The Will to Victory

Men, millions of them, have died as bravely before--and not long before. The defense and fall of Dienbienphu raised a lump in the world's throat not because the quality of courage displayed there was unique but because Dienbienphu was set apart, catching the eye and the heart by contrast. It was geographically isolated. It was a pitched battle, one of the few in a shapeless, sceneless guerrilla war. Tactically, the defense was conducted with a coherent resolution of command; from inside Dienbienphu there came from first to last not a sign of hesitation or doubt about what had to be done.

The contrast that makes Dienbienphu shine so brightly begins not many miles away, where a reconnaissance force--which could have been built up into a relief column by air drops--was crawling from Laos in a quarter-hearted pretense at rescue. The contrast sharpens at Hanoi, where General Navarre held his hand; he did not even" try to relieve Dienbienphu, because he feared this might disturb peace negotiations at Geneva. The mood of political Paris favored Navarre's hesitation. Surrounding Paris' attitude was a larger circle of doubt and confusion.

The French, who had never had a clearly defined will to victory in Indo-China, were seriously demoralized when the Americans, on a much more favorable battlefield, settled, down to a stalemate and then a truce in Korea. And around that Korean failure lay a still larger setting of weakness: the tendency of the non-Communist world to think of the cold war purely in terms of reaction to enemy action, to "repel aggression."

Given that attitude, the best that the free world can produce, even if all its soldiers are as brave as Dienbienphu's defenders, is more Dienbienphus. "There is no substitute," MacArthur once said bitterly, "for victory." There is a more accurate and a more bitter way of stating it: there are dozens of alluring substitutes for the will to victory--and all of them are poison.

This will to victory--where is it supposed to reside? Again and again the free world's generals, politicians and journalists have complained that the enemy troops show their "fanaticism" while the anti-Communist troops do not. "Fanaticism" is a misleading word. In combat such as that at Dienbienphu there is no difference between the courage needed by the attacker and by the defender.

Christian de Castries, great field soldier, was scarcely a fanatic, nor were his hard-bitten French noncoms, or his Germans of the Foreign Legion, or his newly trained Vietnamese. All of these men, from the most widely disparate backgrounds, found--without fanaticism, brainwashing or Communist terror--as much of what the soldier needs as any Red ever showed. What they did not have--and the Communists do--is direction from above, the kind of direction that comes from the will to victory.

The sacrifice at Dienbienphu may turn out to be quite pointless. Whether it does or not depends upon leaders in Paris, London, Washington--and upon the free world's people, many of whom are still addicted to palatable, poisonous substitutes for the will to victory.

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