Hell In A Very Small Place

Today marks the anniversary of the last day of French control over the underwater nightmare fortress of Dien Bien Phu.

Entirely encircled by Viet Minh forces, the anti-aircraft fire grew so intense that the French aircrews refused to fly.  As can be seen, the planes had to make drop runs from north to south.  At the southernmost point, Isabelle, the drop crews had 7 seconds to hit their mark.  The last airdrop was flown by a seven group formation, among the pilots these two men:

Wallace Buford

James McGovern, aka Earthquake McGoon.

McGovern and Buford were hit while attempting to resupply artillery shells.  One source says it was a howitzer, but I doubt that.  All of France knew that Dien Bien Phu was about to die and this would have been giving the enemy a new cannon.  With a flying boxcar loaded with explosives, McGovern stayed at the controls and kept the plane from cartwheeling into the doomed garrison.  He made for an emergency landing strip some 80 miles away, but clipped a tree and the plane crashed.  At least one French crewman survived.
Looks like I am wrong.  It was a howitzer and the other 6 planes made their drops.
The American pilots were getting 3,000 dollars U.S. a month.

Crash photo.  "Looks like this is it, son".  McGovern's last words.   We got him and Buford back in 2007.  Both of them were made Knights of the Legion of Honor.  Buford already had two Distinguished Flying Crosses.

The plane.

All for nothing.  All to save a falling empire.  4 years later, the Algerian civil war explodes.
Both of these episodes were fought by excellent soldiers whose lives were wasted, thrown away by politicians.  At least de Gualle had the sense to cut and run from Algeria, albeit in a very underhanded manner.  France is better off without these colonies and remains a serious player on the world stage.

Marcel Bigeard.  

 

Readers of my site might recall that I think Bigeard one of the great captains.  This whole thing was planned by Generals Navarre and Cogny, who ended up suing each other for defamation following the defeat.  They seem to have ignored little things like mountains, streams, rivers, flying times, visibility, or resupply.  Dien Bien Phu was supposed to be a mooring post, a position for sorties and such.  It was to be an armored fist, they had 10 M24 Chaffee tanks flown in, in pieces, the re-assembled.  The base commander was a tanker.

French M-24 'Douaumont'.

Pierre Charles Albert Marie Langlais.  The effective ground commander at Dien Bien Phu. (Colonel de Castries was a tank officer and did not know what to do, the paratroopers started running things). 

In 1986 he killed himself by jumping through a window in the town of Vannes.  Trained as a paratrooper age 45.

Pierre Langlais, by Dino Carancini.

This guy probably looked like this in grade school, cigarette and all.  The soldier behind him is a dead ringer for a certain 20 year old Marine I knew once, staring off into space without two brain cells to rub together.  The Marine, of course, the kid in the picture is a badass by definition.  The French soldiers, most of them, at Dien Bein Phu were some of the best that have ever existed and were just wasted by their high command.  The amazing thing is not that the French lost but that it took the Viet Minh so long to win.  That is because a person like Langlais does not understand defeat or the concept of until there is no other option.  None.

See what the main strip at DBP is made of?  To fix holes in it men had to cut out and weld pierced steel plate, under the direct observation of the enemy.  Every Single Night.  The entire operation depended on the airstrip and the Vietnamese shut that down the first day.

Here Bigeard and Langlais discuss the command arrangement.  Finally Langlais told Bigeard they were both from notoriously stubborn people, so they should butt their heads against a nearby post and see whose was hardest.  Their quarrel ended in laughter and they were a perfect team of the rest of the battle.  This is one of my early and weaker drawings but you get the idea.

When I started drawing again I was  going to make a 'comic' about this battle.  

I can't believe I left off the tail.

 

 Way to go.  I soon realized I was out of my league.

 

 Way out of my league.  And finally we have this guy-

      Roger Hercule Gustave Degueldre, Dien Bien Phu survivor.
Knight of the Legion of Honor.  Patriot.  Warrior.  Killer.

When they made this fellow they forgot to put in the quit!

Oran, 1958.  Roger Degueldre evades les flics.  Blood is going to flow.  The civil war in Algeria is endlessly fascinating.  It turned into a bloodbath for no strategic reason, just vengeance.

 

C'est fini.