Bob Bowie
Former Nuclear Physicist (1985–2017)Feb 13

Has there ever been a military operation with a 100% casualty rate?

Yes.

At the fifty-five day battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 where General Vo
Nguyen Giap's Viet Minh army painfully vanquished the French- nobody was
evacuated- not even the women and children. And yes- the French were
allowed to bring their wives/families/mistresses with them in what was
then a nine-to-five war.

Unlike Khe Sahn in ‘68, the French base was situated at the bottom of
the valley. The French made the tactical decision to occupy the low
ground. All the better to look like a sitting duck to the other side-
that was the plan. Dien Bien Phu was a series of eight fortifications
rather than one contiguous base- built around North/South airfields
which were ringed by hill top fire base positions.

Things started going awry for the French forty-eight hours into the
battle when the one-armed French artillery commander- unable to charge
his semi-automatic pistol due to his one-handedness, laid down next to a
grenade, pulled the pin and committed suicide.

It turned out that Monsieur got off easy.

After the second week of fighting both French airfields were permanently
closed due to withering and surprisingly accurate Viet Minh artillery
and mortar fire from the surrounding hills. At that point almost 13,000
French troops- plus an unknown number of civilians including doctors,
nurses, cooks, prostitutes both Vietnamese as well as women brought in
from other French colonies there to service the French officers,
military deserters and cowards- who were allowed to stay on at the base
and happy to be needed to do menial jobs rather than be cast out into
the jungle, contract workers and front office personnel were now there
for the duration of the war. With both airfields cratered the French
couldn't even evacuate their own wounded.

Unbelievably despite both airfields being closed, every day fresh troops
kept arriving by parachute to replace French troops killed or too
seriously wounded to continue to fight. Seriously wounded in this case
was a relative thing- with nowhere to go wounded French soldiers
continued to fight bravely- some missing an arm or an eye.

The French, despite losing all contact with the outside world save one
high frequency radio transmitter at the command post inflicted such
heavy casualties on the Viet Minh that nearly a month into the fight
General Giap was a few hours from calling it quits and withdrawing his
army back to the Northern Tonkin region which he controlled.

Giap then came up with the solution that changed the course of the
battle, the war and history. He sacked his Chinese military advisers who
favored human wave attacks on the French fortifications and ordered his
troops to start digging towards the French positions- sometimes coming
up inside the French wire- other times secreting huge mines in tunnels
dug underneath the French camps.

As the area controlled by the French got smaller the air-dropped
supplies that they relied on increasingly fell into enemy hands-
including the devastating American made 155mm howitzer shells with short
time-delayed fuses that could penetrate reinforced bunkers for several
yards before exploding.

The French wounded overflowed the two base hospitals and the shortage of
medical supplies was so acute that bandages were reused- so bad were the
conditions at the hospitals that an attending physician assured
onlookers that the maggots which infested the wounds of his patients
only ate the rotting flesh- thus helping to stave off gangrene.

The inevitable end for the French came on May 7th, 1954 when the Viet
Minh- who had been inside the compound for several weeks now- overran
the command center and gave the French an ultimatum- surrender by 5:00pm
or else.

The American military intervention in the form of American troops and
long range bomber air-support, reportedly nuclear- promised by Vice
President Richard Nixon and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson was vetoed at the
last moment by CIA Director Alan Dulles and President Dwight D.
Eisenhower, leaving the French to be the first modern army to be
defeated by a purely indigenous force.

The surviving French- as well as the ambulatory wounded- were then
force-marched 380 miles into captivity to camps near the Chinese border.
The French had done the unthinkable- and lost every man they had in the
valley. The ones who didn't die on the march died or suffered beatings,
illnesses and starvation at the POW camps.

Not even in the German defeat at Stalingrad were the losses at
one-hundred percent. After Paulus' unexpected surrender hundreds if not
thousands of Sixth Army regulars managed to evade the Soviets and make
it safely back to German lines.

Although still winning the war things certainly were looking a lot worse
for the French- and two days later the government of France sued for
peace at the scheduled conference between the two sides in Geneva,
Switzerland- setting the stage for Johnson and Nixon to wage the second
Indochina war.

Vice President Richard M. Nixon Inspecting the French Emplacements at
Dien Bien Phu in 1953.

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