Garrison at Bay

The garrison at Dienbienphu clung at week's end to six fire-whipped strong points by the Nam Yourn River. The tricolor still flapped jauntily above the French command post. But the 12,000 worn-out Frenchmen. Vietnamese. North Africans and Foreign Legionnaires had been squeezed into one-third of their original perimeter, and they were short of ammunition, supplies and fresh reinforcements. The men were so tired that their performance was losing effect. One night last week the Communists quickly isolated and overran a Foreign Legion outpost in the airstrip sector, and the French could not get it back. This was the third outpost the Communists had captured in seven days, and GHQ was despondent. Unless some way could be found to draw off Red General Giap's 40,000 men, said one top French commander, "General de Castries has only one chance in ten of holding out."

The Bitter River. Inside Dienbienphu there was little food, little wine. At one point there was just enough ammunition for three days' fighting. The drop zone was so small that much of the French supplies and many paratroop reinforcements drifted into the enemy lines. In one sector the Communists were only about 700 yards from the French center, and the front lines were often less than 40 yards apart. The Red field gunners and mortarmen had perhaps the most concentrated target in all Indo-China: the French perimeter was only 2,000 yards wide. The French artillery was ineffective by comparison: it had lost about half of its guns. The surviving French tanks were bogged down in the muck of the early monsoon, and French tactical air was often blinded in the haze. And there was the anguish of the wounded, who could not be flown out due to Red interdiction and part-capture of the airstrip. Wrote Charles Favrel from Indo-China to Paris' influential and neutralist Le Monde:

"About a thousand wounded are waiting in Dienbienphu. waiting for the end of their nightmare. Every day anxious telegrams are sent out from the fortress asking for blood plasma and drugs . . . Only 25 beds were set up in the underground hospital, because it was believed that the wounded would be brought to Hanoi by plane. The beds have increased to 400, and four surgeons have to cut away arms and legs which are threatened by gangrene, which they could have saved under normal conditions.

"The surgeons are reaching the limit of their endurance, and the overflow of wounded are waiting on the ground for their dressings to be changed. The water of the river in which bodies float can be filtered only in eyedropperfuls. There is just about enough water to give the men when they get delirious from thirst."

There is also the question of the dead. The French say they have counted 6,925 Communists dead on the battlefield. There are also the French dead, buried reverently in the rubble--when there is time. Nowhere in the shrinking perimeter can the garrison escape this intimacy of death and injury, with its abrasive effect on morale.

The Bitter Mistakes. How did Dienbienphu fall upon such bitter days? Last November the French were confident: they parachuted into Dienbienphu and cut the Red garrison to pieces in the tall elephant grass. Commanding General Navarre then built an entrenched camp 175 miles inside enemy territory. He dared the enemy to come and get him and itched for a set-piece battle instead of Indo-China's usual, fruitless chases through the jungle. Navarre flew in light tanks and 155-mm. artillery; his officers installed their mess silver, their embroidered white tablecloths and their wine cellars, and (though a few high-placed officers were dubious from the beginning) they echoed Navarre's confidence. "They will have to take more casualties than we," said one French commander. "And in any case, they cannot win."

At 1600 hours, the 13th of March, the Communists did attack--and there suddenly were many doubts. Navarre, it seemed, had badly underestimated the strength, rate of fire and accuracy of the Red artillery, the size and effectiveness of Communist China's professional help, the persistence and training of the Red infantry. He had overestimated the effect of his tactical air power. And it soon became cruelly evident that Navarre had offered battle in a bad spot--an open, accessible and easily commanded plain, not on the high ground. Commented Favrel scathingly in Le Monde:

"It could be pointed out that when the life of a fortress depends upon an airlift, the first need is to ensure the protection of the landing strip and to build it outside the reach of enemy artillery. But they wanted to install themselves in a basin without occupying the surrounding hills, and the terrain was neutralized from the first day of the battle. And our artillery proved so powerless to locate the enemy guns that the colonel responsible committed suicide in his bunker on March 14th, by blowing himself up with a hand grenade."

The Bitter Outlook. In these conditions, against numerical odds of 4 to 1, the garrison has fought for 40 nights and days. Last week the French government cited every man for the Croix de guerre, and Sir Winston Churchill cabled: "I salute you." Now the gallant garrison was at bay. Was there a chance of relief? Was Red General Giap's army as worn out as the garrison? Or would the outcome be the simple probability--death or Red captivity in one of three bitter ways: a sudden, crushing onset in the dark, or death by the thousand cuts of a siege, or surrender with the honors of war? There were lurking uncertainties in the dusk of Dienbienphu, and sometimes the tired men could hear the Red loudspeakers through the cacophony of mortars and the lizards. "The hour of our victory has struck," the Red loudspeakers mocked them. "We shall be face to face, very soon."

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