The First DominoBy John T. Correll The French outpost at Dien Bien Phu fell in 1954, 10 years before the United States was drawn into Vietnam. 64 AIR FORCE Magazine / October 2013 Soldiers watch as parachutes descend into Dien Bien Phu, South Vietnam, on Nov. 20, 1953, during Operation Castor. The French took the remote outpost from the Viet Minh, repaired the runway, and built fortifi cations. It wouldn’t be enough. It was the decisive battle in what began Vietnam, a French possession since 1887. as an attempt by the French to re-establish The French army returned in 1945 to their empire in Indochina after World resume control but before it got there, War II. Before long, though, the confl ict Ho Chi Minh, leader of the communist escalated to international signifi cance, Viet Minh, declared independence for perceived as a critical step in the global all of Vietnam. march of communism. Attempts at negotiating with Ho came Vietnam was regarded as a test of the to nothing. Under pressure, the French “Domino Theory,” which predicted that offered “independence within the French if one nation in Southeast Asia fell to Union,” which meant that France would communism, the others would follow retain the sovereignty as well as all the like a row of toppling dominoes. For the important aspects of government, includ- United States, that conviction trumped ing military and foreign affairs. its long-held principle of opposition to The war began in December 1946, colonialism. US aid for the French war spreading from Tonkin in the north to in Indochina started in 1950 and by 1954 Annam in central Vietnam and Cochin was funding 75 percent of the costs. China in the south. The National Libera- It was not enough. Without direct US tion Army, commanded by Giap, was military intervention, Dien Bien Phu was essentially a guerrilla force with only a doomed. In March and April 1954, ideas few pieces of modern military equipment. and proposals of all sorts were fl ying The French held the towns and the main back and forth. roads; the Viet Minh owned the villages Among them was Operation Vulture, a and the trails. Outside of the towns, the plan—cooked up by French and American French concentrated their troops into functionaries in Saigon—for US B-29s to fortifi ed posts called “hedgehogs.” At bomb the enemy positions at Dien Bien night, the Viet Minh easily infi ltrated Phu. According to the French foreign the areas around them. minister, the United States also opened The French Expeditionary Force in the possibility of using nuclear weapons. Indochina consisted of professional sol- US offi cials denied it. diers, volunteers, and the scrapings of the In any case, the United States did not empire: colonial regiments, the Foreign intervene. When Dien Bien Phu fell on Legion, and local auxiliaries. They were May 7, it was the fatal blow for the French supported by air force squadrons fl ying empire in Indochina. However, that did a handful of worn-out World War II air- not end the entanglement of the United planes. French draftees were expressly States which—still pursuing the Domino withheld from service in Indochina, as- Theory—was drawn into its own war in signed instead to the Metropolitan Army, Vietnam 10 years later. which remained in Europe. After several years of no discernible progress, French AP photo Last Grasp for Empire public opinion began to tire of the war France’s prewar standing among the and begrudge the expense of it. or 56 days in 1954, the eyes of nations of the world had not been restored the world were fi xed on Dien by the ouster in 1944 of the collabora- The End of Neutrality Bien Phu, a remote mountain tionist Vichy regime. The Free French President Franklin D. Roosevelt was outpost in Vietnam where 11 provisional government continued to doggedly opposed to colonialism. His French army battalions were struggle for infl uence in international successor, Harry Truman, took a more pinned down by some 50,000 affairs. fl exible position about the colonial em- Vietnamese insurgents. If France could reclaim its colonial pires of US allies and, until the late 1940s, FThe rebels were led by Vo Nguyen empire, it might be able to regain some followed a general policy of neutralism. Giap, a former history teacher and self- of the prestige it had lost. “A consen- That changed with the eruption of The First Domino taught general. Giap’s artillery, fi ring sus existed around the proposition that communist challenges on multiple fronts, from the forward slopes of the hills, France’s grandeur depended on the including the blockade of Berlin in 1948, pounded the exposed encampment in the preservation of empire,” said historian the revolution in China, and the invasion valley. At