The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam (review)

Readers of Martin Windrow's The Last Valley will quickly notice the author's attention to detail. The book contains 21 excellent maps, 11 pages of supplementary information on the book's 40 photographs, and a 4-page glossary on French and Vietnamese military abbreviations. It also contains a total of 1,059 footnotes, in small print, that fill 36 pages.

In the preface, Windrow acknowledges that "this book does not for a moment pretend to be a work of primary research; it is a synthesis of secondary sources, the most important of them in French" (p. 46). His use of French sources provides Anglo-American readers with information from many of the untranslated French books on the Indochina War. This is especially true of the French sources that enable Windrow to piece together the fast-moving events during the siege of Dien Bien Phu. Surprisingly, however, Windrow makes almost no use of General Henri Navarre's memoir, Agonie de l'Indochine, 1953–1954 (Paris: Plon, 1956). He cites it only once, in a minor footnote, and does not even list it in the bibliography.

Windrow's topical style of writing sometimes robs his account of the drama that a book on this subject deserves and that a more chronological approach might have afforded. For example, the third chapter ably summarizes the Indochina War from its outbreak in 1946 to the eve of General Navarre's assumption of command of French forces in the spring of 1953. Windrow then devotes two chapters, covering 74 pages, to background information on the opposing armies in the conflict. Relevant portions of these chapters could have been incorporated into chapter three, thus preserving the momentum of the story.

A similar problem arises with chapters eleven through sixteen, which describe the siege of Dien Bien Phu from 13 March to 7 May 1954. Windrow vividly portrays the attacks, counterattacks, heroism, and horror of the French garrison's epic stand. Not until chapter seventeen, however, does he discuss the belated and ultimately abandoned plan, "Operation Condor," for an overland rescue mission from Laos as well as the proposed but never executed plan, "Operation Vulture," for American air intervention at Dien Bien Phu. The integration of these subjects into the earlier chapters would have allowed the deteriorating situation at Dien Bien Phu to be seen from a broader military perspective.

Windrow makes clear his view that the lessons learned by the French from the battle of Na-San in late 1952 inspired their decision to occupy Dien Bien Phu in November 1953. He devotes the first chapter, titled "La Formule" (The Formula), to a detailed description of the Na-San battle and the air-land base that the French had built there. The appeal of such bases, explains Windrow, came from their being "well dug in behind fixed defences and strongly supported by artillery and aircraft" (p. 222), and he quotes General Navarre's subsequent testimony before the French commission of inquiry on Dien Bien Phu: "We were absolutely convinced of our superiority in defensive fortified positions" (p. 222). Adds Windrow: "Some commentators have made heavy weather of the distinction between the offensive and defensive tasks of the base aero-terrestre [air-land base]; but the whole point of the concept was that it embraced both" (p. 216).

General Navarre himself was among those who "made heavy weather" of this distinction, and the evidence strongly suggests that the model for Dien Bien Phu was not Na-San but the French base located at the Plain of Jars in Laos. On 30 November 1953 Navarre made the following reference to the former commander at Na-San: "[General Jean] Gilles would like to have another Na-San. I don't agree with him. Dien Bien Phu must become an offensive base." (Cited in Jules Roy, The Battle of Dienbienphu, trans. by Robert Baldick New York: Harper and Row, 1965, p. 64.) In his memoirs...