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I've been knocking a question around in my head for the past couple of days and felt like posting it. The French during the closing days of that battle were hoping that a massive American air strike (of the nuclear variety) could reverse the situation at Dien Bien Phu.

Thankfully, that never happened, but for the sake of argument let's just say Eisenhower, in a moment of stupidity orders SAC to carpet bomb the Viet Minh positions with nuclear weapons.

Does this enable the base to hold out? If so, what does that mean for the general position of the French empire in Indochina? Even further, does De Gaulle not throw a hissy fit as he did historically and remove France from the NATO military wing?

I propose that a nuclear strike would be catastrophic for the Viet Minh forces as they had assembled some 50,000 men (of whom were the best trained available) and most of the significant conventional arms at their disposal. While all this in time may be replaceable (especially since China was next door), the breathing space that a total French victory at DBP could be used to finally wrest control of the border from the guerillas, thus dealing a mortal blow to the movement.

That said, it could very well mean that the struggle for Vietnamese independence is setback for a few decades at most, and allows the French that much more time to be brutal colonial overlords. Ultimately, it could mean we don't see an American Vietnam war at all and the French throwing in the towel in the 1980s.

Does a NATO which includes the French forces make it that much stronger or are Franco-US ambitions ultimately due to run headon into each other?

It means that the Cold War goes hot in all likelihood.

China will invade, just like in Korea and Russia will probably stay out of it for the moment, but make some very definite posturing and maybe even have a few "accidental shootdowns" and the like.

If the US was going to intervene it wouldn't have been with atomics, Eisenhower didn't like them. A more realistic scenario is that the US helps France, but keeps it conventional. Which likely would still fuck the Viet Mihn over, because SAC could still put a lot of iron on a target. Likely the French would throw in the towel anyway after a while, but it would be more of a "okay, we're going to be nice colonial overlords and grant you self rule" rather than the historical "we got our asses kicked, run away!". This would be much better for French morale, and give them a better chance of keeping Algeria. There were 1-2 million Frenchmen living there so they actually have very good reason to want to keep it, unlike Indo-China which was an imperialist ego thing.

There was, I believe, "Operation Vulture", which was going to be an American nuclear strike. It was voted down for many reasons, one of which was the public relations hit the US would take if it was perceived as using nuclear weapons only against Asians.

But there was a lot of talk of intervention, and a carrier group was nearby and read yo go. A book by a journalist named Simpson, IIRC, was very good about the subject. He was with the French on the ground there, and they eagerly looked forward to such a strike.

The US didn’t have forces positioned to launch a massive conventional attack to support the place, and brining those forces into the area would have taken weeks and cost a lot of money. Nuclear weapons were considered because they could make a difference with nothing more then the dispatch of a carrier group.

Um, wouldn't a nuclear attack on the Viet Minh also expose the French forces there to radiation and radioactive fallout, resulting in the French soldiers and Foreign Legionnairs' eventual deaths?

It would exposure them to radiation fore sure, but its not going to make them just drop dead, not many of them anyway. Remember this is the era of nuclear tests in which the Army and Marines raced each other to ground zero 5 minutes after nukes went off. The risks were not fully understood, and what risk was known would be acceptable vs. loss of the base.

Moreover this is still in the era of immedaite WWII aftermath and the Korean standoff. Massive casualties were expected and still largely embraced. The rise of televised worldwide media was still in the making and thus, in turn, the eventual era where the US and Europe would feel the immediate connection to the consequences of their action. Through about as late as the mid 1960s international diplomacy and armed intervention were matters for experts to decide and the people at home, who had next to no clue what was going on, went along with it because they had titles and degrees and reasonable arguments when they had a week to craft them before the wire and radio reports were made.

So anyway the casualties would be considered an acceptable, if unwelcome, consequence of winning the fight.

