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  The French plan at DBP was to trick the wily guerrilla leader Gen Vo Nguyen Giap into throwing the uncounted thousands of his Viet Minh guerrillas into a pitched battle against an impregnable fixed position where they would all be wiped out. Yet, the generals in Paris and Hanoi already knew that Giap was a master of guerrilla strategy, unlikely to fall into such a trap. They also knew that he was supported by the Communist regime, which came to power in 1948 at the end of the Chinese civil war, and afforded the Viet Minh safe training bases on the Chinese side of the common border, plus apparently limitless supplies of materiel, smuggled along the jungle trails.

  Four whole years before DBP, French Chief of Staff Gen Georges Revers read a Top Secret report to the National Defence Committee in Paris on 25 July 1949, informing them that a vital communications axis designated Highway Four[4] in Vietnam would have to be abandoned because the French garrisons along it were otherwise inevitably going to be overwhelmed by Giap’s guerrillas.

  [SEE MAP A ‘Vietnam: The Strategic Highway Four 1949’ below]

  Highway Four was the strategic road twisting and turning between the hills for 116km parallel with the Chinese frontier in the northeast of Vietnam. From Lang Son to Dong Dang was 15km; at Kilometre 33 was Na Sam; at Kilometre 63, That Ke; at Kilometre 88, Dong Khe; at Kilometre 101, Nam-Nang and so on to Cao Bang, marking Kilometre 116. On many stretches of the road, the frontier was an easy two-hour stroll distant and Highway Four also crossed several historic invasion routes from China. To save needless loss of life, Revers recommended the posts be swiftly evacuated, together with the thirty-odd way-stations in between. His report became embarrassingly public when a Spanish ex-legionnaire using the name Tomás Pérez was arrested for assaulting on a Paris bus two Vietnamese students who had been attending the Communist-front World Youth Congress in Budapest. Police investigating the incident ‘happened to find’ copies of the Revers Report in their possession, which justified subsequent enquiries revealing scores of duplicated copies of the report among the Left-Wing Vietnamese student community. Claiming that he had been paid by French Intelligence to expose top-level leaks in government ministries, Pérez was allowed to disappear – possibly by re-enlisting in the Legion – before the cases came to court.

  Of all the garrisons on Highway Four that Revers had recommended for evacuation, Dong Khe was the strangest. Situated at the start of the 28km stretch known as the Road of Spilt Blood between there and Cao Bang, it was held for a time by two companies of the Legion’s 3rd Régiment Etranger d’Infanterie, designated 3 REI, whose commander Maj De Lambert was a mad dog without a bone to chew on – in other words a first-rate soldier frustrated to the core by the lack of sufficient forces to do anything about the vast numbers of Viet Minh moving in from China all around him. His mission was to stay put and keep Dong Khe a safe overnight stop for convoys heading north along Highway Four before they tackled the lethal final stage of their journey. He therefore put all his considerable energies into making Dong Khe the best possible place for men to spend their last night on earth.

  He built a nightclub casino with a difference, hacked out of the cliffs within the base and called Le Hublot – the Porthole. Since the men entering its portals were aware that the money in their pockets might never be spent anywhere else in this life, the stakes were high and the banker’s share distributed among the garrison was proportionate.

  Poker, chemin de fer, baccarat, backuan – one could play them all, smoke a few pipes, get blind drunk or have a dozen women, one after the other. There were only two prohibitions. A notice on the door signed by Lambert read:

  Following the death of Cpl Négrier and the deaths of… [here followed names of six legionnaires] … the games of Buffalo and Cuckoo are henceforth forbidden in this establishment.

  These were the games played by those who wanted the strongest buzz of all. Buffalo involved two ‘players’. On the bar were placed two bottles of aperitif, usually Cinzano or Dubonnet. Each man swallowed a bottle of his poison and then the two charged each other heads down and hands behind their backs like two buffaloes clashing their heads together at full speed. If neither was knocked out in the collision, they both drained another bottle of aperitif before repeating the confrontation. On occasions the players had been known to down two bottles of aperitif each before one was taken to the sick bay with severe concussion. On other occasions one collision was enough to crack a man’s skull.

