The French Foreign Legion Read online

  At daybreak, Jeanpierre and Faulques did not like what they saw. The Coc Xa valley was cut in two by a narrow gorge in the middle. All the Viets had to do, was wait until Lepage’s column entered at one end and Charton’s at the other – and wipe them out before they could join forces.

  Neither Jeanpierre nor anyone else then knew how many Viet Minh battalions were closing in on them. Sustained harassment for the rest of the day reduced 1 BEP to less than 300 men. The wounded who could not walk received a French bullet in their skulls as a last favour from a comrade. Meanwhile, the Viets were biding their time and building their strength to an unprecedented 20,000 – 30,000 men with both field and heavy artillery, waiting for Charton to arrive.

  That night, Lepage received the first direct radio transmission from Charton, with the news that he hoped to reach Coc Xa next evening, or at latest by dawn on 6 October. From his reaction, Jeanpierre and Faulques realised that ‘the gunner’ was hoping to be rescued by the people he was supposed to rescue. Repeatedly their men had to strengthen his Moroccans wherever they were under most pressure. Moving at night in single file along a narrow trail in thick jungle, more than thirty paras were unnervingly grabbed one after another and had their throats cut in total silence.

  Counting the losses at dawn, 1 BEP was ordered to spearhead a breakthrough to link up with Charton. Without air cover, they were mown down by well-sited mortars and machine guns. Running out of ammunition and resorting to grenades and bayonets, they finally made contact with their fellow-legionnaires of 3 REI in Charton’s advance party. Once the panic of Lepage’s Moroccans had infected their compatriots in Charton’s column the only troops still effectively under control were 3 REI and 1 BEP. Despite fighting against appalling odds in the way that had become traditional in the Legion, their valour was not enough to halt the confusion and slaughter in the Coc Xa valley.

  Approximately 6,600 men were killed or taken prisoner. Nobody counted the civilian dead. Twelve officers and 475 men made it safely to That Khe on 8 October, including three officers, three NCOs and twenty-three men of 1 BEP – among them Jeanpierre and Faulques, both wounded. The scale of the disaster at Coc Xa was observed that day by a Morane spotter aircraft piloted courageously down through the clouds into the valley to find signalling panels spread meaninglessly among the debris, from which long columns of prisoners were already being herded away through the jungle into the Viet prison camps.

  The toughest officers and men taken prisoner would remain there during four years of watching their less robust comrades growing fewer in number each week, due to untreated diseases and forced marches from camp to camp on rations of rice, political indoctrination and little else. One of the few ‘lucky’ ones at Coc Xa was Legion Cpl Zurell. Picked up in the jungle so badly wounded that he seemed bound to die, he was exchanged by the Viets. Repatriated to Algeria, he wanted to live, and somehow pulled through, to volunteer for Vietnam a second time.

  In concert with the massacre in the Coc Xa valley, Giap launched attacks all along Highway Four, as Revers had foreseen. Two companies of legionnaires were told to hold That Khe as a base for survivors of the two columns to home in on, but forbidden to go to their rescue under any pretext. On 18 October Carpentier ordered a military and civil evacuation of Highway Four from Lang Son all the way south to the coast. This was sheer panic. Although there was no immediate risk, in some cases magazines and artillery pieces were not even blown up or rendered unserviceable and the Viet Minh, always short of medicine, received in this way a present of 150 tonnes of medicine and surgical supplies.[13]

  The arrival of the refugees in Hanoi had people in the terrace cafes people talking openly of abandoning the colony. In Paris, the Communist credentials of Giap and his political master Ho Chi Minh made them heroes of the Left Wing, which organised blockades to halt ambulances carrying the repatriated wounded and incited blood donors to refuse their blood to soldiers. Nervous that conscripts would refuse to report for military service en masse, the government passed a law prohibiting any conscript being sent to a war zone[14] – a law that was conveniently forgotten when Algeria erupted in 1954.

