CMBN: Dien Bien Phu!

[sburke]

Roy is a great writer though a bit of a pinko in that stuffy French intellectual way.

I personally doubt the thesis that, to paraphrase Kubrick: "Inside every Commie is a Nationalist, waiting to get out!" In other words, while the Viets and the Chinese were almost certain to lock horns eventually, Ho and the rest of the Politburo weren't about to share power with bourgeois Catholics and any government of national unity would have been farcical and cosmetic. It would basically have been Cuba. Unlike India or Indonesia, there weren't sufficient sectarian divisions in Vietnam to forestall the emergence of a 100% Communist regime. And the immediate adjacency of a militant and confident Red China sealed it.

Who's Roy?

I don't for a moment think there was any chance of a coaltion type gov't, but by 1954 what chance was there of that anyway? The French had lost, bad. There was no local opposition that backed them. The idea of splitting Vietnam and having a vote was a farce even we didn't believe in. Our own President predicted Ho Chi Minh would get 80% of the vote. So instead we just ignored the UN treaty and the war continued only now it was us sitting in for the French.

As a student of political history one of the things that fascinates me is when the myths that are created around leaders get deflated as you find out they are just normal petty humans. The leadership of what became the Communist party turned in their competition to French agents in Shanghai to eliminate the opposition before WW2.

My point was more recognizing political realities. There was no reputable opposition. The forces we sided with in Vietnam were never going to create a viable gov't and were arguably far worse than the communists when it comes to any concept of political rights. They were a bunch of thugs who just killed each other when the infighting escalated. We could kick the NLF's ass from here till doomsday militarily, but we had nothing to offer to fill the political vacumn so it didn't matter. So instead we accept the reality on the ground and establish trade relations with the new gov't. We have our foot in the door, they hate China worse than us and we let time work for us. Yeah yeah I know, all pipe dreams, but it couldn't possibly have worked any worse than the path we chose.

[sburke]

It is interesting though to speculate what would have happened had Vietnam been united in 1954 and then fallen under Communist rule. My guess is that America would still have been drawn into a major war, but it would have taken place instead in Laos and the dry plains of northeast Thailand. And there, as in Korea, you would have had a true Communist War of aggression with the noncommunist Thais and Laotians (ethnically Thai) fighting a lot more vigorously against despised Viet (and Chinese) "dog-eaters" than the ARVN did. SEATO might have been able to keep its ground force commitment to a division or two plus air power. All speculation of course; some dominos fall more easily than others.

I kind of doubt that, but really who knows. Vietnam's involvement in Laos was a direct part of their strategy against the French. They didn't really give much of a crap about Laos itself. Sort of the same with the US. We used whomever we needed to in order to prosecute the war whether or not it was even legal by our own standards. The whole domino theory thing is a US construct that was more paranoia than any real plan. We credit our enemies with being far more organized than they were. I finished Berlin 1961 recently. Another interesting book and what is so fascinating is how badly everyone involved Kruschev, Kennedy, Adenauer and Ulbrcht mis understood each other and their motivations etc. I am convinced most human history is made up of us stumbling along blindly assuming things about others that are usually totally wrong. One of the things we missed completely is how badly the Soviets and Chinese hated each other. We viewed the Communist bloc as a monolith and by doing so made it stronger than it really was.

Part of the problem in SE asia was simply a social political vacumn that was created as the French Colonial empire collapsed. Nature and politics both abhor a vacumn. The French were particularly inept at colonial empire building. If you look toward the War in Algeria you have another example of how badly they could screw the pooch. If you ever get to see it Battle of Algiers is a fascinating movie on the attempt to create an urban guerrilla force against the French. These guys would definitely be classed as terrorists then and now, but considering by one estimate I have heard the French killed 1 in 7 Algerians during that war it is not surprising to see things sink to that level.

The whole of post ww 2 history is so messy simply because you have a social political crisis in the collapse of British and French colonial power with no one prepared to step in to maintain any real social economic order and the US and USSR using anything and everything to oppose one another. Africa in particular is still a long way from recovering.

