I recall reading about the fall of Dien Bien Phu (“Hell In A Very Small Place”-Barnard Fall), that Giap ordered his men to drag 8-ton American howitzers over the hills to DienBien Phu. It took months (using block and tackle and human muscle), but Giap finally had the French surrounded in a trap.
What Navarre never noticed this activity is beyond me.
Giap was persistent, and nevr wavered from his goal.
As far as I know Giap (like GW) never attended a military academy-mybe that is why he was so good.
I went to Dien Bien Phu a couple of years ago. The hills around it are rolling and heavily vegetated, so assuming you could drag 8-ton artillery over them, you’d have plenty of cover from French reconnaissance. (How they managed to do it though is beyond me. I barely made it in a van over the mostly-paved roads that have been built recently.)
When I was in Niger, the gardien de nuit at the place where I worked had been at Dien Bien Phu. Kind of striking to me how many of these French colonial battles were fought by conscripts from some other colony.
Pretty standard stuff. For many empires, a lot if Britains battles were fought by mainly Indian troops, from Abysinnia to Yokohama in the 1860’s.
He had support from China and the Soviet Union.
The French had a semi-official policy of using troops from one colony to maintain order or fight rebellions in another colony. They’d have no links with the locals and would have far less problems shooting them .
That said the Indochina war a fought by a professional army, not a conscript one. So I dont think there was any conscript in that war on the French side, either from mainland France or from the colonies.
This American agrees. I think people have a hard time accepting Giap’s brilliance because of the many tactical defeats the NVA/VC suffered. But that’s guerrilla warfare. Dien Bien Phu alone establishes his bona fides.
As I read recently in Ted Morgan’s “Valley of Death,” French conscripts were barred by law from being sent overseas. The substantial French Communist Party liked this, for obvious reasons, and the French Right accepted a deal with the US by which a wealth of materiel was given to France in exchange for French draftees doing their part to thwart a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
One myth to refute was that most of the Foreign Legion were ex-Nazis. By 1954, they’d have been in their early thirties at least; useless old men by jungle warfare standards.