Near the End

INDOCHINA

Soldiers! The government owes you much and can give you nothing.

Napoleon Bonaparte

It was twilight at Dienbienphu. Narrow-eyed with loss of sleep, the French sentries peered through the monsoon haze towards the Communist trenches less than roo yards away. All was quiet, and the tired 10,000-man garrison hoped for a fair night's rest. At GHQ in Hanoi, an officer reported: "Lull at Dienbienphu."

Failure in Battle. At 2100 hours there was a muffled stirring within the enemy lines. Mortars opened up, thump and rustle, against six French strongpoints. Communist 1055 and 755 put down harassing fire-nothing more-upon the isolated strongpoint of Isabelle, three miles to the south. At 2 200, high explosives cracked sharply from the edge of the French barbed wire. Then four Red regiments drove in relentlessly. They achieved tactical surprise.

The Red regiments came in leapfrog from four directions, battalion by battalion. They had rehearsed their attack for days against replicas of the French strongpoints. Each Red packed unusual firepower: belts of high-explosive containers, a submachine gun, a dozen grenades, a rifle or pistol, and a long-bladed knife. This time there was no screaming. After midnight the Reds stormed three outposts, and General de Castries' tired men could not get them back. The Reds dug in less than 600 yards from the French command post. Successively in French, Vietnamese, Arabic and German, Red loudspeakers blared: "Surrender or die!"

Only from Isabelle came bright news. As the Reds swarmed across one outpost, some Foreign Legionnaires went underground. From their dugouts they fought up towards the flarelight; it was hand-to-hand work with knives, grenades, the bayonet. At 0400, two Legion battalions counterattacked. It took them twelve hours to drive Giap's men out of Isabelle.

Letdown in Command. At 1600 that afternoon, Dienbienphu fell strangely quiet. What was Giap up to? Was he regrouping? Was he digging his assault trenches closer to the battered French center? Was he heeding Mao Tse-tung's doctrine: "Fight only when victory is certain"? Or, more likely, was he synchronizing his next assault with Molotov's next offensive at Geneva?

Despite official optimism, the French privately held out little hope. In the battle's first phase, De Castries could launch a dozen counterattacks a day. Now his men were almost worn out. French Commanding General Navarre was still parachuting in 100 men and 170 tons of supplies every 24 hours, weather permitting. But only about 3,000 of Dienbienphu's defenders were in fighting shape. The rest were the wounded, the sick (mainly from dysentery) and the exhausted.

Navarre was making no apparent effort to relieve Dienbienphu, though he had some 20 battalions elsewhere in Indo-China, including four paratroop battalions in the Red River Delta. "Navarre seems to be drawing completely into himself," said one high-placed observer. "It's almost as though he had a Gotterddmmer-tmg complex." Navarre meant somehow to cling a while to Dienbienphu in the hope that peace could be negotiated at Geneva, but there would be no new blow against the Communists-for that, as one of his aides astonishingly explained, would be "inconsistent with the government's decision to seek a negotiated settlement."

At Dienbienphu, the soldiers watched through the parapet and waited.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.