[JasonC]

sburke - Um, in Algeria the French air force had to defeat the colonists to drive themselves out of the country, and they left because an army coup nearly toppled the state, and De Gaulle (after several assassination attempts by French colonist terrorists) decided it wasn't worth destroying France to keep Algeria.

And in case everyone just forgot, in both cases the domestic native allies of the west were the last to give up, and who suffered the most. Hundreds of thousands murdered in the immediate aftermath in both cases, and millions made refugees. They knew who they were fighting, even if the stupid westerners didn't.

Enough of the revisionist pap, all it is doing is trying to excuse lost wars and supposedly not worth fighting. They were, but they weren't worth losing - and they were lost through western political divisions.

[sburke]

sburke - Um, in Algeria the French air force had to defeat the colonists to drive themselves out of the country, and they left because an army coup nearly toppled the state, and De Gaulle (after several assassination attempts by French colonist terrorists) decided it wasn't worth destroying France to keep Algeria.

And in case everyone just forgot, in both cases the domestic native allies of the west were the last to give up, and who suffered the most. Hundreds of thousands murdered in the immediate aftermath in both cases, and millions made refugees. They knew who they were fighting, even if the stupid westerners didn't.

Enough of the revisionist pap, all it is doing is trying to excuse lost wars and supposedly not worth fighting. They were, but they weren't worth losing - and they were lost through western political divisions.

Well we may have to agree to disagree on some of this. The colonists that the French had to defeat to leave were their own creation of years of colonial occupation. The "domestic native allies" are generally those who had something to gain in the occupation of their own country. If it were us in a similar situation we would call them traitors. Civil wars are inherently the worst. Our own being a case in point. I can't say I have much sympathy when the Frankenstein creation of a colonial power turns out to not be under control and in fact a threat to the social political fabric of the home country whether that be French, Chinese, Russian or American colonial power.

We always pay for the short sightedness of our policies. Financing Mujahdeen in Afghanistan against the Russians while blithely ignoring how much they hate us as if it will never come back to bite us. Backing a Saudi regime that is beholden to one of the most reactionary religious movements in the world is going to keep coming back on us. We know it and yet we keep pretending we have some plan to avoid it. Pakistan is probably the world's worst den of terrorism and yet we still (Republican or Democrat) have no idea how to handle that. There is a consistency to politics on all sides. Short term goals trumps long term reasoning and inevitably long term we pay far more and come up with again short term answers as fixes.

[sburke]

It just dawned on me I am helping derail this thread a bit. Sorry.

Anyway back to Davidson's book. It is interesting in that you also see the political infighting on the Vietnamese side and how Giap develops plans for fighting the French. More of a political military history that while also describing the battles gives you some perspective of why the battles take place where and when they do. When I first picked it up I really wasn't sure what to expect. Coming from the US military I figured, well we will see. It is one side's perspective that at least wouldn't be full of just political rhetoic and no detail. I found it far more interesting than I'd thought it would be. I think he really does try to show a view from both sides, both good and bad and does so with a wealth of material.

[Broadsword56]

Re: The tragedy of the US in Vietnam and roads not taken...

The other day on a radio talk show I heard an academic trace it even farther back than WWII, the postwar power vacuum, and Dien Bien Phu.

He said US President Woodrow Wilson had the opportunity to meet with Ho Chi Minh in Paris in 1919 (yes, Ho was that old), back when Ho admired America and wanted to talk. Wilson refused the meeting, and an early opportunity for a dialogue was lost.

I think this came up in the context of the current US political climate, where candidates fight over whether it's better for national security to refuse to talk to dangerous actors or potential military enemies, or whether it's a sign of strength to feel secure enough to to talk to them and thus lower the risks of misunderstandings and war.

[LongLeftFlank]

Make no mistake; the mainstream Communist line was to "liberate" all of Southeast Asia from colonialism and feudalism. Enthusiasm and meaningful material support for this project waned and waxed over time, of course, and got caught up in the emergent maelstrom of the Vietnam War (Laos and Cambodia).

However, winning a guerrilla war against foreigners (colonialists) and their local supporters -- where the Communists can lay claim to being patriots as well as offering a brighter tomorrow -- is a very different proposition from overthrowing homegrown institutions, however corrupt. So if there's any universal lesson to be drawn, it's probably that foreigners can't fabricate a popular government where none existed before (in living memory).

