ABSTRACT
It was apparent to the American policy makers from late in April or early May 1954 that the French surrender of the garrison at Dien Bien Phu (DBP) was imminent. Not so predictable was the outcome of the approaching Geneva Conference, which would witness the emergence of the DRV as a new communist state, much to the displeasure of Secretary Dulles. For US officialdom, it would be difficult to deny that the French Expeditionary Corps fell short of an elite fighting force due to its poor French generalship and the volume of armaments delivered by the PRC to their DRV allies. Both sides were aware that the predictable gap left by the defeat and withdrawal of the French Expeditionary Corps would be filled by the Divisions of the National Army (VNA). The VNA had grown unsteadily from its origins under General de Lattre and continued to gain fighting experience against the DRV forces, most recently in Operation Atlante in southern Annam, where it deployed forty-five infantry battalions and eight artillery battalions. It fought over the coastal region stretching from Da Nang in the north to Nha Trang in the south and was supported by French Army units and French air squadrons, but it lacked superiority against the DRV forces.1 The estimation of the numbers of troops fighting in Vietnam varied, although the figures presented by Foreign Minister Bidault on 21 April, immediately before the Geneva Conference commenced, calculated that the French Expeditionary Corps had 250,000 troops, the VNA had 200,000 and the Laos and Cambodian forces amounted to 50,00 troops. The People’s Army was estimated to be 500,000.2
The VNA soldiers were not welcome by the French-trained troops at the DBP garrison where its commander, Colonel de Castries, reported that they ‘could not stand up under artillery fire’. On 24 April, France’s senior commander General Navarre told McClintock of the Saigon mission that the morale and efficiency of the VNA ‘had gone downhill ever since the announcement of the Geneva conference’ and added that there had been a similar, but less damaging effect, on the French Union Forces. He reported that the ‘situation in National Army was so bad that the day before yesterday an entire battalion near Tuy Hoa in operation Atlante had mutinied’, but that France had to continue to rely on the ‘increasingly unreliable Vietnamese National Army’.3
