Hell in a very small placeé by Bernard B. Fall - 1967

USA: Lippincott, 1967. Cloth. gGood +. USA: Lippincott, 1967. gGood +. USA: Lippincott, 1967. gGood +. Preface THERE HAVE been, even in recent history, many sieges which lasted longer than the French Union garrison's defense of a small town in the northeastern corner of Vieté-Nam with the unlikely name of "Seat of the Border County Prefecture," or, in Vietnamese, Dien Bien Phu. The French reoccupation of the valley lasted a total of 209 days, and the actual siege 56 days. The Germans held Stalingrad for 76 days, while the Americans held Bataan for 66 days and Corregidor for 26; British and Commonwealth troops defended Tobruk once for 241 days. The record World War II siege was no doubt that of the French coastal fortress of Lorient, held by German troops for 270 days from 1944 until VE-day. Many of the major sieges of recent years involved large num­bers of troops on both sides: there were 330,000 German troops en­circled at Stalingrad at the beginning of the siege, and the Soviet troops. which encircled them numbered over one million. In comparison, Dien Bien Phu, with a garrison which barely exceeded 13,000 men at any one moment, and a Viet-Minh siege force totaling 49,500 combatants and 55,000 support troops, could hardly qualify as a major battle, let alone a decisive one. Yet that is exactly what it was, and in a way which makes it one of the truly decisive battles of the twentieth century-in the same sense that the First Battle of the Marne, Stalingrad, and Midway were decisive in their times: although hostilities continued after the particular i. battle-sometimes for years-the whole "tone" of the conflict, as it were, had changed. One of the sides in the conflict had lost its chance of attain­ing whatever it had sought to gain in fighting the war. This was true for the French after they had lost the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The French Indochina War had dragged on indecisively since December 19, 1946, and reluctantly-far too reluctantly to derive any political or psychological benefit from the gesture-the French granted the non-Communist regime of ex-emperor Bao Dai some of the appurtenances but little of the reality of national independence. In fact, as the war bit deeper into the vitals of the French professional army and consumed an ever-risin([ amount of France's postwar treasure (it finally cost France about $10 billion, In addition to $954 million of United States aid actually expended in Indochina prior to July, 1954), it became increasingly clear that France had entirely lost sight of any clearly definable war aims. General Henri-Eugene Nayarre, the unfortunate French commander-in-chief at the time of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, was to argue later in his book Agonie de Z'lndochine that there were two acceptable but contradictory war aims: France could be expected to fight the Indochina War alone but with all her might only if the Indo­china States would accept a "special relationship" that would justify the expenditure in blood and money that would entail-and if they were wiIIing to help in the fight to the utmost of their abilities. If, on the other hand, the Indochina War had become an integral part of the world-wide struggle, led by the United States, for the containment of communism, all other nations concerned with stopping communism had an obligation equal to that of France to participate in the struggle. * It is because the United States herself now takes precisely that latter position that Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara went to Paris in December, 1965, to plead for greater and more direct support by America's NATO allies in the struggle the United States has been shouldering almost exclusively (with the exception of the South Vietnamese Army and minor contingents from a few small nations). The results, apparently, were negligible. In contrast to the United States, France never had the strength for a large-scale unilateral commitment, and knew that public opinion at home, as well as war weariness among the nationals upon whose territory the war was being fought (a factor that appears to be too often forgotten now), demanded that a short-range solution to the conflict be found. Or, barring victory, that a situation be created in which the national armies of the Associated States of Cambodia, Laos, and Viet-Nam could deal with Communist guerrilla remnants once the French regulars had destroyed the enemy's main battle forces in a series of major engagements . Contrary also to the American Chief Executive who is able to commit American troops in unlimited numbers in undeclared overseas wars, the French Parliament, by an amendment to the Budget Law of 1950, restricted the use of draftees to French "homeland" territory (i.e., France and Algeria, and the French occupied areas of Germany), thus severely limiting the number of troops that could be made available to the Indochina theater of operations. ISBN <br/><br/> <br/><br/>