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The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam

door Martin Windrow

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"In December 1953, the French army occuping Vietnam challenged the elusive Vietnamese army to engage in a decisive battle. When French paratroopers landed in the jungle on the border between Vietnam and Laos, the Vietnamese quickly isolated the French force and besieged it in a small place called Dien Bien Phu. The hunters - the French army - had become the hunted, desperately defending their outgunned base." "As defeat loomed for the French, they appealed to the United States for help. The vice-president at the time, Richard Nixon, and Air Force general Curtis Le May soon devised a plan to drop atomic weapons on Vietnamese supply dumps - an ill-considered strategy blocked by President Dwight Eisenhower." "And so the siege in the jungle wore on, its scope and ferocity calling to mind the siege of Stalingrad during World War II. Eventually, the French were depleted, demoralized, and destroyed. As they withdrew, the country of Vietnam was ominously divided at U.S. insistence, creating the short-lived Republic of South Vietnam, for which 55,000 Americans would die in the next twenty years." "Dien Bien Phu was a pivotal battle of the last century - the first defeat of modern Western forces by an Asian guerrilla army. Its political consequences reverberate to this day. The Last Valley is destined to be the classic account of the battle for generations to come."--Jacket.… (meer)
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Martin Windrow has written a tedious, one-sided battle history of Dien Bien Phu, the engagement that marked the defeat of France in the First Indochina War. Worse, he has spent some 750 plus pages in composing a book without a central thesis. You sort of get the idea that, yes, the French did a little better than the popular view of history presents. And you get an idea of the failure of French air support to carry through their mission. (They were ill equipped, understaffed, and poorly trained.) Too, there is much information about the composition of French forces at Dien Bien Phu, which largely included colonial troops and legionnaires. But in the end, it reads like one giant footnote, with lists about lists about lists. Names pop up by the score and then disappear entirely from the narrative. At the end, it is as if the reader has already conducted his own death march.

The most severe fault with The Last Valley, however, lies with its one-sided view of the battle. There is nothing wrong and in fact it can be quite informative to take a sympathetic perspective from the French point of view. But when discussing the battle, then, it becomes like a description of one side of a chess match. Only in the broadest terms is the other side discussed, which leaves the French movements in isolation and often without meaning. Very few of the Viet Minh are introduced and discussed--and those who are mentioned are primarily written up at the book's beginning. And the source material for the Viet Minh side also seems sparse.

But the worst fault I found was with the one-sided view of things within the French camp. After doing a fairly good job of describing the order of battle, which includes Vietnamese and West African colonial troops, Moroccans, Algerians, and legionnaires from Europe, Windrow then omits their individual stories. Those are mainly reserved for French officers, NCOs, and rankers. Along with the poor layout of the maps in the book (they are all collected at the beginning), the paucity of photographs, and the lack of a timeline, the failure to construct a meaningful thesis and storyline leaves this a dry read.

Overall, the result is disappointing. But there is information of worth. It's just a slog to get to it. It is no excuse to claim that this type history is intrinsically tedious. Compare The Last Valley, for example, with Mark Bowden's Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam. Bowden and Windrom both deal with the major battles and turning points of the respective Indochinese wars under their discussion. And neither are professional historians. And both books were written just about fifty years after their battles took place. But Bowden knows how to construct a narrative and he is at pains to give as much of a voice to both sides as possible. You come away from Hue 1968 with a clear image of what happened, compared to the dull gray confusion that still surrounds The Last Valley at its conclusion.

