The Last Valley by Martin Windrow

Author:Martin Windrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780222479
Publisher: Phoenix

12. Gars Pierre and Torri Rouge

‘Langlais is an admirable lad as a fighter, but he’s… I won’t say difficult to command – but he forms many opinions which are subject to revision…’

General Cogny before the Commission of Inquiry, 10 October 1954

THE SKY ABOVE THE HIGH REGION remained overcast on 15 March, and due to the continued lack of a VHF beacon resupply flights again had difficulty in finding their way. Only 12½ tons of cargo would be dropped that day, a derisory fraction of the previous night’s ammunition expenditure. The 105s alone had fired about 10,000 shells – two-thirds of their remaining stock – and the four quad-50 crews about 40,000 rounds. The ten remaining guns of II/4 RAC had fired nearly 600 rounds each – in one night each gun had fired away six complete Dakota loads. That morning Lieutenant Moreau of 6th Battery noticed something he had never seen before: the paint had burnt off the barrels of his howitzers, showing bare steel.1

There was some air support activity, and during the day seven Bearcats of GC 2/22 flew missions over Dien Bien Phu. One, piloted by Sergeant Ali Sahraoui – the sole survivor of the mission of 7 February – was hit by AA fire and crashed in the hills; no parachute was seen. The Air Force sorties were followed by three patrols of Hellcats from Flotille 11, and by Helldivers of 3F. ‘Savart Blue’ (Lieutenant Commander Lespinas and Petty Officer Violot) were told to bomb an artillery emplacement north of the airfield marked by a smoke shell. Lespinas dropped his two 500lb bombs, but his Hellcat ‘11F-8’ was then immediately hit, blazing up in mid-air and crashing 400yds north of the objective. Many in the camp saw his fiery death, and some came to attention and saluted: on that wretched morning the fighter pilots seemed to be their only friends.2

Everything depended upon the enemy’s plans for the next night, which rested in turn upon the state of Giap’s assault units after two nights of sacrificial attacks. No detailed casualty figures have been published by the People’s Army, and French estimates vary. Captain Gendre reported that when he withdrew from the south-west corner of Gabrielle to join 1 BEP on the Pavie Track he passed over an unbroken carpet of enemy dead, killed by French artillery fire – presumably from Regiment 102 ‘Ba Vi’. After the fall of Gabrielle, French aerial reconnaissance produced a suggested figure of 1,000 dead on the field, which by conventional calculation would give up to a further 2,000 wounded. There is no way of knowing at what stage in the Viet Minh’s clearance of the battlefield the reconnaissance flight took place, but since the weather probably delayed it until after noon, the actual figure may therefore have been higher. A conservative estimate of the cost of capturing Béatrice would be about half these figures; so we can risk a guess of at least 1,500 killed and 3,000 wounded over 13–15 March – the total can hardly have been much less than 5,000 casualties.

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