After eight years of fighting a frustrating guerilla war to regain control of its old colony, France’s mission in Vietnam came to a humiliating end in 1954. Seeking to put an end to Vietminh incursions into neighboring Laos, also a French colony, as well as to cut the Vietminh off from their rice supply in the Dien Bien region of Vietnam, French military commanders placed a huge garrison of troops and a fortified compound at the bottom of a valley overlooked by high mountain peaks. Why the French chose to put their base there (militarily it is more desirable to control the high ground, not the low, where one is a sitting duck) is a bit of a mystery, although it has been said that they underestimated the enemy’s ability to get artillery through the rough jungle base of the mountains up to the top; unfortunately for the French, however, that is precisely what the Vietminh did. Over the course of several months, Vietnamese peasants and soldiers carried massive howitzer cannons and anti-aircraft guns, piece by piece, through the jungle and up the mountain, an impressive testament to what motivated team work can accomplish, assembling the guns at the top and camouflaging them with nets strewn with leaves and branches. Down below, fifteen thousand French military men, many of whom arrived fresh from France and were not really prepared to fight the grizzled veterans of the Vietminh, waited for the battle to begin. What ensued was a total bloodbath, lasting three months. The base at Dien Bien Phu had no direct access to supplies save for an airfield that the French commander in the field (well, actually he was safely directing the battle from an air conditioned HQ in Saigon), Henri Navarre, believed was out of the range of Vietminh artillery. It was not, and it was quickly destroyed, making it virtually impossible for the French garrison to receive badly needed supplies or evacuate the wounded. After three months of slaughter, the garrison surrendered, and France bid its old colony farewell.
The great tragedy of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, one that was to be repeated in later years as the United States became embroiled in Vietnam, was that it was fought with the knowledge that there was no real chance to defeat the Vietminh militarily. Indeed, the point of the battle from the French perspective was not to achieve a decisive victory over Ho Chi Minh, which most military analysts ruled out as unrealistic, but rather to inflict enough damage to pave the way for an “honorable” settlement in Vietnam and allow the French to save face and sneak out the back door. The term “peace with honor” made a comeback later on in the Johnson and Nixon years when it was equally clear that a military solution to the Vietnam War was not possible, with tragic consequences. That awful word “honor,” the refuge of men too weak to come to a peaceful solution, has killed a lot of people throughout history, as it will doubtlessly continue to do in wars of the future.
Unfortunately, Vietnam’s war for independence did not end with the fall of Dien Bien Phu, as it should have. Ho’s victory did not mean much militarily or economically for the capitalist West; Vietnam was a rural and extremely poor country, with very little significance on the grand chessboard of geopolitics. While the majority of Ho’s forces, and obviously Ho himself, were Communists, their deepest passions were defined by nationalism, the desire to see their fatherland free of foreign domination, from the French or any other country. They had no interest in the international struggle of workers or in spreading Communism across the globe.
The French defeat should have signaled to the Americans that fighting to deny the Vietnamese independence was a lost cause, both practically and morally. Events in Vietnam, however, were not taking place in a vacuum; they must be viewed through the larger scope of geopolitics in the early 1950s. The perception at the time in the eyes of many was that the Vietnamese war for independence was part of a monolithic Communist movement spreading throughout Asia, directed from Moscow, and it had to stopped before it advanced any further.
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