The definitive work on Dien Bien Phu, I think, is yet to be written. ( )
  PaulCornelius | Apr 12, 2020 |
This is a dense, well-researched, and occasionally stirring book about the siege that changed the course of Southeastern Asian history. Dien Bien Phu is one of those battles that exerts a strange and mysterious pull on my imagination. A garrison of ten thousand men, French paratroopers, veterans of the Resistance, legionnaires of every race and background, Algerian fusiliers, Thai militia, trapped in their jungle fortress, thousands of miles from anywhere, with no hope of escape. When the Vietminh finally overran the camp on May 7, 1954 many of the surviving defenders collapsed, where they lay, in exhaustion. Only 2 out of every 5 men in the original garrison would see their homes again, the majority having perished in the defense, gone missing, or subsequently disappeared in POW camps. Windrow, a British historian, has an engaging style for the most part, although the book tends towards the dry side of military history. ( )
  MikeLindgren51 | Aug 7, 2018 |
A thorough, well written account of an under covered battle that had rippling effects through history. It is a very long, sometimes dry, read, but well worth it for any one interested. ( )
  rockinghorsedreams | Nov 13, 2014 |
Those who are fond of pointing to France's generally dismal military history since Napoleon will probably relish this book. However, Windrow's thesis is that it was French policy and strategy that failed in Indochina, not their fighting qualities. Certainly the French troops on the ground fought hard and well, perhaps harder and more desperately than their American counterparts did a decade later. Nowhere was this more obvious at Dien Bien Phu, where the beleaguered troops put a up a staunch fight in the face of an impossible tactical position, a confused strategy, poor air support and supply and a very determined enemy. The French troops fought for every inch of ground and inflicted massive casualties on the Viet Minh. The reward for their efforts, for those who survived anyway, was a long march to brutal captivity, from which many never returned. A really great read, the twists and turns of the battle make for fascinating reading, and the evocative pictures, such as the tank that still sits today in the same spot where it was stopped during one of the night battles, are excellent. ( )
  drmaf | Oct 3, 2013 |
I found this to be a really excellent account of the climax of the French effort to retain their empire in Southeast Asia. The key attraction for those who have already read the classic accounts of the battle, but who don't read French, being the inclusion of the French secondary literature that has grown over time. As it is, about half the work is devoted to the campaign proper, with the remainder spent examining the path to Dien Bien Phu and the denouement.

Be that as it may, Windrow's examination of the larger situation makes clear the battle's intended purpose as only a part of the last great effort to regain some initiative in a deteriorating situation. However, as much as theater commander Henri Navarre may have seen Operation Castor as an ultimately expendable roll of the die, the real damning criticism has to be that there was no practical 'Plan B' when it rapidly became obvious that the assumptions behind the plan were largely invalid. This is particularly after the battle caught the imagination of the French public, making the defeat a moral failure, not just an operational setback.

In the end you can call Dien Bien Phu another victim of the disease of air power, as the French never really had the aviation assets to make the concept work; Windrow's close examination of how the performance of French aviation played out in practice is another key attraction here. The mediocre-to-bad show put up by the French bomber force (with numbers to back it up) is a particular revelation. On that note, Windrow is also dubious about whether the eleventh-hour application of American air power (whether conventional or nuclear) would have done anything for the actual garrison, apart from putting it out of its misery.

There is very little that I find at fault with in this account, but it should be noted that Windrow is a great admirer of the French colonial army (particularly the Foreign Legion) that fought to collapse, and some might find that he gives these men too much benefit of the doubt in a cause that was of ambiguous value at best. Would that the French government of 1945 have been more hard-headed about the real prospects of their empire. ( )
  Shrike58 | Dec 3, 2011 |
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"In December 1953, the French army occuping Vietnam challenged the elusive Vietnamese army to engage in a decisive battle. When French paratroopers landed in the jungle on the border between Vietnam and Laos, the Vietnamese quickly isolated the French force and besieged it in a small place called Dien Bien Phu. The hunters - the French army - had become the hunted, desperately defending their outgunned base." "As defeat loomed for the French, they appealed to the United States for help. The vice-president at the time, Richard Nixon, and Air Force general Curtis Le May soon devised a plan to drop atomic weapons on Vietnamese supply dumps - an ill-considered strategy blocked by President Dwight Eisenhower." "And so the siege in the jungle wore on, its scope and ferocity calling to mind the siege of Stalingrad during World War II. Eventually, the French were depleted, demoralized, and destroyed. As they withdrew, the country of Vietnam was ominously divided at U.S. insistence, creating the short-lived Republic of South Vietnam, for which 55,000 Americans would die in the next twenty years." "Dien Bien Phu was a pivotal battle of the last century - the first defeat of modern Western forces by an Asian guerrilla army. Its political consequences reverberate to this day. The Last Valley is destined to be the classic account of the battle for generations to come."--Jacket.

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