordinary detail not only the failures but also the heroism that took place in what he calls one of the most decisive battles of the 20th century.

During his last trip to Vietnam in February 1967, Fall chose to accompany a platoon of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, on Operation Chinook II, a search-and-destroy mission. From Phu Bai the group moved along the area the French had named La Rue Sans Joie, or Street Without Joy. It was here, in the area that he had written about with much emotion, that Bernard Fall was killed by the explosion of a land mine, along with Gunnery Sergeant Byron Highland, a Marine combat photographer.

Bernard B. Fall will be remembered by history as one of the foremost authorities on the Vietnam War. He wrote this article in 1964, prior to the publication of Hell in a Very Small Place.

On May 7, 1954, the end of the battle for the jungle fortress of Dien Bien Phu marked the end of French military influence in Asia, just as the sieges of Port Arthur, Corregidor and Singapore had, to a certain extent, broken the spell of Russian, American and British hegemony in Asia.

The Asians, after centuries of subjugation, had beaten the white man at his own game. Today, 10 years after Dien Bien Phu, Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam again challenge the West's ability to withstand a potent combination of political and military pressure in a totally alien environment.

On that day in May 1954 it had become apparent by 10 a.m. that Dien Bien Phu's position was hopeless. French artillery and mortars had been progressively silenced by murderously accurate Communist Viet Minh artillery fire, and the monsoon rains had slowed down supply drops to a trickle and transformed the French trenches and dugouts into bottomless quagmires. The surviving officers and men, many of whom had lived for 54 days on a steady diet of instant coffee and cigarettes, were in a catatonic state of exhaustion.

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French troops bring in wounded Viet Minh prisoners following another successful sally from the base on April 14, 1954.
While their commander, Brig. Gen. Christian de la Croix de Castries, reported the situation over the radiotelephone to General René Cogny, his theater commander 220 miles away in Hanoi, in a high-pitched but curiously impersonal voice, the end obviously had come for the fortress. De Castries ticked off a long list of 800-man battalions, which had been reduced to companies of 80 men, and of companies that were reduced to the size of weak platoons. All he could hope for was to hold out until nightfall in order to give the surviving members of his command a chance to break out into the jungle under the cover of darkness, while he himself would stay with the more than 5,000 severely wounded (out of a total of 15,094 men inside the valley) and face the enemy.

By 3 p.m., however, it had become obvious that the fortress would not last until nightfall. Communist forces, in human-wave attacks, were swarming over the last remaining defenses. De Castries polled the surviving unit commanders within reach, and the consensus was that a breakout would only lead to a senseless piecemeal massacre in the jungle. The decision was made then to fight on to the end, as long as the ammunition lasted, and let individual units be overrun after destruction of their heavy weapons. This was approved by the French senior commander in Hanoi at about 5 p.m., but with the proviso that the men in Isabelle, the southernmost strongpoint closest to the jungle, and to friendly forces in Laos, should be given a chance to make a break for it.

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