South Korea is a noteworthy exception; that nation had no institutions at all remaining in 1945 after 50 years of brutal Japanese rule. However, their Communists made the cardinal error of being too closely aligned with Chinese outsiders, limiting their patriotic appeal. The entire country being ravaged by foreign armies probably had a lot to do with it as well; the exhausted people were happy to take copious US aid and keep the peace.

Still, following the ceasefire, a low level "dirty war" had to be fought by the ROK Army through the 1950s-1960s which has never been properly documented (in English).

The Communists made the same mistake in Burma. In Burma, where much of the country is trackless highlands inhabited by hilltribes, the BCP began as a United Front movement but then marginalized itself by becoming too heavily Chinese and worse, fanatical Red Guard dominated. Ethnic Burmese cadres joined the army strongman Ne Win -- himself an avowed socialist backed by the USSR and India -- and shoved the BCP to the Chinese border where by 1975 they became just another tribal opium army. No Western support desired and our ability to influence events in that country remains marginal.

From 1965 or so, the Communist Party of Thailand, a united front of rural reformers and Communist-influenced Chinese huaqiao (20% of the Thai population), mounted an active armed struggle in the Isan and Nan regions (and in Yala, adjacent to Malaysia) that wasn't fully suppressed until the early 1980s. The Royal Thai Army and paramilitary Border Patrol Police, assisted by various hilltribe militias -- including colourfully, the old Kuomintang "opium armies" encamped on the Burma border -- was able to contain this insurgency without substantial US involvement beyond a free flow of arms (which also supplied the guerrillas more than the Chinese ever did, btw).

[LongLeftFlank]

Broadsword: ref my earlier comment that "Inside every Commie is a Nationalist, waiting to get out!" Ho was a fervent Communist. No amount of Presbyterian preaching by Wilson would have converted him to a Horatio Alger Liberal (classical definition here). Had he somehow become one, he would have renounced it in the following decade or been shunted aside and become a historical footnote. These people were not easily sweet-talked out of their beliefs by white men in starched collars; like Nehru, they only adapted to circumstances when compelled.

Americans of all ideological stripes persistently overestimate the extent to which foreigners identify with or want to imitate them.

[LongLeftFlank]

Foreground: US Airborne modded (poorly) to French "lizard" camouflage; Canadian airborne.

Background: Polish infantry with LW wireframes and camo with US webbing added to represent Algerian Etranger units; using the officer uniform eliminates the chinstrap and allows a mix of helmets and berets.

With support for the war waning in France, the all-volunteer CEFEO (Corps Expéditionnaire Français en Extrême-Orient) was a pretty cosmopolitan force by 1954, with nonwhites (Vietnamese and North Africans) making up nearly half the headcount even in elite Metropole, Coloniale and Etranger Para battalions. Vietnamese supplementifs (porters, runners, translators and scouts) had given way to autochtones (soldiers) at squad level, in addition to all-Vietnamese companies with local officers. Reverting to ancient custom, these men commonly took their families along with them to war!

Few CEFEO units retained parade ground uniformity in terms of uniforms and equipment in the field; a mix of US, French and British WWII surplus was issued.

I tried retexturing the Garand to look like the French MAS36 service rifle but gave up. A better modder than me will need to push this forward from here. I will probably mess around some more then release what Indochina mods I have.

[mjkerner]

You are Phoc-ing amazing, LLF!

[sburke]

damn you LLF, i am gonna end up with still another install of cmbn for your ubber mods. lol

[LongLeftFlank]

Merci pour les encouragement, mes amis, but I'm still hoping one of the many talented French moddeurs in our community is going to take an interest in this at some point.

[LongLeftFlank]

You know, as I work my way through Roy's and Windrow's books, it's a revelation to me just how equal to / superior the Vietminh forces had become to the CEFEO forces at pretty much all levels by early 1954, from squad level to technology to C4I to overall strategy. Once again, the "robotic yellow hordes" myth that Westerners fear/cherish so deeply largely goes out the window.