  A strong man was evidently required to halt the panic in Vietnam. He was found in the person of the universally popular ‘King John’, correctly known as Gen Jean De Lattre De Tassigny, the most senior Vichy officer to rally to De Gaulle in the Second World War. To counter the Viet Minh promise to take Hanoi by 19 December, his arrival and that of Minister of State Letourneau was marked by a parade of 5,000 troops in the city that evening to show the population who was in charge. Since the VIPs could not drive in from the airport without the route being secured by 2 BEP, it was a debatable point. The legionnaires had so little time to prepare for the parade that they arrived in combat gear and donned their képis only at the last moment for the ceremonies, lit by the headlamps of trucks parked around the parade ground.

  That was PR to calm the civilians. De Lattre’s personality also calmed the troops. ‘I have come,’ he said to the captains and the lieutenants, while their seniors kept discreetly to the rear of the reception, ‘so that from now on you will have a commander who commands’.[15] His manner and his words went a long way to reassure the fighting soldiers with no respect for the REMFs who had ordered the retreat from Highway Four. They also approved De Lattre’s recipe for combating the Viet Minh by implanting quick-build ‘hedgehog’ fortresses deep in Viet Minh areas which Giap would have to attack and where he would incur such heavy losses that they would collectively bleed him white. The hedgehogs were not linked by roads because there was no time to build them and anyway the Viets would have cut them, so re-supply and reinforcement was by air. Perhaps the real heroes were the pilots who daily risked their lives juggling their Second World War Junkers aircraft between the clouds and mountains in areas where the maps often bore little resemblance to what they could see of the terrain, dropping supplies to the outposts and both men and ammunition into positions under enemy attack. They also dropped napalm, which De Lattre introduced to Vietnam.

  For a while, it seemed to be working, so long as one did not look at what the planners called the ‘pox map’, whose red blotches of Viet Minh-controlled areas grew week by week. With De Lattre’s requests for more men never satisfied, he had to plunder the rear to use every man at the front in this new aggressive warfare. In this way 13th Demi-Brigade de le Légion Etrangère – abbreviated to 13 DBLE – lost three of its four battalions, posted to the north.

  Changing the rules, Giap stepped up terrorist atrocities in the poorly defended towns and cities. The need to protect civilians in the towns so that business could continue – it was, after all, the reason for being there, especially the rubber plantations so vital for the huge Michelin company – meant abandoning many of the new bases. So Giap won that round.

  The forces deployed against him were numerically impressive. At its peak, the expeditionary force numbered 235,721 officers and men including French-officered colonial troops fromVietnam, Laos, Cambodia and North Africa. Of the 18,710 men drawn from Legion regiments around 50% were German. In many units instruction and orders had to be translated into German, or given directly in the language. A government policy to exclude ex-SS men would have been impossible to enforce, since many had had their under-arm blood-group tattoos removed – not that the Legion worried too much about government policy.

  Less than 25% of the French population was in favour of what Le Monde already called ‘this dirty war’,[16] which was costing France the equivalent of all the Marshall Aid the country was receiving, with the result that its post-war recovery was slower than that of any other European state. Washington had made it clear that more aid would not be forthcoming until France agreed to grant Vietnam complete independence.

  That Christmas the legionnaires of 2 BEP had a surprise visitor. De Lattre came in person, not to wish them peace and goodwill but to assure them of his concern. The visit was particularly effective because he came not in a throng of senior officers b
ut with an escort of just two aides-de-camp. None of the men whose spirits he lifted were aware that their C-in-C was dying of cancer, and would be replaced by Gen Raoul Salan in 1952.

  In any case, 2 BEP was not in Vietnam when Salan arrived, but in Tunisia, where Habib Bourguiba, who would become president of the country, had been arrested by the French yet again. Commanded by Maj Albert Brothier, who had begun his Legion career in the 22nd Regiment of Foreign Volunteers in 1940, the battalion was not jumping out of aircraft, but tasked with keeping order among a population that wanted the French out. Based in the busy port of Sfax, Lt Bernard Cabiro’s company had more trouble with desertion than rioting natives. The Italian legionnaires especially were targeted by local compatriots, who offered to smuggle them on board ships heading for home.

  The boredom continued after they were posted back to Sétif in eastern Algeria. Desperate for some action, in August they hitched a lift aboard some US C-119 cargo planes that landed at Annaba[17] so they could make some practice jumps. It was with enormous relief that Cabiro was posted to 1 BEP in Vietnam, where Gen Salan had been replaced for political reasons in May 1953 by Gen Henri Navarre.

