Free Embers of War by Fredrik Logevall

VIII
    IT REMAINS TO BE ASKED IF IT COULD HAVE TURNED OUT DIFFERENTLY . Might the battle of Dien Bien Phu, if the French command had conducted it another way, have yielded a different result? Could it have ended in a victory for French Union forces instead of a defeat, thereby perhaps changing the whole complexion of the war?
    In strategic terms, Navarre’s original decision to make a stand at Dien Bien Phu had more to recommend it than conventional historical wisdom has suggested. He was not wrong to want to create an initiative outside the delta, or to see the valley as the best available place to bar Giap’s path to Luang Prabang, the royal capital of Laos, which France was committed to defending. Nor was it necessarily unreasonable to see in Operation Castor an opportunity to repeat the success of Na San the previous year, but on a greater scale: that is, Navarre believed he could create at Dien Bien Phu a focus of action that would draw into play, on terms favorable to him, the bulk of the enemy’s mobile force. And it made sense to try to deny the enemy the lucrative opium harvest of the area. The counterargument would be that Navarre would have been better off sacrificing northern Laos in order to husband his resources in the more vital Red River Delta and force Giap to attack him there, and that he should have anticipated much more readily than he did the logistical problems that ensued and that ultimately would be the garrison’s undoing. Fair points both. Then again, had General Giap followed the original plan and launched the attack on January 25—which, as we have seen, he came very close to doing—his troops might have suffered a colossal defeat. Navarre’s conception would have been fully vindicated. Castor would have gone down in history as a military masterstroke, its architect a strategist of the first order. Many of the same military experts—not least, it should be said, American ones—who after May 7 savaged Navarre’s decision to establish a garrison that could be supplied and reinforced only by air had earlier lauded his choice and predicted it would result in a smashing victory.
    Of course, Giap did not attack on that final Monday in January. He waited seven more weeks, until twilight on March 13. By then, it had long since become clear to Navarre, to Cogny, and to de Castries that their hopes of operating beyond the valley, indeed beyond the range of their own artillery, were in vain. By then, they grasped that the Viet Minh had defied the forecasts and assembled an enormous stock of ordnance as well as superiority in numbers. A battle of position and attrition now seemed more or less inevitable, and the question is whether the French commanders could have done more in tactical terms to prepare for the encounter. The answer must be yes, even if some things were beyond their power to remedy—notably the inability of the French Air Force, stretched to the limit and lacking sufficient aircraft and crews, to provide adequate air cover. They might have, for one thing, used that limited airpower more effectively. They committed the common error of overestimating the strategic capabilities of airpower, dropping huge tonnages of bombs on Routes 41 and 13 to interdict Viet Minh supplies and having little to show for it. The Viet Minh proved too adept at getting the materials through. French planners would have been better off concentrating their bombing effort on the basin itself. 55
    Inside the valley, the layout of the position left much to be desired. The network of defensive strongpoints was poorly conceived, with Isabelle too far away to really support the central position with artillery fire, and Gabrielle and Béatrice too weakly defended to play their assigned roles in defending the airstrip. At no time did Cogny order de Castries to test whether his reserve forces could reach these strongpoints at night and under fire. Probably none of them, and certainly not Isabelle, should have been