Dien Bien Phu: Monument To A Failed French Strategy -- Vietnamese Tactics That Won There Later Defeated U.S.

DIEN BIEN PHU, Vietnam - Forty years ago, men fought, bled and died here in an epic battle that changed the course of recent world history.

Over the years, the trenches and bomb craters have given way to the gentleness of the land, save for some battle sites with small decaying stone memorials that hint at the events that took place.

Here was where the French stronghold of Dien Bien Phu fell to a peasant Vietnamese army of nationalists and communists, ending French colonial rule, setting the stage for the involvement of the United States in Vietnam and ending Western - and white - domination of much of Southeast Asia.

New generations of farmers now roam the peaceful valley with water buffalo. Life is simple and uncomplicated. Children play in ponds. Old men and women ride their bicycles.

White clouds frame the ring of mountains from which Vietnamese troops laid siege to the French forces for 56 days.

"I can no longer communicate with you," crackled the last chilling message from the French fortress to headquarters in Hanoi, nearly 200 miles away.

Dien Bien Phu fell on May 7, 1954. The victorious Vietnamese raised a banner over the bunker command post of French Gen. Christian de Castries proclaiming, "Determination to Fight, Determination to Win."

With that, France waned as a colonial power. A new player would emerge as a bulwark against the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.

Dien Bien Phu propelled the United States into a full-scale war a decade later, boasting that its military and economic might would crush the poorly armed Communists and maintain a balance of power in the Free World. It didn't, and history wrote its own script.

Indeed, French President Francois Mitterrand acknowledged as much after a visit to Dien Bien Phu a little over a year ago. "French colonialism had to understand the necessity of turning the page," he said.

Over the years, with their own hands, the peasants and soldiers filled the bomb craters and trenches and flattened the battlefield of Dien Bien Phu on which thousands of Vietnamese and French died.

They and the generations which followed them gave birth to a new valley of lush pastures of rice and maize and fruit gardens sustaining a population that has grown more than tenfold to 125,000 people.

Many of the veterans of the battle are still alive.

The veterans are paraded out for special occasions, such as the 40th anniversary.

At the front is their leader, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, now 82, the legendary warrior who defeated the French and later held off more than a half-million U.S. troops. He wields little power today in a newly emerging Vietnam that years ago made its peace with France and is now edging closer to America.

Dien Bien Phu represents the glory of the old soldiers, an occasion to put on their tattered, mismatched uniforms with medals as they retrace the battlefield and pose for photos for reporters and tourists.

Giap and senior officers who fought alongside him took a patrol into the past on a pre-anniversary visit early in April. Giap stood in front of de Castries' command post, transfixing villagers with riveting accounts of how he defeated the French general.

While Giap had been to Dien Bien Phu several times in past years, he returned to his old headquarters in Muong Phang, 10 miles away, for the first time since his victory. He received a hero's welcome.

About 4,000 of Giap's soldiers lie in four tree-shaded cemeteries in Dien Bien Phu. There is none for the French. Their dead are symbolized by two rebuilt grave sites, where returning French veterans pay their respects.

Hundreds of Vietnamese and French soldiers were buried in the earth of Dien Bien Phu at the positions where they fell, or were swallowed up by monsoon waters.

Many of the Vietnamese veterans of Dien Bien Phu also fought against the Americans. One of the four cemeteries holds the fallen Vietnamese of that war.

Those Vietnamese soldiers who survived have grown old now. Many are retired and tending their gardens.

But they still can feel the weight of the heavy artillery they pulled by hand and the 50 pounds of rice each carried for miles through the mountain passes, often under attack by French bombers.

They can still see the French bodies in the trenches and feel the hatred that inspired them to victory.

They still can feel the sting of the hot shrapnel making contact with their own bodies and the excruciating pain of bullets being removed with no anesthesia.

MANY DIED

"So many people were killed, both Vietnamese and French," said Nong Van Khau, now 63. "They all laid down in the trenches and died."

The French lost 2,200 killed out of more than 16,000 in the garrison. Waving white flags, up to 10,000 others surrendered, many of them seriously wounded. Many of them succumbed on a 500-mile death march to POW camps.

Western historians estimate the Vietnamese suffered from 8,000 to 10,000 dead. That was about one-fourth of their forces at Dien Bien Phu.

Khau was among the thousands of wounded who survived to fight in the war against the Americans. He wears a chest full of medals. He still carries scars on his right knee and a piece of a bullet in his lung.

NO ANESTHESIA

Surgeons ripped his back open with a pair of scissors to pull out the shrapnel with no anesthesia. Pain killer was for the more severe cases. The surgeons gave him the part of the bullet they removed as a souvenir.

"I was very angry," Khau recalled. "I threw the bullet away because I considered it as my enemy."

The Vietnamese surrounded Dien Bien Phu with a network of trenches stretching hundreds of miles from the high mountains to the plains, cutting French supply lines and gradually tightening the noose around their camp.

BOMBS VS. BARE FEET

From their fortified trenches, barefooted Vietnamese shock troops assaulted French strongholds day and night, even under French bombardment. They secured their artillery in the surrounding mountains and built roads for trucks to carry shells to each gun position.

"The greatest surprise we had in store for the enemy was our refusal to engage in all-out lightning clashes with the elite entire strength of the (French) Expeditionary Corps, firmly dug in their solidly built forts," Giap wrote in one account of the battle, "Dien Bien Phu: The Most Difficult Decision."

"We decided to destroy pockets of resistance one by one," Giap wrote, "and gradually, in our own way, at a time and place of our own choosing, launch attacks with overwhelming superiority in each battle and at the same time consolidate our bunker system and cut the enemy's supply line until the base camp was strangled."

The defeat of the French brought to a close the first Indochina War. The Geneva Agreement of 1954 that followed divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel into North and South.

The second began after the United States and South Vietnam refused in 1956 to honor a key provision in the Geneva agreement that called for national elections to be held that year to reunify the country. They feared the Communists would win and gain control of South Vietnam, upsetting the balance of power with China and Russia.

Giap would repeat his Dien Bien Phu strategy against the United States, locking it into its most divisive war that took a toll of nearly 60,000 U.S. dead and two million Vietnamese killed.

The first U.S. military advisers arrived in Saigon in July 1950. The first U.S. combat forces arrived in South Vietnam in March 1965. Over the next three years, American forces grew to more than half a million troops.

MANY MEMORIES

For many, Dien Bien Phu stirs memories of an old U.S. battlefield, Khe Sanh, near the Laotian border just below the old Demilitarized Zone that divided the warring Vietnams.

For 77 days in 1968, Giap's forces laid siege to the U.S. fortress, hammering it daily with cannon fire from surrounding mountain positions.

But Khe Sanh held with the support of massive U.S. air strikes that unleashed nearly 100,000 tons of explosives against North Vietnamese positions, one-sixth of the total tonnage dropped by U.S. planes during the entire three years of the Korean War.

A relief column of 12,000 U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers reached the battered base on April 5. The North Vietnamese had withdrawn into the jungles.

What had been billed as the showdown battle of the war never came off, but the cost of holding the base had been high, with more than 200 U.S. Marines killed and 1,600 wounded.

Like Dien Bien Phu, Khe Sanh became synonymous with failed military strategy.

It was a consideration that eventually led the United States to withdraw its military forces in 1973 under terms of the Paris Peace Agreement. The war between North and South ended on April 30, 1975, with a Communist victory.