The Battle of Dienbienphu [antikvár]

Introduction In July of 1963, nine years after the debacle at Dienbienphu, Denis Warner, the Australian journalist, told me how astounded he was to find the American generals m South Vietnam deluding themselves with the same false optimism the French generals had professed during the first Indochina war. Warner, who has spent the last fifteen years covering Southeast Asia, had just returned from a trip through the villages and rice paddies of the Mekong Delta south of the capital. The Delta was the most important area in the country. The majority of the population and the bulk of the economic resources were concentrated there and the outcome of the struggle in the Delta would decide the war. Warner noted sadly that the Saigon government's position was crumbling there just as rapidly under the hammer blows of the Vietcong guerrillas as the French position in the Tonkin Delta in North Vietnam had eroded under pressure from the Vietminh insurgents in 1952. On his return to Saigon, however, Warner had been shocked to hear the American generals assure him with the same false confidence the French had shown, that they were winning the war in the Delta. They had cited similarly meaningless statistics on the number of guerrillas supposedly killed and on the number of fortified hamlets that had been built. "I'U bet I could dig out my old notebooks and find almost identical statements by the French," Warner said. Nine years after the disaster at Dienbienphu had ended more than eighty years of French rule in Indochina, much remained unchanged. The French generals and diplomats had departed, leaving their reputations moldering in the rice paddies. But they had been followed by American generals and diplomats who suffered, or were about to suffer, the same fate for similar reasons. The young French oflScers and foreign legionaries who had soothed their frayed nerves in the cabarets and xi