In the late afternoon of 13 March 1954 Viet Minh artillery hidden in the hills around Dien Bien Phu opened fire on the French fortified camp in the valley, and infantry stormed Beatrice, its north-eastern strongpoint, held by the Foreign Legion. Beatrice fell shortly before midnight, its battalion commander killed in the first minutes. It was the start of a siege that ended on 7 May with the fall of the camp and led, within weeks, to the Geneva Accords and the end of French rule in Indochina.
A camp in a valley
In November 1953 French paratroopers dropped into the valley of Dien Bien Phu, near the border with Laos, in Operation Castor. The French command meant to block Viet Minh moves into Laos and to draw the enemy into a fight against a fortified air-land base, as it had done at Na San the year before. The valley, about 16 by 9 kilometers, was ringed by hills, and the French held only the valley floor and the low hills inside it.1
They built strongpoints with women's names around the airstrip: Gabrielle to the north, Beatrice to the north-east, Dominique and Eliane to the east, Anne-Marie and Huguette to the west, and Isabelle to the south. Colonel Christian de Castries took command in December 1953. Once the Viet Minh cut the roads, supplies could come only by air, but the French were confident of their position.2
The odds
The figures differ by source. The French Ministry of the Armed Forces' Chemins de mémoire gives the garrison nearly 10,000 men in mid-March, rising to about 15,000 with parachuted reinforcements, against about 70,000 Viet Minh soldiers with more than 100 guns in hidden positions. Britannica says General Vo Nguyen Giap surrounded the base with 40,000 men and used heavy artillery to break the French lines. Both agree that Giap's strength, and above all his artillery, was far greater than the French had expected.3 › Battle of Vĩnh Yên, 1951
The night of 13 March
Beatrice was held by the 3rd Battalion of the 13th Foreign Legion Half-Brigade. The shells and heavy mortar rounds smashed shelters that had not been built to resist large calibers. In the first minutes of the fight the battalion commander, Major Paul Pégot, was killed, and the same night Lieutenant Colonel Jules Gaucher, commander of the 13th Half-Brigade, was killed too, Le Petit Journal recounts.4
Viet Minh infantry attacked in wave after wave, and after hours of hand-to-hand fighting Beatrice fell shortly before midnight. On 14 March the attack turned on Gabrielle, held by Algerian riflemen, and within two days both strongpoints were lost. Chemins de mémoire notes that the French artillery failed to silence the enemy guns. The French artillery commander, Colonel Charles Piroth, who had promised to destroy the Viet Minh batteries, killed himself with a grenade in his dugout on 15 March, according to Le Petit Journal.5
Siege and surrender
With the northern strongpoints lost, the airstrip came under constant fire, and from 27 March no aircraft could land or take off. The garrison was then supplied and reinforced only by parachute. The Viet Minh tightened the ring through April with repeated assaults, and on 1 May they launched a general offensive. The central position fell on 7 May, a ceasefire was announced at six that evening, and Isabelle was overrun on 8 May.6
Chemins de mémoire counts about 1,700 French dead, 1,600 missing and 10,300 prisoners, of whom only 3,300 came home; it puts the Viet Minh losses at no fewer than 8,000 dead and more than 15,000 wounded. Washington considered intervening but would not act without allies, the US State Department's Office of the Historian notes. In July the Geneva Accords ended the war and divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The memory of the French defeat haunted the American Marines besieged at Khe Sanh in 1968, as told in our article on Khe Sanh.7
Note: strengths and losses differ widely between French, Vietnamese and other sources, and the text names the source for each figure.
Also on this day
- 1569: Battle of Jarnac. Near Jarnac on the Charente, royal Catholic troops under Marshal Gaspard de Tavannes surprised the Huguenot army of the Prince of Condé in the French Wars of Religion.