  Cuckoo was, if anything, madder still. In the empty basement two men were given Colt 45s with nine rounds each. The lights switched out, one called out, ‘Cuckoo,’ meaning, ‘Is anyone there?’ He then jumped as smartly as a very drunken man can to one side, so that the bullet of the other player missed him. If it missed, the other called, ‘Cuckoo,’ and this continued until all eighteen bullets had been fired – in theory. In practice hardly anyone ever got that far, which is why Lambert eventually banned the two most popular games in Le Hublot.

  A legionnaire who knew Dong Khe at this time said, ‘So we were crazy? We wouldn’t have been there otherwise, would we?’[5]

  You did have to be crazy. The forts and way-stations along Highway Four were trip-wires, existing not attack or even slow down the enemy, but simply to be wiped out by any important incursion and thereby signal its presence. Sanity was in short supply on both sides. The reinforced concrete way-stations were used as training grounds by the Viets, testing the effects on concrete of different explosives and experimenting with different ways of blasting a passage through the wire by human suicide torpedoes and bamboo tubes stuffed with plastic explosive.

  Experimenting? The most surreal attack came at a way-station near Dong Khe known only by the elevation of the hill on which it stood. At midnight early in 1950 the garrison of six legionnaires and eight anti-Viet guerrillas commanded by Sgt Maj Gianno from Italy was awoken by the sentinels when what seemed to be a sparkling home-made bomb arched over the wall and fell into the courtyard. It was a petrol-soaked cat with a bundle of smouldering tinder tied to its tail. Before the first cat had exploded in a ball of flame, another landed in the courtyard, followed by another and another until the courtyard was a mass of demented, flaming cats.

  The hope of the Viets was that one or more of the desperate animals would run into the ammunition store and blow the whole place sky-high, which is what happened. The sole survivor of the explosion who managed to creep away through the jungle to Dong Khe was a Dutchman by name of Strast. Recounting his story next morning, he could hardly have expected to be believed anywhere else. Along Highway Four, everything was possible. The method of attack was never used again, probably because capturing enough cats and preparing them was harder work than chucking home-made bombs over the wall.

  Before 3 REI took over Dong Khe, at 0645hrs on 27 May 1950 the garrison of French-officered Moroccan colonial infantry awoke to the sound of exploding shells from five beautifully camouflaged 75mm guns hauled clandestinely into position on the hills above them. Forty-eight hours later, Gen Giap’s elite 308th Brigade took the place by storm, to be driven out within hours by the drop of a battalion of colonial paras, whose success engendered a false confidence within the French command, along the lines of ‘one battalion of our boys is worth a brigade of theirs’.

  On 24 June Communist North Korea invaded South Korea with Chinese backing and what little space the international press had allocated to the French war in Vietnam dwindled to nothing. Believing that Giap would now go all-out to win his war, marching in step with North Korea, the new C-in-C Vietnam Gen Marcel Carpentier defied Revers and decided that the frontier posts along Highway Four must be held at all costs to block Viet reinforcements and supplies coming in from China.[6] Events moved swiftly. Less than three months later Carpentier was planning to evacuate one of them before mid-October.

  Cao Bang was a tin-mining town surrounded by Viet Minh territory at the nodal point where Highway Three, leading to the capital Hanoi, intersected Highway Four, which ran from the coast northwards. It also
lay astride an historic Chinese invasion route only 24km from the frontier of Guangxi Zhuang province. The town was garrisoned by two companies of legionnaires from 3 REI under 40-year-old Col Pierre Charton, a wiry little man who stood so straight that he appeared tall, and whose reputation as a soldier’s soldier had spread well beyond the regiment.

  The only way to evacuate Cao Bang on the ground was via Highway Four, passing through Dong Khe, now garrisoned by 5th and 6th Companies of 3 REI. However, at 0700 on 16 September Giap repeated the previous treatment. After two days of bombardment from concealed artillery, the post was again overrun with so many casualties that only nine legionnaires made it through the jungle to the neighbouring post at That Khe, where they arrived with uniforms in shreds, nearly dead from hunger and thirst.