  Navarre’s brilliant career in Intelligence and counter-espionage did not equip him for the job. It is required of commanders whose predecessors have failed in their mission that they should have a ‘better idea’. Navarre’s was so simple that his masters in Paris had had no trouble grasping it. He explained that De Lattre had done the right things, but on too small a scale. In place of the many ‘hedgehogs’, so costly in manpower, Navarre planned to build one huge super-fortress in a strategic corner of northwest Vietnam to block Giap’s route into neighbouring Laos, where two offensives had been driven back that spring.

  The attraction of his master plan over a Paris conference table was that it sounded very ‘modern’, combining air supremacy, air transportation, air-mobile and parachute troops. Yet officers who knew the country could not believe their ears because they knew the Viets were like ants in their ability to find a way round any obstacle. Navarre did not listen. He was convinced that Giap would be unable to bypass the super-fortress and would therefore go on attacking it until he ran out of men. In a telling metaphor, he explained at every briefing that his super-fortress would be an anvil so big that it would shatter the Viet Minh hammer for good. And the place where this was to happen was called Muong Thanh, but went down in history as Dien Bien Phu – a translation of the French for ‘Administrative Centre of Frontier Region’.

  Navarre was appointed expressly ‘to create the circumstances for a resolution of the Vietnam conflict’. His political masters’ confidence in him and his ability to impress the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington[18] was reflected in his portrait as Man of the Moment on the 28 September 1953 cover of Time magazine. While he did accelerate the resolution of the conflict, it was in the way opposite to what they had hoped.

  To take command of the super-fortress, Navarre brought with him to Vietnam a distinguished commander, who has been called his ‘golden boy’. Col Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix De Castries was however an odd choice – a 51-year-old cavalryman whose strengths did not lie in defence of fixed positions – a fact he repeatedly gave away at DBP by screaming, ‘This is an offensive operation,’ long after that had become impossible.

  The location Navarre chose for his anvil was less than a day’s walk from the Laotian border, in a shallow valley dominated by high ground on all sides. Building a base in a valley overlooked by high ground all around defies a basic rule of warfare, but the jovial, self-assured gunner Col Charles Piroth assured the new C-in-C that the 600km of mountain and jungle lying between DBP and Giap’s usual supply sources in China meant he could not possibly bring in any heavy artillery. So the anvil was bound to break the hammer, wasn’t it?

  The valley boasted an abandoned airstrip, last used during the Japanese occupation. However, it lay 300km from Hanoi and 400km from the naval air base at Cat Bi near Haiphong – and thus at the limit for re-supply without refuelling by the Dakotas and C-119 ‘Flying Boxcars’, on which the garrison would depend for every bullet, weapon, kilogram of food and litre of clean water. With Piroth’s bland reassurance about artillery, nobody was expecting much in the way of Viet anti-aircraft fire, but Col Nicot, responsible for air transportation in Vietnam, warned Navarre that the weather would prevent him flying in anything like the minimum necessary flow of supplies for the garrison once the monsoon broke.

  [SEE MAP B: ‘Province of Tonkin, North Vietnam’ below.]

  The cardinal principle of any operation is for the commander to have a clear objective. De Castries seems to have been unclear from the outset. Was he there to reinforce local minority-race anti-Viet Minh guerrillas? They were to be abandoned anyway, as they would later be by the US. If he was there simply to defend the valley and block Viet Minh incursions into French-held Laos, that would have required not the thirteen battalions under his command but roughly fifty battalions.[19]

  The battle began with Operation Castor starting at 1030hrs on 20 November 1953 when sixty-five DC3s and C47s dropped their human cargoes in two zones near the village of Muong Than. The drop of 200 metres was short enough. However, the paras were encumbered not only with their own weapons but also heavy equipment such as parts of mortars and sacks of ammunition. Waddling forward in overloaded aircraft bucking in the morning heat rising from the ground, they were slow out of the side doors of the Dakotas, whose minimum ground speed of 170kph meant each stick of twenty-four men being spread out over 3km when they hit the ground.

