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Dien Bien Phu is a market town in an almost preposterously remote corner of northwest Vietnam. Common sources give its population as either nine thousand or twenty-two thousand (the former seems more likely to me). In 1953, however, it was so small it wasn’t even considered a community and in fact didn’t have a name. The phrase “Dien Bien Phu” translates roughly as “border-area administrative post.” Few outsiders had ever heard of it. By the spring of 1954, however, it was a place very much in the news internationally.

France’s eagerness to resume its lucrative control of Indochina at the end of the Second Wold War was stymied by the surprising, to French eyes, growth of the Viet Minh. As Ho Chi Minh was the political brain of the liberation movement, so Vo Nguyen Giap was the military one. Ted Morgan has written of Giap as “a man of action with a chess player’s mind.” Morgan, a senior American journalist and biographer, is himself, like Ho, a pseudonymous individual. Until he chose to become an American in the 1970s, he was Sanche de Gramont, a minor member of the lingering French nobility. (He selected “Ted Morgan” because it is an anagram of “de Gramont.”) As a young man he was an intelligence officer in the French army, serving during the war in Algeria, where some of the soldiers he knew had survived the horrible fighting at Dien Bien Phu.

Few battles of the twentieth century were more resoundingly decisive or remain such powerful cautionary tales. What took place at Dien Bien Phu has become the subject of a vast literature in both celebratory Vietnamese and exculpatory French. In English, too, the topic keeps recurring in new books, both scholarly and popular. For years, the foremost work in English was Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. It was published in 1966, the year before its author was killed by a landmine while reporting the American War for the New York Times. More than four decades later came Morgan’s Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War, a work whose subtitle says a great deal. I suppose that Morgan is still so French that his former nation’s defeat seems a tragedy in more than just loss of life. But he may also have become so American that, like many others in the United States, he continues to seek precedents for what happened between 1965 and 1975. In any case, the two books are quite different. Fall loved military jargon and put far more effort into explaining logistics, for example, than ideology. In contrast, Morgan writes excellent journalistic prose and attempts the difficult of task of giving us the serious political context for the battle narrative.

What exactly went so wretchedly wrong for the French? Cultural condescension, certainly, but impatience, as well. The colonies were growing. In 1937, there were twenty thousand French people — the colons — in Vietnam and 19 million Vietnamese. By 1954 there were fifty thousand French and 25 million Vietnamese. The latter had stereotypes of the former: for instance, that of the big-bellied French officials and businessmen, growing rich and cruel on exorbitant taxation, rigidly imperial economics, and military might while living with their Vietnamese mistresses (con gai). For their part, the French saw the local population as backward and ignorant.

For a number of years the Viet Minh had been using standard guerrilla and terrorist tactics in both the cities and the rural areas, following methods learned by observing Mao Zedong. By 1953, however, the former ragtag guerrillas had become a formidable and highly disciplined army. We all know the platitude about the tendency of generals to refight the previous war. In this case, the previous war was the recently concluded one in Korea whose most glaring feature had come right at the beginning, in June 1950, when the North invaded the South by suddenly sending a “human wave” of 213,000 soldiers across the 38th parallel.

In Vietnam, the French, tired of the standard anti-colonial scrapping, and fearful that the Viet Minh would expand the war into neighbouring Laos, came up with a plan. They would fortify a strange misty valley a few miles from the Lao border. It was, and is, an elliptical plain made of red clay and surrounded on all sides by thick jungle and very high mountains. Such a tempting target was supposed to lure the Viet Minh into making a human-wave attack. The French imagined tens of thousands, maybe scores of thousands, of lightly armed bo dois charging over open ground, only to be mowed down by French artillery and air power in a single coup. The French believed they were well prepared for their mission. They had even brought along two field-brothels (bordels militaires de campagne) staffed with Algerian and Vietnamese women. But French G-2 work was very poor at best and almost non-existent at worst. They didn’t know how many Vietnamese they were facing or where exactly these enemies were or even how they were armed. They knew only that the Viet Minh, who admittedly had no air force, likewise had no artillery to speak of, nor the skill to use it effectively if they had. These assumptions were mistaken. It was the French who became the sitting ducks.

The commander in Indochina was General Henri Navarre, who came from NATO headquarters in Europe. In his ignorance of Indochina, some saw the promise of a fresh perspective. He gave field command at Dien Bien Phu to an officer who had served under him in Italy during the Second World War: Colonel (but now, instantly, General) Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries, a cavalryman who had chosen to work his way up through the ranks rather than profit from the influence of his ancient military family. One of the officers Castries himself would most rely on at Dien Bien Phu was Colonel Charles Piroth. He, too, was a veteran of the Italian campaign, during which he had lost his left arm at the shoulder. He was an artilleryman whose task was to keep the Vietnamese human wave at bay until the optimal moment.

There were thirteen thousand French troops in all. Most of the rank-and-file were Algerians, Moroccans, or members of the Légion etrangère. Of this last group, many were ex-Nazis who considered questions about the previous decade somewhat impertinent. There were also some loyal tribal people, whom the French called autochthones. The French weren’t fully aware that there were fifty thousand Vietnamese with as many again in reserve.

When the first French troops arrived by parachute in November 1953, during the dry season, they began building an airstrip and then, on either side of the Nam Yum River, nine defensive positions, what Morgan calls “this network of overlapping little fortresses, this labyrinth of barbed wire and sandbags.…” The strongholds were given feminine forenames, beginning with Anne-Marie and extending down the alphabet to Isabelle (and, contrary to legend, these were not the names of Castries’s — or anybody else’s — mistresses back in Paris). The defences were made of earth, concrete, and barbed wire, and were connected to one another by communication trenches. The building materials for these and for the all-important airstrip, not to mention all the weapons, ammunition, food, medical supplies — everything — had to be flown in, for although Hanoi was less than three hundred kilometres miles away, it was sixteen hours distant by road: a road controlled by the Viet Minh in any case. The airlift involved cargo planes acquired from the United States: C-47 Dakotas (in the early stages, they made eighty flights a day) and C-117 Flying Boxcars. This is when the trouble began.

