ABSTRACT
During the summer of 1953, General Henri Navarre, Chief of the French Union forces in Indochina, conducted discussions with his senior military staff which led to him ordering the establishment of a French garrison in the valley of Dien Bien Phu (DBP). The intention was to block the People’s Army from again invading Laos and spreading the war into the Associated States. His intelligence experts reported that the People’s Army divisions had moved towards DBP and those defeated at Na San were camped nearby. That French victory convinced Navarre of the use of air power to defend DBP. It had two landing strips, which gave the site an added advantage to be defended against any military offensive the People’s Army might launch against it. Certainly DBP was in a valley surrounded by a range of mountains, but the French believed that their counter-battery firing could destroy the enemy’s artillery emplacements. The French built nine forts in the valley, some linked together and others a few miles apart, but together forming a ‘hedgehog’ against which the enemy would batter itself to defeat. The forts were mainly built underground, from which it was intended that the commando-style forces would sally forth in armoured vehicles to defeat Giap’s forces.
