Sixty years ago this morning I listened to a sombre radio announcer intone, “Dien Bien Phu has fallen.” Scant hours earlier Viet Minh rebels had overrun the French fortress in Indochina. Just over four months previous when French paratroopers jumped in to seize the valley, virtually no one outside the area had heard the name. Now Dien Bien Phu was known throughout the world.
Although only 10 years old, I had followed the battle with interest. For me it featured one of George Orwell’s “wild, almost lunatic misunderstandings” of childhood. I misheard the radio news announcers, as though they were saying “MGM Phu.” I puzzled at the French naming a fortress after a movie company. A decade later I found the actual name and read an article which re-kindled my interest in what I learned had been a pivotal battle in the 20th century.
Militarily it was uninteresting, re-stating long known lessons: on the losing side, never underestimate your enemy, and be wary of inviting him to surround and besiege you. On the winning side, General Giap has been criticized for accepting horrendous casualties in order to win. Similar criticisms are made of the Soviet Union’s Marshal Zhukov in the Second World War, and General Grant in the U.S. Civil War. But all were victors. Similarly expensive assaults in the First World War – every one a failure – discredited Britain’s Field Marshal Haig.
Politically, the fall of Dien Bien Phu tolled the bell on colonialism. The photograph of a Viet Minh soldier waving the red flag atop the conquered French command post was flashed around the world. Anti-colonialism had long been in the air, but the French defeat got a clear message through to subject peoples – their foreign masters could be beaten. Thirty-one years later the image of a helicopter rising from a pad atop the American embassy in what was then Saigon similarly proclaimed a symbolic, humiliating end to the United States’ successor venture in Viet Nam. Around the same time Portugal shut down the last of the colonial liberation wars.
Dien Bien Phu returned to the news four years ago with the death of Marcel Bigeard, France’s famed former paratroop commander. He had jumped into the valley with the initial assault force, then again when parachutists returned to reinforce the beleaguered garrison. He became one of the airborne leaders who took control of the defence when the appointed commander proved ineffectual. Later he became prominent in the savage battle to preserve France’s Algeria colony. His reputation is stained by the French army’s resort to torture and secret summary executions there. A British newspaper quoted his former superior, General Jacques Massu as saying he saw Bigeard torturing an Algerian prisoner, and that Bigeard told him prisoners in Indochina were tortured. After Bigeard’s death in 2010 the Vietnamese government declined to grant his wish that his ashes be scattered at Dien Bien Phu. The stated reason was fear of setting a precedent.
Writer David Haas is a long term St. Albert resident.
