Bernard Fall was one of the great foreign war correspondents. A Frenchman of Austrian Jewish birth, he spent most of his adult life studying and teaching in the United States when not in Southeast Asia covering the Vietnamese communist war against the French and then the Americans. This book, the story of the epic siege and defeat of French forces at the hands of Vo Nguyen Giap and the Viet Minh in 1954, was published in 1967, the year Fall was killed when he stepped on a landmine while embedded with the U.S. Marines in Thua Thien province, Vietnam.
“Hell in a Very Small Place” is a fantastic military history. Characters and tactical movements come to life, as does the horror of war. The author describes the strategic debates that led to the French operation to seize Dien Bien Phu and the subsequent ground level action with equal clarity and skill.
To begin with, Fall does an admirable job developing the main characters in the story, almost as a novelist would. He writes rather glowingly of the two top French commanders, although they would grow to hate one another. LTG Henri Navarre, the overall commander in French Indochina, is described as reclusive and cold, but a highly qualified and competent military leader. His subordinate and area of operations commander in the Tonkin region, BG Rene Cogny, is cast as the ideal general officer: handsome, dashing, experienced, courageous. Yet, the two French commanders had conflicting views on the role of Dien Bien Phu in the coming campaign, and that misalignment was one of the contributing factors leading to disaster, according to the author. Navarre envisioned Dien Bien Phu as an “air land base” deep in the enemy’s rear, a fortified jungle stronghold that would tie down Giap’s forces and impede his push southward. Indeed, in that sense Navarre was right: just 4% of the French forces in Vietnam were at Dien Bien Phu and it is estimated that over 60% of Giap’s forces were employed in the coming siege. The recent experience at Sa-Nan loomed large for Navarre. It was an operation the French staff saw as a huge success and it convinced Navarre that such remote bases could be occupied and evacuated at will. Cogny, on the other hand, saw Dien Bien Phu more as a “mooring point,” a remote base from which special operations forces could launch attacks deep into the jungle to harass and interdict the Viet Minh forces flowing south. The man selected to lead the operation at Dien Bien Phu, the flamboyant COL Christian de Castries, is a character straight out of a dime store novel, a skilled horseman and lover, he lived for “a horse to ride, an enemy to kill, and a woman in bed.” He would name the strongpoints at Dien Bien Phu after his mistresses (Claudine, Anne-Marie, Isabelle, Dominique, Beatrice, Elaine).
A central theme of this book, about the largest defeat in French colonial history and told primarily from the French perspective, is “where should the blame lie?” Fall states flatly that the French defeat was NOT due to intelligence failure. The French knew about the Viet Minh’s intentions and manpower advantage, they simply overestimated their ability to defend themselves and underestimated Giap’s ability to supply such a remote campaign. But are not such faulty assumptions attributable to poor intelligence? Consider the broader argument that Fall lays out in “Hell in a Very Small Place.”
The author concludes that the French plans for Dien Bien Phu were totally unrealistic and based on false assumptions, particularly that the Viet Minh had reached the apex of its strength and couldn’t possibly move and supply heavy artillery pieces so deep in the jungle highlands. Was that not an intelligence failure of some sort?
Moreover, the two commanders had two distinct views on the intent of the base (Navarre: air land base; Cogny: SOF mooring point) and had incorrectly drawn lessons from a recent experience at Na-San. Again, would not better intelligence have drawn more accurate conclusions from the Na-San experience? Fall writes that Giap had learned that the French couldn’t sustain offensives, although it seems that French intelligence did not understand that. Giap’s staff warned that an attack against Dien Bien Phu would be extremely difficult for logistical reasons, just as French intelligence suggested, but Giap felt that the potential benefits of successfully besieging the isolated encampment was worth the risk. The French quickly had intelligence suggesting that the Viet Minh were reinforcing the area around Dien Bien Phu, which would render the use of the base a special operations “mooring point” unrealistic, yet so change in strategy came. The only alternatives were to evacuate the valley or garrison the base with massive firepower that the French didn’t possess at the time.
Finally, the French had far too few men and resources to effectively execute the operation at Dien Bien Phu, especially considering the other operations they had planned for the South. Fall suggests that the prudent thing to do was consolidate forces, not distribute them far and wide. That may have been an error in command judgment, but a better understanding of enemy strengths and French limitations likely would have altered the decision making.
Nevertheless, Fall stresses the French were NOT defeated at Dien Bien Phu by failures in intelligence, aerial supply, or artillery. Rather, he argues, it was primarily a defeat by poor combat engineering. Because Cogny thought of the base as a special operations mooring point, fortifications were to be kept to a minimum. Bunkers were only built as the siege ring began to tighten and resources were growing scarce, he says. It was assumed that the enemy could never transport a siege force a hundred miles from their base; and if they did, they could never re-supply it; and if they did any massing of artillery would be quickly knocked out by French counter barrages; and if they didn’t they could slip out of Dien Bien Phu just as they had at Na-San. The French made no attempt to camouflage at first, which made all of their posts easy targets. French also counted on their presumed firepower advantage to overcome the inherent vulnerability of the mountains that dominated their base camps in the Dien Bien Phu valley. Moreover, when their forward observations posts were lost in the first 48 hours and many of their artillery pieces were taken out in the first barrage, the firepower advantage so relied upon became steadily blind and weak.
In the end, it seems to me, the French lost the logistical battle. The effective use of anti-aircraft weapons by Giap’s forces was not anticipated (another intelligence failure?). As the siege lines grew tighter the available drop zones became nearly impossible to hit (perhaps 50% of French supplies end up in the enemy’s hands, thus lessening their resupply needs at a critical time). Moreover, the ability of French airpower to interdict the enemy supply lines was almost nil. Giap employed tens of thousands of coolies that hand-carried supplies through the jungles, an archaic system that was nevertheless invulnerable to significant disruption from the air. Overall, airpower (or lack thereof) played a pivotal role. The French had no bombers as their NATO commitment was for fighters (only the U.S. and British had bombers) and what little strategic airpower they did possess was limited by surprisingly thick and effective anti-air coverage. Thus, the combination of inadequate air support and strong anti-aircraft response undermined the French logistical network, which starved the troops at Dien Bien Phu of critical supplies, especially ammunition. Fall concludes that airpower would not have won the war in Indochina, but it may very well have saved Dien Bien Phu. According to the author, this can be attributed to two things: the French misunderstood modern airpower and the U.S. failed to intervene even though a French victory was very much in their national interest. Fall suggests that French understanding of airpower in 1954 was akin to their understanding of tank warfare in 1939. He notes that nearly all the French officers at Dien Bien Phu came from the ground forces and used their airpower piecemeal.
So who was really responsible for the defeat at Dien Bien Phu? According to the author it was the U.S., who “for the first time in her whole history, she would abandon an ally to his fate while the ally was fighting a war that the United States encouraged him to fight to a point far beyond his own political objectives and most certainly far beyond his own military means.”
Although I take issue with Fall’s assessment on the culpability of French intelligence to the defeat at Dien Bien Phu, this is a remarkable narrative history and an invaluable contribution to the study of the Vietnam conflict more generally.
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