Did the French had a chance of winning that battle (or in other words, did they fucked up or was a loss simply inevitable)?

wautd wrote:Did the French had a chance of winning that battle (or in other words, did they fucked up or was a loss simply inevitable)?

They allowed themselves to penned into a protracted siege. If they had changed tactics, possibly, but by retreating into Dien Ben Phu and adopting a defensive position, they essentially made their defeat inevitable, as far as I understand.

Dien Bien Phu was poorly situated-- surrounded by mountains which the Viet Minh had the free run of, and the only way to airdrop supplies was to fly through a narrow pass, and winds frequently blew dropped supplies to the Viet Minh. The airfield that they depended on for supply drops was totally exposed to enemy fire... they basically put themselves out on a limb and dared the enemy to start sawing.

Indeed the entire layout of the base was badly situated and they had taken no effort to fortify the hill surrounding it. If the base had been set up on the top of one of those hills instead of down in the valley things might have been different.

Isolder74 wrote:Indeed the entire layout of the base was badly situated and they had taken no effort to fortify the hill surrounding it. If the base had been set up on the top of one of those hills instead of down in the valley things might have been different.

Possibly very different. The 'Hedgehog Concept' had worked before, at Na Dan, I think it was called, and arguably at Khe Sanh too. At Dien Bien Phu, the French chose the worst possible terrain for what they were trying to accomplish.

Isolder74 wrote:Indeed the entire layout of the base was badly situated and they had taken no effort to fortify the hill surrounding it. If the base had been set up on the top of one of those hills instead of down in the valley things might have been different.

Why on Earth would they put their defenses in the valley rather then in the mountains? Were the French trying to lose?

CaptainZoidberg wrote:Why on Earth would they put their defenses in the valley rather then in the mountains? Were the French trying to lose?

IIRC, the Foreign Legion had an outpost at Dien Bien Phu, which they abandoned when the Viet Minh approached it because they realized it was undefensible. The French, after their humiliating performance in WWII, refused to leave another square foot of French soil under enemy occupation, so they retook the outpost and had it heavily reinforced, with the idea that the Viet Minh would destroy themselves upon Dien Bien Phu's formidable defenses.

In short, the French were thinking with their balls instead their brains, with pride instead of logic (and logistics) driving their choice of battlefields.

Also, they decided on the plan by committee, which is a very bad idea. Virtually no-one sitting at the planning table was particularly keen on the whole thing, but they went through it anyway because meetings make people dumber.

At Khe San, a successful hedgehog, the Americans were smart enough to heavily fortify the surrounding hills.

CaptainZoidberg wrote:

Isolder74 wrote:Indeed the entire layout of the base was badly situated and they had taken no effort to fortify the hill surrounding it. If the base had been set up on the top of one of those hills instead of down in the valley things might have been different.

Why on Earth would they put their defenses in the valley rather then in the mountains? Were the French trying to lose?

It was much worse than that. The French had a base camp surrounded by a ring of outposts that were supposed to keep the opposition out of artillery range from the central complex. Two things wrong with that.

A - The Vietminh brought in proper artillery (mostly American 105mms captured in China if you want a real stroke of irony) that could lob rounds over the outposts into said central area.

B - The outposts were brilliantly sized, being just powerful enough to drain large amounts of manpower away from the central complex while being just too small to be defensively self-sufficient.

As a result they contributed nothing to the defense but did manage to shorten the siege by spreading the French over too many points and thus resulting in inadequate defensive strength at any one point.

A very good book on Dien Bien Phu is "Hell In A Very Small Place" by Bernard Fall.

The French also completely stripped the valley of all natural cover and concealment, to get material to build all those useless outposts; they had originally expected to cut down tracts of forest in the surrounding hills, but even at the start of the bases construction Vietminh in the area where too strong for that to be practical. The French gave up any pretext of patrolling the surrounding area within a few weeks of arrival.

Course the whole point of Dien Bien Phu was to act as a roadblock against an enemy who cut his own trails through the jungle… so go French planning.