The Last Valley
Martin Windrow
734 pages including index
published in 2004

Dien Bien Phu is the battle which as The Last Valley's front cover blurb succintly puts it, "doomed the French empire and led America into Vietnam". An European army, equipped with the most modern weaponry it could field and superior in firepower was defeated by a peasant guerilla army in exactly the sort of standup fight all the experts said such a guerilla army could never win. It was proof that France could never win this war and all it could do now was withdraw with honour. At the same time Dien Bien Phu was both the proximate cause for the United States to get itself deeper involved in Vietnam as well as a terrible warning, a warning that was not heeded, that its involvement would not be succesful. Finally, for those so inclined, it was yet more proof of France's inherent incompetence at waging war, the way its army allowed itself to be caught in a trap and destroyed. For all these reasons Dien Bien Phu is one of the few post-war battles that have stayed in the general public's consciousness.

Which doesn't necessarily mean that this image of the siege is accurate of course. As The Last Valley shows, Dien Bien Phu wasn't a trap the French just blundered into, but part of a deliberate strategy to get an elusive guerilla enemey to stand down and fight. It was a strategy that had worked before and had been designed to make the most of the limited resources the French forces in Vietnam had available. Because unlike the Americans after them, the French neither had the money nor the men or material to go after the Viet Minh, so had to find some way to get them out where they could be got at. Dien Bien Phu wasn't lost because the French were dumb or cowardly, but because the Viet Minh were smarter, had prepared better and had learned from their experiences at earlier battles.

Martin Windrow is a military historian who has been mostly working for the various Osprey series on war and warriors, contributing entries on the French Foreign Legion to the Men-at-Arms series for example. Anybody familiar with that publisher and its catalogue should therefore not be surprised that Windrow's sympathies are firmly with the French and has written his history largely from their point of view. To be fair, this is partially forced on him, as French sources on the battle are more easily available than their Vietnamese counterparts, for a number of reasons. So while he relocates Dien Bien Phu the battle in the context of the French's grand strategy in Vietnam, he is less able to do so for the Viet Minh, though he is careful to not present them as whollly reactive.

But the main focus remains on the French experiences in Vietnam and Windrow takes the long view in sketching the road that took them to Dien Bien Phu and to explain why this defeat was so conclusive, when it only involved a relatively small part of the French army in Vietnam. The battle itself therefore only appears more than halfway down the book, as Windrow first sets out the geopolitics of the conflict, the political background in France against which this war was fought, the composition of the French Expeditionary Force and the Viet Minh/People's Army, as well as the development of the socalled air-ground base concept which led to Dien Bien Phu.

As Windrow gradually makes clear, while the French had far from lost their war before Dien Bien Phu, they were slowly starting to lose, having had to abandon large parts of northern Vietnam to the People's Army already and lacking the strength to take them back. In France the war, mainly fought with professional rather than conscript soldiers, was unpopular and barely supported. Thanks to the instability of the Fourth Republic, with governments lasting on average only six months, there was no political leadership of the war, no context in which a military strategy could be developed.

Which eventually led to the development of the air-ground base concept. The idea behind the air-ground base is to develop a strong base on a strategic spot, which could be supplied by air, have its own artillery and tank support and function as a jump off point for raids against the Viet Minh, while being strong enough to not just survive a siege, but function as an anvil against which to smash the enemy. This concept was tried and tested at a base called Na San, where the Viet Minh's commander, general Giap, first tried to fight the French on their own terms, and failed. This experience gave the French the confidence to try it on a much larger scale at Dien Bien Phu, in the Northern Vietnam highlands bordering Laos. This way they hoped to lure more of Giap's forces to their doom and reduce pressure on Laos and the French delta heartland in Vietnam. In turn, the hope was that this would pressure the Vietnamese to be serious in their peace talks in Geneva and make peace on acceptable terms to France.

The French strategy at Dien Bien Phu worked in as far as Giap took the bait and went for it. Where it failed was in underestimating the forces Giap could put together for this. Giap had more units, more men, but above all much more artillery available at Dien Bien Phu than anybody could've guessed and the Viet Minh was as well or better prepared for the battle as the French were, building up their forces there at the same time as the French were building their base.

Though most of the French units and soldiers who fought at Dien Bien Phu -- and French is a bit of a misnomer, as some of these units were Thai, some French Foreign Legion soldiers including German WWII vets, some from Algeria and other French African colonies-- were qualitatively superior to most of the Viet Minh, the latter's numerical superiority was telling in the end. Windrow is very good at describing the battles once he finally gets to them, switching from unit to unit as required, keeping track of what happened where and who were involved, leading the reader through the confusion of the battlefield as clearly as possible. He puts you in the thick of it and you have to be made of steel not to start feeling for the poor soldiers caught up in it...

Though there was a strategy behind Dien Bien Phu, it was one born of military necessity and a certain desperation as the overall sitution was not changing for the better from the French point of view. With its fall therefore went the last hope of the French to be able to get peace on their terms, even though objectively the strategic military situation in Vietnam wasn't changed all that much by it. Dien Bien Phu made clear that the Viet Minh was now capable of defeating French forces in open combat, that the air-ground base concept was a failure, while the French no longer had the resources or will to come up with a new strategy. The Last Battle is excellent in explaining this, but just as good in showing the gory details of the battle itself and the heroics of the defenders of Dien Bien Phu. Remains only for someone to write the same history from the Vietnamese point of view...