the cost of heavy losses in his Fredrik Logevall. of South Korea in 1950. Communist fac- own ranks, Giap rolled back the French French Indochina—consisting of what tions led the insurgencies against the co- perimeter with a series of human-wave is now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia— lonial regimes in Malaya and Indochina. ground attacks. remained loyal to Vichy during World War The driving theme of US foreign Airplanes could not land on the be- II, but the real power was the nominally policy was anti-communism. In 1949, sieged airstrip. The only way in was by allied Japanese occupation force. The the National Security Council recognized parachute. There was no way out. most important part of Indochina was Southeast Asia as “the target for a coordi- AIR FORCE Magazine / October 2013 65 nated offensive directed by the Kremlin,” the strategy to defeat the communist Light in the Tunnel and in NSC 124/2 in 1952 said that “the challenge. This had no appeal for the The French military position in Viet- loss of any single country would prob- French, whose reason for fighting was nam had been slipping since 1950, but ably lead to relatively swift submission to preserve the empire. Gen. Henri E. Navarre, who arrived in to or an alignment with communism by “By the time I entered the Presidency, May 1953 to command the French Ex- the remaining countries of this group.” the French nation had become weary of peditionary Force, sought to change the By 1952, the United States had pro- war,” President Dwight D. Eisenhower momentum by going on the offensive. vided substantial financial assistance to said. From 1953 on, the Eisenhower Navarre’s plan had several parts. He the French as well as 229 aircraft and Administration continued the basic pre- would employ his best forces in a more all sorts of other military equipment for vious approach but increased the aid to mobile role and seek to draw the Viet use in Vietnam. the French. Minh into an open battle. He hoped to The Fourth Republic in France was no- At a press conference in April 1954, do this somewhere in Giap’s stronghold toriously unstable. When Prime Minister Eisenhower declared the “Falling Domino in northwestern Tonkin, where he also Joseph Laniel took office in 1953, it was Principle,” often remembered as the figured to cut off the Viet Minh invasion the 19th French government formed over seminal US commitment to Indochina. route into Laos. the previous seven years. Support for the “You have a row of dominoes set up, you An international conference on restor- effort in Indochina waxed and waned. knock over the first one, and what will ing peace in Indochina had been organized US determination to salvage Vietnam happen to the last one is the certainty by the major world powers with French was more constant than that of the French that it will go over very quickly.” His concurrence. It was scheduled to begin themselves, but the motivation was dif- description was more graphic than Tru- in Geneva in May 1954, and a victory by ferent. The United States wanted France man’s NSC 124/2, but the meaning was Navarre in Vietnam could strengthen the to agree to full independence as part of exactly the same. French hand in the negotiating. Confident of success, one of Navarre’s In this painting by Jeffrey Bass, CAT pilot James “Earthquake McGoon” Mc- aides told Time magazine, “Now we can Govern, his copilot, Wallace Buford, and two French crew members struggle see it clearly—like light at the end of the to make it over the border into Laos after being hit by flak over Dien Bien Phu. They made it, but died in the crash. McGovern and Buford were the first tunnel.” Years later, that famous phrase Americans killed by the Vietnamese in combat. would be mistakenly attributed to US 66 AIR FORCE Magazine / October 2013 Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who somehow managed to bring his cannons points named Anne-Marie, Beatrice, never said it. into action, they could be silenced in Claudine, Dominique, Elaine, Francoise, The place Navarre chose to make his minutes by counterbattery fire. Gabrielle, Hugette, and Isabelle. Gabri- stand was identified on French maps as In Operation Castor, Nov. 20, 1953, elle on the northern point was more than Dien Bien Phu, close to the Laos border three airborne battalions parachuted into five miles from Isabelle in the south, but 185 miles from the French Tonkin Dien Bien Phu and captured it from the where a small secondary airstrip was built. theater headquarters in Hanoi. The name Viet Minh defensive force. The French The outpost was an airhead, totally meant “big frontier administrative cen- repaired and reopened the runway, which sustained by airlift.