Just throwing out some opinions here for discussion, but it seems to me the only areas where the French retained superiority were:

1. Air power, definitely helpful, especially in covering fighting withdrawals, although the French didn't have nearly enough to make a strategic difference or interdict Vietminh supply lines. But then again, there was probably no amount that *would* have been enough (even atomic bombs, which the US fleetingly considered using to break the siege) given the jungle, monsoons and rising Vietminh AA capabilities. Giap himself greatly overestimated the potency of French air power, but the VM had enough resources to waste some in overpreparing, overcamouflaging, etc.

2. Airlift. A distinctly mixed blessing, since overestimation of its capabilities is what led the French to hold and reinforce distant, isolated locations, culminating in DBP. As with airpower, terrain and weather made this a highly unreliable asset.

3. Battlefield initiative (short term only!). Broadly speaking, by 1954 if the French gave moving Vietminh forces more than about 10 hours to reconsolidate, dig in and receive new orders, the French would get their arses handed to them -- any victory was at best Pyrrhic. Either that or they'd find themselves blasting empty scrapes.

But when the Vietminh didn't get that breathing space, the French units would routinely beat them (or escape) assuming the latter had the strength and leadership to move. Both VM infantry and artillery subunit leaders tended to hold in place and await orders from above. This seems to be the main reason why even late in the game at DBP, skeleton French units repeatedly ejected far greater numbers of Vietminh from newly occupied positions. The French at DBP certainly got better at fighting at night, for the same reasons that the VM had had to become good at it in the first place.... badly outgunned in daylight!

That's pretty much all CEFEO had going for it.

Overland mobility, both big and small unit maneuver and logistics. Vietminh, hands down. No contest. The Vietnminh were virtually never thwarted by terrain. At best, Trinquier's Meo and Thai guerrillas and a couple of the best Para battalions (Bigeard, Brechignac) could match the VM speed in rough country for a limited period. But most CEFEO forces were rendered virtually unfit for combat by any kind of extended overland operation outside the Delta (and even within it), even facing minimal opposition.

Battlefield C4I seems about a wash; heavy radio sets plus lousy conditions negated most of the French technical advantage, especially in terms of calling artillery; on the move the VM instead used spies, runners and primitive but effective signaling systems. The VM were listening in to the French radio net about as much as vice-versa; both sides preferred landlines where possible.

Weapons. By 1954, the VM had equal or better equipment overall... in many cases, it was the same equipment. Their Type 50/51 submachine guns and Chinese Mauser rifles were superior to their French/US equivalents; they largely used the same LMGs. AFVs were of limited value in the terrain and the VM had numerous bazookas and RCLs to kill them -- more 75mms than the French in fact! The US 60mms were likely a bit better than the hodgepodge of VM lights, but the VM seemed able to manpack more 81/82 and 120mm mortars and ammo to their fights. By the end the VM artillery was as good, tube-for-tube, thanks to Chinese transfer of US 75 pack howitzers and 105s captured from the Kuomintang or in Korea. The French maps were shockingly bad at DBP, and it seems their fire mission preplanning was also slipshod, and once the initial VM bombardment shredded their landlines they were punching nearly blind. There are anecdotes that the VM fired a lot of dud rounds, but the same may well have been true of the French. The tropics does that.

Leadership. This is a tricky and incredibly complex one to call -- at DBP both sides demonstrated both genius and numbing incompetence at all levels. Opinions welcome; let me mull on it some more.

Soldier to soldier, the elite VM units were every bit as skillful, tough and courageous as the French paras (whose cadres were nearly half Vietnamese btw!) -- and a lot more numerous. I definitely discount all the agitprop about the Stakhanovite dedication of the bo doi, eagerly throwing themselves like soldier ants on embrasures and under the wheels of guns. It's unclear to me what that really amounts to in terms of battlefield performance. In spite of the "dare to die" legends, their peasant cadres were *distinctly* less fanatical than the Japanese... there was no Emperor to worship and land reform isn't much good if you aren't around to benefit. I'd chalk it up to strong discipline and zero forgiveness of failure, plus the universal soldierly values of camaraderie and the sense that that victory was in reach.

In contrast, for the besieged GOMO forces at DBP, it generally seems the men who were going to desert had largely done so before the fighting started in earnest; whole units in the case of the Thais at CR Anne-Marie. The rest fought and/or fell back without deserting.