  At exactly the same time Navarre was in his office in Hanoi being informed by Rear-Admiral Georges Cabanier, the assistant secretary-general of the Committee of National Defence who had just flown in especially from Paris, that the government expected diplomatic negotiations for ending the war to start in Geneva the following month.[20] Navarre was therefore to do nothing that put the expeditionary force at unnecessary risk.

  Somehow, Navarre talked Cabanier round, relying on the traditional freedom of action given to French commanders in the field. Paris did not learn that Castor had been launched until 1630hrs Vietnam time. Why did Navarre not halt this operation and order the men already on the ground to march out via Laos, since the airstrip was unserviceable – or make it serviceable and then evacuate them by air? Did he believe himself capable of resolving the entire Vietnam conflict single-handedly despite Cabanier’s message from Paris? Or, was he in a ‘no win’ situation, under pressure to gain leverage for the talks, yet without taking any risks? Was that why he launched a large operation code-named Atlante in south central Vietnam and other lesser operations all at the same time, thus depriving himself of any reserves for DBP?

  Thereafter, his reaction to every setback was to order more of the same – until he and Gen Cogny, commanding the military area in which DBP lay, were not on polite speaking terms. At one point, Cogny told Navarre that the only thing stopping him punching his superior in the face was respect for the stars he wore.

  Whatever Navarre’s reasoning, his underestimation of the enemy was to cost thousands of lives. The scene was set for tragedy, but on 29 November there was a chance to avert it when Ho Chi Minh told a Swedish journalist that he was prepared to end the conflict, providing the French would discuss complete independence. Since they had already, however insincerely, promised this to their corrupt puppet-emperor Bao Dai[21], there was no reason not to sit down immediately and talk. But they didn’t – and the tragedy became inevitable.

  Chapter 2: You gotta die sometime.

  Dien Bien Phu: November 1953 – April 1954

  Since it was used to save French lives, the Legion often drew the short straw, but at DBP all the straws were short. Casualties were incurred before the first stick of paras reached the ground. What had looked from the air like black-clad peasants working their fields turned out to be Viet Minh bo-doi soldiers training with Chinese AK 47s and US machine guns and mortars from stocks supplied to Chiang
Kai-Chek’s Kuomintang forces in China or recovered from Korean battlefields. With their instructors, they sacrificed themselves so that the HQ staff of Giap’s 148th Regiment could escape. As the gunfire died away, the valley fell eerily silent.

  Navarre had not entrusted the establishment of the camp to De Castries, but to Brigadier Jean Gilles, the veteran commander of one of De Lattre’s ‘hedgehogs’ at Na Son. He jumped into DBP on Day Two, bringing with him a bad heart problem exacerbated by constant overwork, to do a job he had not wanted. On paper, it was bad enough. Once on the ground, during Cogny’s first visit Gilles told his boss that the sooner he was replaced, the better he would like it. Having spent six months living mainly underground in the command bunker of the Na Son ‘hedgehog’, he knew what he was talking about.

  Na Son had been a conventional fortress with artillery, minefields and concrete strong-points all within a defensible perimeter, but DBP was a mess. The plan in Gilles’ hand showed a number of separate strong-points on various raised parts of the valley bottom, all bearing names of women important in Navarre’s life. Around the main airstrip were clustered Claudine, Dominique, Eliane and Huguette. Northwest of Huguette was a complex of defensive positions manned by White Thai colonial troops. Gabrielle and Béatrice lay 2km to the north of Huguette, and were to be manned by 450 legionnaires of 3/13 DBLE. Protecting the secondary airstrip 6km to the south, would be more legionnaires at Isabelle under Col André Lalande, a veteran of 13 DBLE throughout the Second World War. The distances between them meant that, although they had interlocking fields of fire, each could be surrounded separately.

  On day eight 675 paras of 1 BEP under Maj Guiraud dropped in to contribute their various skills to the clearing of the airstrip and securing of the valley. With the thickly forested hills all around, their first reactions were negative. Zurell – now a sergeant in 4th Company – was reminded of Dong Khe, where he had lost one of every three comrades. His swarthy company commander Bernard Cabiro, now promoted to captain and nicknamed ‘Le Cab’, stood a moment looking west after gathering up his ’chute. ‘That,’ he announced to his men, ‘is the only way out of this dump – on foot, via Laos.’