Colonel recalls 'decisive shock'

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PARIS -- French intelligence had warned that Dien Bien Phu would be attacked at 5 p.m. on March 13, but the Viet Minh were a half-hour late. Col. Pierre Langlais was taking an outdoor shower.

In "Dien Bien Phu," a 1963 memoir, he recorded the moment:

"A distant thunder was followed immediately by ear-splitting explosions. ... They sent me plunging into my shelter like a rat in its hole."

Vietnamese tribesmen fighting with the French quickly deserted. "Who could blame them? They had been good soldiers of the small war, but with this decisive shock, what reasons did they have to lose their lives?"

Col. Langlais, a paratrooper, became de facto commander of all 10,000 French soldiers against the onslaught by the Viet Minh, the peasant army commanded by Vo Nguyen Giap. The Viet Minh had done the seemingly impossible: dragging their artillery, by hand, in pieces over a mountain to surprise the French.

Over the weeks, outposts fell. Recruits from Algeria, Morocco and France's black African colonies deserted. The runway was too dangerous even for workhorse DC-3s. Food and munitions were dropped from the air.

"Supply could not keep pace with the battle. Drops at high altitude by a zone reduced day by day meant 30 percent losses to us and gains to the enemy. Thus, 5,000 shells were delivered to Viet Minh batteries."

One successful drop contained primitive devices to locate enemy artillery that would have taken months to install.

A rudimentary field hospital dug into the dirt fell far behind, and no one could be evacuated.

At dawn on May 7, "a shadow detached itself from the sky and jumped in our trench. It was a Viet soldier pointing his weapon, face deformed by a gauze mask, who shouted: 'Surrender! You are lost.' Stupified, we were immobile. The least movement would set off a spray of bullets."

But a French officer managed to shoot the soldier from behind. "He only had to slowly raise his own weapon to rid us, with a short burst, of this audacious intruder."

Soon, Viet Minh were everywhere.

"Quickly, I made a choice of what to destroy. ... I burn my letter, documents, the battle diary I wrote each night that I often read into the morning to my comrades, this same account that today I can surprisingly restore in my memory.

"I burn a leather frame and the dear image, aboard my sailboat, of the woman who became my wife. I burn my red paratroop beret."

Col. Langlais, who was taken prisoner, concluded on a note of final anguish the Viet Minh's sense of purpose compared with his own troops' lack of it:

"We were not fighting to defend our homes, we were not fighting to chase a foreigner from our land, we were not even fighting to keep Indochina for France. Then why? The honor of the profession of arms, and that is all."