  With Cao Bang more isolated than ever, Carpentier reinforced its garrison by air with a battalion of Moroccan infantry. At Lang Son to the south on Highway Four Lt Col Marcel Lepage was ordered to re-take Dong Khe again and hold it until the Cao Bang garrison could rendezvous with him there. After that, the combined forces could march safely south. That was the plan, but Charton was not supposed to know in case it leaked out and the Viet Minh got to know. To lull his suspicions, Carpentier paid Cao Bang a lightning visit by air to reassure him that everything was under control. Two days later Gen Alessandri, C-in-C North Vietnam, came on the same mission, but took Charton into his confidence. Charton was furious because he knew there was no way the Viets positioned all along Highway Four would let him and the garrison just walk away, even if all the scorched-earth destruction was left undone until the last minute to avoid giving them prior warning.

  Two weeks passed before Lepage set out from That Khe on 30 September after the Legion’s 1st Bataillon Etranger de Parachutistes – abbreviated to 1 BEP – dropped in to reinforce his force of 8th Moroccan Infantry Regiment, making a total of 3,500 men on the post. Their mission was to re-take Dong Khe by 1200hrs on 2 October. In Cao Bang, Charton was fuming at the order radioed to him to abandon the fortress at 0001hrs on 4 October – a time chosen to wrong-foot the Viets.

  ‘To set an exact time for an operation like this is crazy,’ he retorted. ‘Who knows what the weather will be like? And without air cover, we haven’t a chance.’[7]

  The order was unshakeable. According to Hanoi, relayed by radio from Lang Son, Lepage was advancing and Dong Khe would be in the bag in a matter of hours. So what was Charton worried about?

  ‘In that case, make the RV nearer me,’ snapped Charton over the static interference. ‘Make it Kilometre 22 and not Kilometre 28. I’m going to be slowed down by our wounded and sick civilians, pregnant women and children, people in all stages of malaria, people with dysentery.’

  He had already told the population they could leave and join the Viets, stay and see what happened after the French withdrawal, or come with him. Nung, Meo and other minority-race locals had good reason to fear genocide from the Vietnamese after the French pull-out and the town’s whores faced the same fate on moral grounds. As a result the withdrawal would include 1,500 civilians.

  Charton was effectively told he was losing his nerve. How could he imagine that a few lousy Viet guerrillas would dare attack the combined force of his garrison and Lepage’s column? From the safety of Hanoi, that was unthinkable.

  And so the plan went ahead. South of Cao Bang in a basin surrounded by forested hills, 1 BEP’s two companies under Capt Pierre Jeanpierre and Lt Roger Faulques were tasked with re-taking the apparently abandoned citadel of Dong Khe on the morning of 2 October. It was a trap. Snipers, mortars and heavy artillery on the surrounding hills exacted a severe toll before the decision was taken to retreat after suffering 30% casualties.

  In Cao Bang at midday Charton obeyed orders, ordering his garrison to blow the charges already laid under the magazines and start destroying stores, burning everything that could not be moved and at the same time stashing anything edible and drinkable in their packs. Before they had finished this orgy of destruction, Lepage’s retreating column reached an abandoned way-station called Na Pa around 1400hrs. Suddenly mortar and large-calibre artillery shells were landing in profusion on the 2,000-plus men trapped in the valley. Lepage was scornfully called ‘the gunner’ by the paras of 1 BEP, but as an artilleryman he knew that the fire was coming from a Viet force several times as big as any forecast by Intelligence. With movement forward or back along Highway Four impossible, if he stayed where he was, the entire column could be wiped out in a couple of hours.

  It seems that only then was Lepage informed from Lang Son by radio that the purpose of his mission was to link up with the break-out from Cao Bang.[8] Since a further attack on Dong Khe was out of the question until the very low cloud lifted so that he could have fighter cover – which, at that time of year, could be days away – he replied that on no account must Charton leave Cao Bang.[9] This was more or less what Charton had been yelling into a microphone for the last two weeks.

