The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien Phu

May 7, 2004

"Any Forces That Seek to Impose Their Will on Other Nations Will Surely Fail"
The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien Phu
By AHMAD FARUQUI

On May 7, people from the world over will gather at Dien Bien Phu to commemorate one of the most important battles of the twentieth century. On that date in 1954, the People's Army of Vietnam (Vietminh) inflicted a decisive military defeat on the French army.

The battlefield is located in a river valley 500 km northwest of the capital, Hanoi, near the border with Laos and China. The history of struggle is ingrained in Vietnamese character. And, for more than a thousand years, Hanoi symbolized their resistance to Chinese domination. Then, in 1873, a French expeditionary force sacked Hanoi's citadel, and expropriated Hanoi into the seat of France's Indochina Empire.

In 1953, as the colonial era drew to a close, the French began to negotiate the terms of their withdrawal with the Vietnamese at Geneva. To strengthen their bargaining position, the French sought to defeat the Vietminh on the battlefield.

By March of the following year, French Col. Christian de Castries had gathered a force of 16,000 soldiers at Dien Bien Phu. The architect of the new strategy was Gen. Henri Navarre, who had taken over as the commander-in-chief of the French Expeditionary Corps in Indochina. Navarre wanted to defend northern Vietnam and Laos, but he also hoped to draw Giap's elusive Vietminh into a large-scale confrontation. He believed that his paratroopers, foreign legionnaires, armored vehicles, and fighter-bombers would destroy the communist Vietminh once and for all. Navarre, however, had overestimated his force's strength and underestimated the tenacity of the Vietminh.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/faruqui05072004.html

"The French Should Be Ashamed of Their Inability to Win in Vietnam"

Brilliant guy. Most stuff you read in western textbooks, media analyses (cough cough History Channel), and so forth try to pin what happened on French bungling. Then go one to say our armchair generals bungled too. Never really hear much that suggests that the enemy might just have been that good.