The French foresaw no danger in occupying the lower ground rather than the higher, because they doubted that the Viet Minh had much artillery. The French possessed sixty guns. Although none of the Viet Minh pieces was as large as the heaviest French ones, they numbered two hundred in all, many of them from China. Similarly, the French couldn’t accept that their enemy could move their big guns to the rugged mountaintops that surrounded the plain. But that’s precisely what Giap did. He disassembled the field pieces as much as possible, cordelling them with ropes, dragging them centimetre by centimetre and metre by metre, using thousands of ungloved hands and sandaled feet; for, as Morgan has written, “although the French had tanks and airpower, it turned out that long lines of coolies were more dependable.” The Viet Minh dug heavily disguised caves in which to conceal the cannon, bringing them out of hiding just long enough to do their work, before retracting them again. Also, they dug dummy caves at which they set off tiny explosions that mimicked muzzle flashes, tricking Colonel Piroth into wasting ammunition. They managed to render the French airfield useless and to prevent it from being repaired.

With terrible and inexorable efficiency, the guns in the mountains also destroyed the French expedition’s fix-winged aircraft as well as helicopters and tanks. Food, ammunition, and medical supplies were running out as the casualties piled up, with no way to transport the wounded to Hanoi where they could be treated effectively. “By the end of March,” Morgan wrote, “Dien Bien Phu was surrounded. The only way in was by parachute, and there was no way out.” And as the cannon in the mountains pounded away, the Viet Minh down in the valley continually dug trenches of their own, moving ever closer. “Here, nine years into the nuclear age, was a return to siege warfare that went back to medieval times.” Giap was a close student of the military classics — Napoleon, Clausewitz, and, most tellingly of all, the Marquis de Vauban, whose ideas had revolutionized siege three centuries earlier. For his part, Castries asked Hanoi to air-drop him four copies of the official manual of siege warfare published during the First World War.

The siege became a daily melodrama in the eyes of the world, including, of course, the United States, which, then as later, saw Ho Chi Minh not as a nationalist primarily, but as a tool of the Third International, bent on propagating global communism. When General Navarre took over in the region, insisting that the purpose of the campaign was to prevent the Viet Minh from attacking Luang Prabang, he told a subordinate, “We’ve had American generals, veterans of Korea, tell us how satisfied they were with our deployment. They invested a lot of money here and they didn’t want us to lose.”

His listener replied tactfully: “My only desire is to believe you, General.” At one point Washington considered using nuclear weapons, but decided against the plan, fearing it would lead to sending U.S. ground forces into Vietnam.

A few French troops were getting in by parachute, but only a few. One sergeant wrote to his brother back home: “The Viets are two hundred metres from our barbed wire, hiding in trenches. They look at us. We look at them.” He added: “On top of everything, we’ve run out of wine.” A major with a safe desk job in Saigon learned that his wife had been lost at sea en route from France by steamship. In despair, he asked to be dropped into Dien Bien Phu. He was volunteering to commit suicide or, as he put it, “doing Camerone.” The reference was to a famous nineteenth-century battle in Mexico in which an entire Légionnaire command was wiped out. Colonel Piroth no longer counted enough pieces of artillery to keep the enemy away or enough gunners left alive to man the guns if he still had them. He retreated to his bunker. Having only one arm, he found it difficult to load and cock his pistol, so he committed suicide by using his teeth to pull the pin on a grenade. Castries was, in Ted Morgan’s words, “marinated in despondence.” (Morgan enjoys culinary metaphors. A few pages on, a certain section of the battlefield is “truffled” with landmines.)

Most of French strongpoints were quite low, but there was one, code-named Dominique, that was a hundred or more metres high and of enormous circumference. Indeed, it is still the dominant geographical feature of Dien Bien Phu, overlooking the town. A full battalion was needed to defend it properly. Toward the end, it was manned by only two thin companies of Algerians, whom Castries considered unreliable in any case. “Better to obliterate a company than rout a battalion,” Giap observed, as he tightened his stranglehold on each of the sorry outposts in turn. In Paris, the government began to look a bit wobbly. In Dien Bien Phu, the monsoon had begun. Mushrooms sprouted on the soldiers’ boots after only twenty-four hours. The troops were out of almost everything. Both the living and the dead were sucked down into the mud.

On May 7, 1954, after fifty-six days of actual siege, General Castries surrendered. The most famous photograph of this French War is one of Viet Minh soldiers standing atop the round corrugated-iron roof of the general’s bunker, waving their flag. Of the thousands of French troops who were taken prisoner, relatively few survived captivity and made it back to Europe or North Africa. Today, Dien Bien Phu’s principal boulevard is named May Seventh Street.

The lessons of Dien Bien Phu are numerous and altogether obvious. At the end of his book, Morgan wrote:

When he later read that some of Castries’ men had died without showing any apparent wounds, Giap concluded that “their endurance had failed, because they did not know what they were fighting for.” Navarre’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu, Giap believed, had come from “an error in judgement in that he did not understand his adversary. He didn’t realise it was a people’s war.” For the French elite troops, war was their profession. But what were they fighting for? Navarre’s mistake was that he couldn’t believe illiterate peasants could become good artillerymen, or that cadres who hadn’t graduated from Saint-Cyr could solve strategic and tactical problems.