As we've established elsewhere, it's nearly pointless to generalize about combat skill and bravery by nationality, experience levels aside. Having your back against the wall tends to "force" out the exceptional in all human beings as they are forced to take risks and break the rules. And by 1954 it was CEFEO which found itself in that position more often. So I'd broadly call it a wash on the above factors that dictated ability to "git 'er done" in the pinch.

My own thoughts and I'm not particularly stuck on them.

Bueller? Bueller? Jason? Anyone?

[Sgt Schultz]

Overall, it may been the sense of mission, and the "true believer" mindset that did more than anything else to thwart all Western attempts to pacify the area.

The communists truly believed that anything could be forgiven in the pursuit of their goals,while Western powers had to abide by those darn morals/rules/laws... pesky things that they are. The Viet Minh and related operations used people up with little to no regard for anything other than the completion of the task at hand.

To use a loose analogy, it was like the Crusades. Any horror is permissible for the greater good and glory of God/Ho/insert concept. Once you get enough people on that kind of twisted bandwagon, incredible things become possible.

That level of cultural dedication, coupled with both the terrain and the lack of true dedication of the Western powers, ensured defeat.

DBP was insanity from day one. Alamo with no greater purpose attached. Then the Americans doubled down on the firebase concept and threw resources at it to "do it better with helicopters". Hedgehog defense worked for the Germans, in the winter, in WW2, in Russia. And they tried for Regimental strength to do that right. It was foolishness in the extreme in Asia to drop a Btn in the jungle and expect any kind of positive result.

But your work is freakin' awesome LLF!

I look forward to playing with the new guys once you get it all done.

[LongLeftFlank]

Yup, although the success of the Demyansk airlift is part of what what led the Germans to believe they could keep Stalingrad going until the expected relief thrust broke through.

Thing is, the insanity only became truly clear in hindsight. Navarre assumed he could break two VM divisions and whatever limited arty they hauled 300 miles through the jungle mountains. Probably true enough. And if more unexpectedly showed up he could simply withdraw, because he'd get plenty of advance warning and his mobile forces would give him space in the valley to protect the airfields. None of that proved true but it seemed plausible at the time. The French commanders were not in fact pompous bumblers.... well, OK there was some pomposity.

As to fanatical Communism, it certainly existed but not in the way the agitprop wants you to believe. Total obedience to orders and the will of the Party was the message 24x7, with ostracism or death the penalty for failure. Not unique to them of course; iron discipline doesn't always equal combat results or else the Russians would have done better in 1920, 1939 and 1941. The rest of the Vietminh combat performance seems to me to be a function of good camaraderie plus increasingly competent higher leadership not putting them into unwinnable battles. The Communist idealism generally showed up before and after battle.

[MG TOW]

I often wonder how things would have been different if the B29 Arc light was ever authorized to support Dien Bien Phu. Would it have broke the seige?

The French urgently appeal to Washington for help. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff now consider three possible military options: sending American combat troops to the rescue; a massive conventional air strike by B-29 bombers; the use of tactical atomic weapons.

President Eisenhower dismisses the conventional air raid and the nuclear option after getting a strong negative response to such actions from America's chief ally, Britain. Eisenhower also decides against sending U.S. ground troops to rescue the French, citing the likelihood of high casualty rates in the jungles around Dien Bien Phu. No action is taken.

Did the US (perhaps influenced by Britain) actually see the French as more of a corporate competitor than an ally. Perhaps figuring the worst case being a loss for france would leave a vacuum they could walk into at a later date. Or were the Americans just too war weary at the time with the Korean conflict having recently ended.

[Sublime]

It.s an interesting question. I'd heard the US offered the French tactical nukes and the French declined. It is worth noting that USAF flights of cargo drops were used. CAS and interdiction I dont think so, but the cargo drop planes had USAF markings removed and so it's not a far step to remove markings on A-6 Skyraiders or somesuch and use them to bomb the Viet Minh.

