World: DIENBIENPHU: Could It Happen Again?

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FROM Pyongyang to the Yangtze, Asia's Communists last week celebrated the tenth anniversary of Dienbienphu, the savage battle that cost France her century-old Indo-Chinese empire. In Hanoi, loudspeakers blared a specially composed song, Liberation of Dienbienphu, and thousands of North Vietnamese massed to commemorate the feat of arms that General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Red victor of Dienbienphu, called "one of the greatest victories in the history of the armed struggle of oppressed peoples."

Nor did the anniversary go unremembered in France. At a round of reunions in Paris, business-suited survivors of the debacle hoisted nostalgic toasts to "the Angel of Dienbienphu," Geneviève de Galard-Terraube, who was the only woman nurse on the battlefield. (Now 39, Geneviève is a retiring Paris housewife and mother of two children, married to a former French paratrooper.) They were poignant get-togethers, for Dienbienphu holds as deep emotional implications for Frenchmen today as Verdun or Waterloo did for earlier generations.

Tanks & Tablecloths. Many veterans of the fighting blame France's defeat on General Henri Navarre, his government's commander in chief for Indochina. But Navarre, a World War I infantryman, only personified the Maginot mentality of most French career officers. Though warned that it would be fatal to fight a conventional engagement from a fixed base, Navarre concentrated 17 battalions in the North Viet Nam outpost, which lay in a ten-mile-long river valley. His strategy was to draw the Communist Viet Minh guerrillas into a set-piece battle in which French heavy weaponry would prove decisive. Along with tanks and artillery, his officers moved in their mess silver, embroidered white tablecloths, stocks of wine.

Though Dienbienphu was surrounded by hills, Navarre was unworried, since he was convinced that the Reds had no artillery. Dienbienphu's two air strips, its only lifeline to the outside, were within easy field-gun range of the mountains. Under Cavalry Colonel Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries, who was promoted to four-star general during the battle, the garrison had been organized into ten separate commands. With Gallic gallantry, each had been given a woman's name—Gabrielle, Béatrice, Anne-Marie, Françoise, Isabelle, Dominique, Claudine, Huguette, Eliane and Junon.

Bicycles & Backs. What the French did not know was that Red China had armed the Viet Minh with 200 artillery pieces. Hacking paths through jungle trails, traveling up to 50 miles a day on foot, the guerrillas lugged the dismantled guns into positions on their backs, then set up the batteries under rock cover. To fill Viet Minh bellies, 50,000 Chinese coolies bicycled in relays down the narrow mountain footpaths, each straining under a load of 600 lbs. of sacked rice. From November to mid-March, while his 60,000 guerrilla troops sparred with patrols from the fortress, Guerrilla General Giap quietly laid his noose around Dienbienphu. Then one morning Viet Minh artillery boomed a death knell.