Talk:Battle of Dien Bien Phu

Fall, etc.

Since I don't read French, did you mean to make Navarre vNavarre?

Fall wrote extensively. Yes, Street without Joy is probably his best known, but Hell in a Very Small Place is explicitly about Dien Bien Phu. As you may know, Fall died in combat, while doing field research with U.S. units during the war. He also published a number of papers; while some were for the U.S. government, he did regard many of the senior U.S. politicians and planners as idiots, and, in a reasonably polite way, told them so.

I'm actively writing this article; by my side are Giap's book that does have its propaganda aspect, but also Moore & Galloway's 2008 book in which they met with Vo Nguyen Giap (still alive, AFAIK), and then walked the battlefield. There are a variety of other sources online but with such things as translations of North Vietnamese works.

The Viet Minh side is actually fairly well documented in the literature of unconventional warfare, growing amounts of which are available online in primary form. In many ways, it is considered a textbook example of how not to fight a battle, at least from the French standpoint. Even so, Giap told Galloway and Moore that he had violated Party orders in a number of ways that I'll be including. Howard C. Berkowitz 04:37, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Sounds interesting. I'll keep looking in. the vNavarre is a typo -- when I was first editing, the text ran about a million miles to the right in a single line for some reason. It was v. difficult to edit.... Finally I Previewed it and the text reformatted itself. Computers are *weird*.... Hayford Peirce 05:17, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

If it runs to the right like that, it's almost always due to having one or more leading spaces at the start of the line, which turns off automatic line breaking in the rendering. That effect — which also puts things into monospace — can be very useful when pasting in text tables, but a real pain otherwise.

Not in this case -- I just made another edit and the same damn thing happens until I Preview the edit. There's no lefthand margin space at all. Hayford Peirce 15:47, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Parlance, argot, discussions, etc.

While Dien Bien Phu is indeed a common case in the military professional literature, some of the terms used to discuss it won't pass CZ family-friendliness policy. (phonetic) Charlie Foxtrot is one term, the Charlie standing for "cluster".

Of course, there are many, many versions of Murphy's Laws of Combat, at the strategic through tactical level; http://www.swcp.com/~russo/laws-o-combat.html is one example. I'm trying to find my updated Iraq set. One Law that's been around for a while is "When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend."

While I'm not sure where to put it, perhaps here or perhaps in another of the Vietnam War articles, one quote really must be preserved. Bernard Fall records [French] Colonel Wainwright, one of the more competent and colorful French officers:

There is a difference between us French and Don Quixote. Don Quixote rode against windmills thinking they were giants, but we ride against windmills knowing they are windmills but doing it all the same because we think there ought to be someone in this materialistic world that rides against windmills — Fall, Street without Joy, p. 259

Howard C. Berkowitz 16:02, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Jean Larteguy and the Tambours de Bronze (Bronze Drums)

Did you ever read any French novels by this guy, who had served the French forces at some point, then became a novelist and journalist? He wrote at least three bestsellers about soldiers (mostly officers) in Vietnam and then Algeria, The Centurions, The Pretorians, and The Mercenaries. I thought they were terrific when I was about 20 or so. He also wrote one, about 1960, called Les Tambours de Bronze, also about Vietnam, in which he said that the Viet Minh had feinted towards Laos in order to suck the French into their trap. And that now, several years later, they were doing the same thing (remember Kennedy and Laos), in order to sucker the Americans. If I can dig up some info on Larteguy, I'll do next month's Write-About-A-Sucker-Thon on him. At the very worst, I'll just translate the French WP article about him.... Hayford Peirce 16:19, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I've only heard the name, but haven't read any of his work. The Viet Minh did, in fact, move toward a couple of places in Laos, in their overall campaign to force the French to defend and lose initiative. While I'm still working on this article, I hope it comes across that Dien Bien Phu, from the French standpoint, was to control access to Laos. Too many nonspecialist Westerners tend to think purely in terms of Vietnam, even though French Indochina included Laos and Cambodia, and North Vietnamese infiltration during the Vietnam War came through those countries. Indeed, Kennedy and Eisenhower first had secret boots on the ground in Laos, not Vietnam.

Have you read WEB Griffin's Brotherhood of War series? I'd be curious how you react to some of his descriptions of French military culture, especially in Indochina and to a lesser extent Algeria. In my article on air assault, I hope I've given France adequate credit for being the real pioneer in helicopter-based combat; the US enlarged and refined it but the first recognizable airmobile operations were in Algeria.

I must say that doing some detailed reading here reminds me of some of the Indochina subtleties. As you presumably know, I've been reorganizing Vietnam War as well as adding content. One of my major goals was to get it to be less US-centric, although parts clearly do need to focus on US operations. "Vietnam War", however, still annoys me as a title. "Wars of Vietnam" might be a lot closer; most Americans don't even know about pre-Gulf of Tonkin US involvement, much less two centuries of Vietnamese wars. Particularly with respect to China and Vietnam in the world, these are critical areas of knowledge. Howard C. Berkowitz 16:33, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Not literary, but you might find the Roger Trinquier article interesting as an original French military thinker.