Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam by Warren James A

Author:Warren, James A. [Warren, James A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137098917
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2013-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

PHASE TWO

Giap renewed the attack at 1700 on March 30, when the 312th and the 316th jumped off from their trenches to seize five key hills within strongpoints Dominique and Elaine, the eastern half of the MCR. Phase two had begun. Two hills within Dominique fell almost immediately as an Algerian battalion broke under the terrifying weight of an accurate artillery bombardment followed by waves of screaming infantry. The 312th assault battalions were on the verge of taking a third hill, putting them in a position to outflank the FEF troops defending the main headquarters bunker. Had they done so, the French defense of the entire fortress might well have collapsed. Disaster was averted at the last minute when a battery of French artillery on a neighboring hill lowered its muzzles and fired directly into the assault waves, cutting down hundreds of Vietminh in the vanguard waves and forcing later waves to break into disorderly retreat. In the end, the hill held.

Meanwhile, the 316th smothered all the French positions on one hill in less than an hour; by midnight they had taken half of another. As the fighting died down early on the morning of March 31, the French hold on Dien Bien Phu was extremely perilous. A powerful FEF counterattack at 1330 hours retook two of the three hills, but to hold this hard-won ground, fresh troops would need to replace the exhausted assault units and dig in fast. Langlais, however, had no fresh troops to spare. He had no choice but to withdraw from both hills rather than risk the annihilation of the troops who had taken the hills in the first place. As if this weren’t demoralizing enough, the FEF’s artillery ammunition was almost exhausted. The dispiriting withdrawal from the eastern hills exposed yet another French blunder in the battle’s preparation phase: no counterattack maneuvers had been worked out in advance, and the three battalions reserved for counterattacks were stretched too thin to fulfill their role in a protracted siege.

Over the next two days, supplies were stretched thin as inadequate reinforcements and resupplies floated down out of the sky, and murderous PAVN antiaircraft fire forced transports ferrying a battalion of fresh reinforcements to turn back toward Hanoi. Early in the morning of April 2, Giap launched a successful secondary attack from positions northwest of the MCR against a hill protecting the northern end of the airstrip. A counterattack supported by three tanks forced the Vietminh to withdraw, but the defensive positions had been destroyed and, again, the French abandoned the hill.

The grueling pattern of attack and counterattack continued as Vietminh regiments ripped into beleaguered French companies, many of which were reduced to as few as seventy or eighty effectives. The Vietminh made little additional progress in the eastern hills after April 2. Had they done so, the battle almost surely would have ended within a matter of several days. Only herculean French efforts kept the eastern hills sector from complete collapse.

After April 5 the intensity of the fighting slackened somewhat as Giap adapted a more deliberate approach.

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