the American century in Asia. China’ll rule the roost, including Japan and everybody else. But—” The general took in a long breath of air. “—we have a cavalry the French didn’t have.”
“Planes?”
“Oh, the French had aircraft — not enough, but they had ‘em. Now Giap, that clever little history teacher, made sure that as well as cutting all the trails into Dien Bien Phu, he also hit the big airfields to destroy the French air force on the ground. But one thing the French didn’t have was—”
Freeman was interrupted by a signals officer handing him the news that all major USVUN airfields within striking distance of Dien Bien Phu were under Chinese sabotage attack. Over half the aircraft — most of them helos-had already been destroyed.
“What?” Cline said. “What didn’t the French have?”
“A big boat,” Freeman replied, “called the
Freeman knew not to call a ship a boat in military parlance, but Cline realized that Douglas Freeman had a Churchillian sense of history and was conscious that if his Special Forces could take a pounding at Dien Bien Phu and could hold, then Freeman’s words to him this night would enter military legend.
“We don’t have to win, Major,” Freeman added, as if reading the other’s mind. “All we have to do is hold.”
“Yes, I know,” Cline said somberly. “Until relieved. I’ve heard that somewhere before.”
“I think,” Freeman said, focusing on Dien Bien Phu, and in what struck Cline as a peculiarly jocular tone, given the odds, “we’ll do some gardening — a little clear cutting.
“Now, Bob, I want you to have signals flash an order to our boys in Dien Bien Phu not to radiate out in patrols to engage the enemy. We already know where the enemy is — all around us. What Berry, Leigh-Hastings, and Roscoe have to do is dig in — interconnecting trenches with zigzags — and have the trenches reinforced with whatever they can find. I want them to dig deep — keep the trenches narrow, behind razor wire, and machine-gun strong points and claymore mines around the whole perimeter. And to be ready to cannibalize enemy mortar ammo. We can’t get heavy artillery to them yet, but now that all columns — Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot — are in Dien Bien Phu on the Vietnamese side of the Laotian-Vietnamese border, we can use TACAIR. That’s going to be our artillery. We’ll drop them the razor wire ASAP.”
“How about the weather?” Cline asked.
“We’ll go in with infrared fighters and bombers. We’re going to lose some if they go in as low as I have to, but without them our boys won’t be able to hold.”
Cline doubted if Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot could hold, even with TACAIR, but he recalled Freeman’s earlier point that there was an enormous difference politically between being wiped out and surrendering. Quite bluntly, being wiped out meant military defeat but not a breaking of will, a difference that was critical for Washington at the negotiating table. Of course, there was always the possibility that Wang’s buildup in the high ground above Dien Bien Phu was much less than anyone thought, and that the memory of the stunning French defeat at Dien Bien Phu was coloring USVUN intelligence reports. The writers of these reports might have recalled how, before Giap’s siege of 1953-54, French intelligence had performed so badly, assuring Navarre that the enemy buildup, because of the rugged limestone cliff terrain, could not be so substantial as to defeat the French garrison.
Echo, Foxtrot, and Delta were now busy digging in the complex of interconnecting trenches leading to and from machine-gun strong points in front of which they had cleared fields of interlocking fire in the shape of a triangle. Later that evening, fifty-pound spools of razor wire were successfully dropped before the plane was shot down, exploding on impact.
The most optimistic situation report sent to Hanoi and Phu Lang Thuong by Colonel Berry was that he estimated, from interdiction of PLA radio traffic, that his ninety-man Special Forces were outnumbered by at least twenty to one, when everyone knew full well that, all other things being equal, such as artillery, the optimum number of men needed for an attacking force to be victorious over a dug-in force was a five-to-one advantage.
Based on this rule of thumb, the situation for the Americans and British in Dien Bien Phu, in Pierre LaSalle’s latest report to CNN, was “hopeless.”
“How long do you think they can hold, Pierre?” the CNN anchor inquired.
LaSalle gave his usual Gallic shrug. “Twenty-four, perhaps forty-eight hours at most.”
“Thank you, Pierre.”
Fortunately for Colonel Berry, Major Leigh-Hastings, and Captain Roscoe, CNN reports were not considered the voice of God, and when Berry heard the CNN report off satellite feed, it inspired rather than depressed him. He immediately requested reinforcements, although he knew that this, depending on what Freeman was willing to send him, might make it necessary to fight for a drop zone north of the marshes at the old airstrip immediately north of Dien Bien Phu village.
While he was waiting for Freeman’s reply, Berry conferred with Leigh-Hastings and Roscoe, drawing up a plan to do something that he thought the PLA would not expect from the dug-in Special Forces — an attack to take the airstrip, utilizing the fact that the Nam Yum River formed the left flank of his triangle.
Freeman pored over the three-dimensional computer mock-up of Dien Bien Phu. There was no doubt that Berry had to be given reinforcements — whatever it took to hold the garrison until the negotiations reached a more favorable stage. The question was how and what to give him, and how for maximum defensive effect. For Freeman to think in the defensive mode was difficult, for he still clung to the axiom that mobility was the best form of defense, though in reality he knew such tactics could degenerate, as they did for Navarre, into merely feeding men to the enemy’s guns. Any fool could say, “Charge!”
“When will our planes from the
“Seventeen hundred hours, sir. Fifteen minutes.”
“Dropping their bombs either side of the valley.”
“Yes sir. Weather report — mist lifting.”
“Beautiful,” Freeman said sarcastically. “We wait for the valley to clear, and when it does, we’ll be flying into night”
Cline reminded him that with infrared and terrain matching radar, the planes should still be able to put the smart bombs just where they wanted.
“Well, let’s hope so. Wang’s bound to have planted the high ground either side of that airstrip with triple A — turn the whole valley into a shooting gallery.” He picked up the weather report. “No moon. Well, that’s something.”
No moon meant not enough light for the PLA to attack, and brought back memories to Freeman of the Viet Cong moons years before.
If the brilliant use of camouflage nets by Giap had fooled French reconnaissance in ‘54, then the pilots flying the fighter-bombers from
As the F-14 Tomcats and F-18 Hornets peeled off and came into the valley heading north, the infrared images were popping up all over, whether from the residual heat of weapons having been fired earlier in the day, or from collective body heat, it didn’t matter. And the hot spots on the hills told the pilots where to place their five- hundred-pound laser-guided bombs.
Soon the valley erupted in strings of earth-shaking explosions and an intensity of crisscross tracer triple A of a density not seen by veteran pilots since the attacks on Baghdad in ‘91. The pilot of an F-18 had just slid a thousand-pound LGB down the beam when his cockpit began rattling violently. Everything from his caution lights through his backup gauges, digital display, and heads-up display was shot to pieces, and his control stick wasn’t responding. He pulled the eject straps over, elbowed in, pulled, heard the bang of the explosive bolt, and he was in a swirling, cold, wet, pitch-dark sky, illuminated by long, gentle arcs of triple A multicolored tracer and by the blossoms of orange light below, where bombs had hit. He felt the shock waves. Several minutes later he made a remarkably light landing in a marshy area, and had just released his harness and chute when he heard, “Don’t
