The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was the decisive battle of the First Indochina War, fought from 13 March to 7 May 1954. A large Viet Minh army of 49,500 troops and 15,000 logistical support personnel surrounded the northern French outpost of Dien Bien Phu on the Vietnamese border with Laos, destroying the entire 20,000-strong garrison and ensuring that the Vietnamese nationalists held the upper hand at the International Geneva Conference.
Background[]
In 1954, as the French and the Viet Minh opened peace talks in Geneva, Switzerland as part of the International Geneva Conference, both sides jostled to gain the upper hand in Indochina to have more bargaining power at the peace table. The commander of the French expeditionary corps in Indochina, Henri Navarre, sought to lure the Viet Minh guerrillas into open battle at the outpost of Dien Bien Phu, located on the floor of a valley along the Laotian border. The French brought in several artillery pieces, hoping to overwhelm the Viet Minh with their firepower; they also sough to cut off the Viet Minh's supply lines to Laos. However, the ingenous Viet Minh general Vo Nguyen Giap used a force of 250,000 civilian porters (half of them women) to haul hundreds of artillery pieces (including anti-aircraft guns) onto the jungle-covered hills surrounding the base, avoiding detection by French and American transport and surveillance planes. Soon, 49,500 Viet Minh soldiers surrounded the 20,000-strong French garrison.
Battle[]
On 13 March 1954, a massive bombardment by the Viet Minh ensued, and the Viet Minh artillery were protected by counter-battery fire by the terrain. On the ground, the Viet Minh fought the French in World War I-esque trench warfare, and, although the French repulsed Viet Minh assaults on their positions, the Viet Minh artillery destroyed the runway at the French base, preventing them from receiving reinforcements or supplies from landing transport planes. Instead, the French and American transport planes were forced to airdrop reinforcements and supplies by parachute, and many of these planes were targeted by anti-aircraft fire; two American pilots (James B. McGovern Jr. and Wallace A. Buford) were shot down and killed while flying supply runs. The French, surrounded and starved, held out for 1 month, 3 weeks, and 3 days before they were forced to surrender on 7 May 1954, with a few of the French soldiers escaping to Laos.
Aftermath[]
Viet Minh fighters celebrating their victory atop a tank
The disaster at Dien Bien Phu forced French prime minister Joseph Laniel to resign, and Pierre Mendes France came to power with a socialist government which was more sympathetic to decolonization, and which ordered a withdrawal from Indochina. In July 1954, the Geneva Accords were signed, and the Viet Minh, with pressure from their Soviet and Chinese allies, agreed for Vietnam to temporarily be partitioned along the 17th Parallel, divided between Viet Minh-occupied North Vietnam and the French-occupied South Vietnam. However, in 1955, any plans to reunify the country with an election were scrapped when South Vietnamese prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem won a rigged referendum which created the new "Republic of Vietnam" in place of Bao Dai's monarchist puppet regime, and Vietnam was soon divided between the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the conservative and pro-Western Republic of Vietnam in the south, setting the stage for the Vietnam War.