I dont think B29 strikes would have done it, it's significantly less payload than a B52, and less accurate as well. For that matter, I dont think B52s would have done it either. Note at Khe Sanh, which was significantly less remote, with actual US troops there, and way more support aircraft and air support (the US had 2-3k airplanes, the french several hundred at DBP) versus VC/NVA who were waay less powerful than the forces at DBP. And still that siege lasted 3-4 months before it was broken. Though it also should be kept in mind that Khe Sanh was more of a diversionary attack than an all out effort like DBP.

Still, I dont think besides expending way more American might than it was worth (massive air support, US ground troops) that the battle could have been won for the French. It was ringed by mountains, and extremely remote.

[LongLeftFlank]

The French first wavered and then accepted, but as you say, the British remained opposed throughout.

I have no doubt that feelings were pretty negative in America too -- after all, the US hadn't used the Bomb in Korea/China, even though it was largely the US 8th Army at risk (retreat from the Yalu) and MacArthur was requesting it. The shocking thing was that it was offered as an option to the French at all. I haven't finished Windrow yet though.

But it seems like pretty much nothing short of groundbursts by a couple of 5-10KT A-bombs could possibly have broken the siege by mid-April. Maybe not that even.

As Sublime notes, the 60 B29s available from Clark AB (the Phillippines) couldn't possibly deliver enough conventional payload to silence the well dug in Viet Minh guns or cut Giap's supply lines. At best, carpet bombing *might* have been able to cover a determined breakout across the hills toward Laos, which would still have been a costly, horrific rout and an epic defeat, but *might* have saved as much as 1/3 of the GONO troops from the ordeal of captivity.

[Erwin]

"The shocking thing was that it was offered as an option to the French at all."

Of course we don't know what the US wanted in return. IIRC Britain paid a huge cost in gold, hi tech and loss of imperial possessions to get US support in WW2. The US was in the business of destroying the old empires in order to replace them.

[LongLeftFlank]

OK, getting a little too political here. Big bad Dulles, United Fruit, Aramco yadayadayada.

After a 2 week break from CM, I'm getting ready to start pinning out the master map of the entrenched camp and environs. I was tempted to wait for the 2.0 Editor upgrade, but I think I can manage.

[LongLeftFlank]

Borrowed a SPG9 wireframe from CMSF to represent a VietMinh 75mm M20 recoilless gun (base weapon is a 6lbr British Airborne ATG).

No backblast, but ya can't have everything.

[JasonC]

To sburke - men who faithfully supported the actual legal state of their country at great danger to themselves and often at the cost of their lives, against ruthless evil would-be tyrants striving to overthrow those governments by military force, were not "traitors". And you should be ashamed of yourself for saying so. You might as readily claim any blond person who didn't support the Nazis was a "traitor" to his "race" - it is nonsense, start to finish. No one was morally obligated to support the violent revolutionaries, who were ruthless mass murderers with the blood of millions of innocent men, women, and children on their hands. Those violent revolutionaries were traitors against the existing legal order. And the westerners who abandoned their local allies can much more plausibly be accused of "treason" for doing so - to a joint cause that they called others to, rather than to a state - than those allies themselves.

I'll stand with the loyal Algerian non coms and the ARVN thank you very much. And damn the westerners who abandoned them to slaughter to only a slightly higher circle of hell, than the revolutionaries themselves.

[sburke]

To sburke - men who faithfully supported the actual legal state of their country at great danger to themselves and often at the cost of their lives, against ruthless evil would-be tyrants striving to overthrow those governments by military force, were not "traitors". And you should be ashamed of yourself for saying so. You might as readily claim any blond person who didn't support the Nazis was a "traitor" to his "race" - it is nonsense, start to finish. No one was morally obligated to support the violent revolutionaries, who were ruthless mass murderers with the blood of millions of innocent men, women, and children on their hands. Those violent revolutionaries were traitors against the existing legal order. And the westerners who abandoned their local allies can much more plausibly be accused of "treason" for doing so - to a joint cause that they called others to, rather than to a state - than those allies themselves.

I'll stand with the loyal Algerian non coms and the ARVN thank you very much. And damn the westerners who abandoned them to slaughter to only a slightly higher circle of hell, than the revolutionaries themselves.

