How a Poor Asian Country Defeated, Humiliated France

By Mortz C. Ortigoza

While pumping dumbbells and watching at the YouTube the black and white documentary of the Dien Bien Phu Battle between the French and the Viet Minh that erupted on March 13, 1954, two French soldiers digging a trench with their shovels and pickaxes in the North Vietnam mountain overlooking the country of Laos conversed with each other how the battle there could become.

The war was brought in the mountainous areas by General Henri Navarre, the commander-in-chief of French forces in Indochina (now Vietnam) and the strategist of the battle to end the insurrection of Ho Chi Minh and his journalist and teacher turned legendary Army General Võ Nguyên Giáp.

First French: This battle would be Austerlitz.

Second French: No! This would be Verdun.

To those of you out there who read this post and know only modern battles like the Vietnam War, Desert Storm, Ukraine armed drone war that continues to slaughter the Russians, and the idiotic war of U.S President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – a former rightwing Fox News host whose I.Q is at par with Philippines Senator Erwin “Bend the Law” Tulfo – against the Iranians who took hostage the Strait of Hormuz and the saw the people of the world freaked out because of the inflation it brought, the two battles the two French soldiers were discussing were iconic.

The Battle of Austerlitz was famous how the military genius of Napoleon Bonaparte won a war despite being outnumbered while the Battle of Verdun became infamous because it cost 300, 000 dead (France about 163,000 soldiers died while Germany had about 143, 000 infantrymen who were killed) in the gory trench war that ensued for 301 days.  It began on February 21, 1916 and ended on December 18, 1916.

My comments here after watching the video were spur-of-the-moment because I got a hardcovered book for each of these battles.

AUSTERLITZ

The genius of the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805 lay in Napoleon Bonaparte’s deliberate psychological manipulation of his enemies. He tricked the Austro-Russian army into believing the French were weak and overextended, deliberately baiting them to abandon the high ground and attack his intentionally vulnerable right flank, allowing him to decisively slice through and shatter their undefended center.

 Around 158,000 to 160,000 troops fought in this legendary battle of December 2, 1805. Napoleon led roughly 73,000 to 75,000 French troops, while the opposing Austro-Russian Coalition under General Mikhail Kutuzov numbered about 85,000 to 90,000 men.

VERDUN

The Battle of Verdun in 1916 was infamous because it was a brutal 10-month war of attrition where German Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn deliberately tried to "bleed the French army” rather than gain strategic territory. It resulted in roughly 700,000 total casualties and turned the landscape into a toxic, shell-scarred wasteland.

Why Falkenhayn wanted to bleed the French?

Because he believed Germany could not win a decisive, traditional breakthrough victory against the combined resources of the Allied forces. The allied in that war were Great Britain (and the British Empire), France, and Russia (which formed the core Triple Entente). Falkenhayn strategy was a war of attrition—making the human and material cost of the war so impossibly high that it would break the Allies will to fight and force a negotiated peace

DIEN BIEN PHU

How the French was defeated in Dien Bien Phu?

The battle ended on May 7, 1954 after the Viet Minh forces led by General Giáp surrounded their isolated valley base. The Viet Minh secretly hauled heavy artillery up the surrounding mountains, bombarded the camps and the airbases there, cut off air supplies through anti - aircraft guns, and eventually overran the garrison and ending the First Indochina War.

Chinese military advisors, led by General Wei Guoqing, did not simply tell General Võ Nguyên Giáp to "rain an artillery bombardment" without letup to pulverize those trenches but promised him of the abundant ammunition.

“Don’t worry about the shells of your artillery batteries we have a lot of ‘em,” the Chinese told Giap.  Many of these ordnances were those of US-made 105mm howitzers recovered during the Korean War in the early 1950’s and helped formulate the shift to a methodical siege strategy utilizing entrenched, camouflaged artillery positions and trench warfare ("Steady Attack, Steady Advance").

What jaw dropping about this war of nationalism led by Ho and Giap: Tens of thousands of poor Vietnamese peasants moved heavy 105mm howitzers and anti-aircraft guns over rugged mountains by disassembling the weapons into smaller parts, using tens of thousands of civilian laborers to haul them by hand, and pulling them up steep slopes with ropes and pulley systems.

The French thought they have the higher grounds to mow down with their armaments the Viet Minh finally but they did not see how these determined civilians and soldiers would carry their heavy guns to the mountains.

I remembered one of my favorite flicks the 1996 action film The Rock, rogue U.S. Marine Brigadier General Francis X. Hummel of the Marine Reconnaissance or  Force Marine Recon (elite Unit that infiltrate behind enemy lines to gather vital intelligence) and his men cornered a U.S. elite Navy SEAL team in the Alcatraz shower room, telling their leader, "Your unit is covered from an elevated position," and stating, "You're down there, we're up here!"

The Navy SEAL were annihilated, sanamagan, because they were at the bottom of the firefight. But not to the Viet Minh: There were 2,293 French soldiers who died before they surrendered to Ho and Giap in May 7, 1954 that ended their colonial hegemony in disgrace to that poor Southeast Asian country that they colonized and exploited for 67 years.