  Lang Son did not agree. Looking at the maps, it seemed possible for Lepage to drive across country on a trail shown as a dotted line to Quang Liet, by which he could link up with Charton west of Dong Khe in the Coc Xa valley. Lepage therefore ordered 1 BEP to hold the enemy at Na Pa, while he led the Moroccans along the dotted-line trail, as ordered by Lang Son. Nobody as yet understood they were up against odds of at least ten to one. That came when Jeanpierre at Na Pa observed through binoculars a company of Moroccans wiped out by an entire regiment of Viets before they could reach tree cover. A single survivor made it back to Na Pa.

  At that moment Jeanpierre understood that 1 BEP was not being more heavily attacked because the main body of Viets had gone after Lepage, trapped in the jungle on an overgrown trail. It seemed that his only hope was for 1 BEP to draw them off. So, at 2200hrs, 1 BEP went over to the attack and took the crest between Na Pa and Lepage, somewhere in the jungle below them. By now 1 BEP was down to 350-400 men, who had not slept for two days and nights, had neither food nor water and were asleep on their feet as they hacked away with an unreliable compass towards where they thought Lepage was.

  At midnight, precisely as ordered, Charton’s column of 1,000 men of 3 REI and 600 Moroccans drove and marched out of the smoking ruins of Cao Bang, dragging the long tail of refugees with them.

  At 1700 on 3 October Lepage managed to raise Lang Son by radio to give a situation report, but learned to his horror that Charton had left Cao Bang and was much too far along Highway Four to retreat. By dusk Charton’s column had covered 16km in nineteen hours without major incident. A few shells had come their way from guns mounted on the crests of the hills, but Charton was not convinced the Viets’ failure to follow up with a ground attack meant that they lacked any sizeable infantry in the immediate vicinity. He confided his uneasiness to Maj Forget, who detailed six legionnaires under Sgt Kress to bring up the rear, isolated from the vanguard, but with a walkie-talkie that had a 5km range at best.

  The men set off cheerfully enough despite Kress forbidding them to even taste the many bottles of spirits offered by refugees eager to show gratitude to their protectors. Arrived at the rear of the column, two legionnaires asked permission to tirer leur coups with the prostitutes just ahead of them. Kress gave permission – for thirty minutes only.[10] During a local radio check minutes later, Snolaerts the radio man pretended that Kress had sent the two legionnaires on a brief reconnaissance, but they came back sooner than expected. The Chinese girls had been prepared to do a quick turn in the bushes, but the North African madam had forbidden it on the grounds they needed to save their energy for walking the next day! If the men wanted sex, she said in the unambiguous language of her trade, they should use each other.[11]

  At 0500hrs a jeep patrolled the length of the column, with orders for everyone to get moving again. At 1000hrs Charton radioed the rear guard with the news that he had at last got through to Lang Son and been ordered to leave the highway and follow the dotted-line trail on the map to Quang Liet and the new RV because Dong
Khe was still in Viet hands. The problem was that his map did not correspond with the topography. Kress was ordered to ask the locals whether anyone knew where the trail was. Through one of the Chinese prostitutes who spoke French and the local languages, they discovered an old man who said he could guide them and drove him to the head of the column, where all the vehicles were being burned and the field artillery that Charton had brought along against orders was being rendered useless.

  The trail turned out to be unused for many years, so that the point men had to hand their rifles to comrades and hack a passage through thick secondary growth jungle with coupe-coupe jungle knives. Kress was ordered to make sure the rear guard kept the column tightened up, with stragglers being left to their fate, although they would be killed by the Viets for having sided with the French.

  Kress was a tough veteran of the Second World War, but even so, he remonstrated, ‘What about the kids and pregnant women?’

  ‘Leave them,’ Charton ordered.[12]

  Disregarding that, first one legionnaire took a child being carried on its pregnant mother’s back, then another did the same, until they were all carrying at least one child. For the old and ill, they could do nothing. The laggards gathered into little groups, to have the comfort of not dying alone. Some slit open wrist veins to bleed to death before the Viets got them.

  From the south they could hear intermittent gunfire as Giap’s artillery harassed Le Page’s column fighting its way towards the new RV. The survivors of 1 BEP also converged on it towards nightfall, to find that they were at the top of a 300-metre precipice. After several men fell to their deaths trying to find a way down in the darkness, it was decided to spend the night at the top.