No I am not ashamed to say so. Characterizing a colonial creation as the "legal state" of a country doesn't make it the actual representative will of that nation, it is simply the legal state recognized by the colonial power.

So how would you characterize George Washington, John Adams etal? They were leading an uprising (violently I might add) against the legal state.

Not sure how you turned that around to somehow put them in the same league as Nazis but when folks resort to that level of extreme characterization, it is usually because the rest of the argument doesn't have much basis to stand on. Eisenhower himself admitted that 80 percent of the population was likely to vote against our wonderful standup "faithful to their state" guys, in other words the 20% who were willing to see their country dominated by others despite the overwhelming sentiment to the contrary amongst their fellow countrymen. The fact that we propped up this travesty at the cost of so many lives is what I feel shame about.

[John Kettler]

LongLeftFlank,

Beat me to it on the recoilless rifle backblast! On a different note, I found out there's a movie about your subject. Here's a pictorial guide to the weaponry, but the M24 Chaffee is totally botched and is really an M41 Walker Bulldog.

http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Diên_Biên_Phú

This is an excellent overview of Dien Bien Phu and was published in AIR FORCE magazine. Not only does it discuss the air side of things, but provides useful information on how Giap did what he did. Was surprised to see Giap had the Katyusha. Don't recall reading about that before.

http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2004/August%202004/0804dien.aspx

Here is the OB/OOB/ORBAT. It lists all the units involved, artillery strengths, and the immense ammunition stockpile Giap had for his guns.

http://orbat.com/site/history/volume4/435/Dien%20Bien%20Phu%201954%20v.2.htm

I emphatically commend the below thread to your concerted attention. Has extensive discussions of the overall military situation, potential intervention scenarios, airpower situation, previously unseen intel, to include period North Vietnamese, State Department and Australian intel, the last so good the Aussies knew how many 4.5V batteries were due from China. There are maps showing where the artillery was sited, plans of attack, aerial photographs, analyses of photos (including telling real ones from reconstructions; the famous "human wave attack" is a still from Viet Minh film; the human wave seen consists of French paratroopers).

There are photographs of the infantry and artillery weapons, to include the remarkable Vietnamese Katyusha, which had six barrels and was on a two wheel carriage. One of the things I somehow never understood was that ALL of Giap's artillery EXCEPT his precious 105mm howitzers (ex-U.S. via China; captured in the Korean War) engaged solely by Direct Fire from camouflaged emplacements!

While the bulk of Giap's artillery was on the forward slope of the first range of hills overlooking DBP, the 105s were on the next set of hills back, invisible to the French and apparently fired only at night, after having spent all day doing the target selections and firing calculations. The impression I got from reading pp. 10-19 was the Vietminh standard of artillery handling, in terms of technical expertise in Indirect Fire, was poor. Fortunately for them, the French got only a small fraction (~2000 tons of 37,000 tons needed) of the engineering materials required to properly fortify! The French were also progressively starved of such basics as food, and aerial resupply couldn't make up the difference after the runway was cut and flak "rivaling the Ruhr" was put into place. People in the thread liken it not to settlers cut off by Indians/Native Americans, but to Stalingrad (late in the game).

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=75459&page=10

The grog concentration here is off the charts, to include Vietnamese who can translate many otherwise unreadable docs, provide maps (as far down as 1:30,000 topos), battle plans, personal accounts they got from soldiers who were there and more. Need a diorama of Eliane? Not only is it here, but it's got little lights showing the breach points for Eliane's storming.

All in all, this is a total immersion course in DBP, and I believe you'll find it richly rewards you for time spent perusing it.

Regards,

John Kettler

[John Kettler]

LongLeftFlank,

I don't know which French position this was, but I believe you'll find this overhead view of the defenses most useful.

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/dien-bien-phu

Four more overheads of French defenses at bottom of linked page; three new, to me at least. Site may be useful from a uniform standpoint. Why? Its an Indo-China reenactor group!

http://www.tac-team.dk/Indochina/DienBienPhu.htm

Uniform pics from above. May or may not be useful, but you may see why the French held out as long as they did. Wouldn't dream of spoiling the surprise!

http://www.tac-team.dk/Indochina/photoswide.htm

Regards,

John Kettler