Absolutely Riveting - Tactical/operational level study of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu from the French...

The Indochina War | Hell In A Very Small Place (Da Capo Paperback) | Bernard B. Fall

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	• Hell In A Very Small Place (Da Capo Paperback) Bernard B. Fall Da Capo Press, 1985 - 568 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A book legend among my Vietnam Vet friends

I talk weekly over coffee with two friends who served in Special Forces in Vietnam. Top of books they recommend me read to understand the war is "Hell in a Very Small Place". I first read a copy autographed by my friend and read before his first tour of duty in 1967. My friends say the parallels of the American experience in Iraq and the French in Indochina push the book high on Americans' "must" reads to understand the Vietnam War and our current conflict. The more I learn of Fall, the more regard I have for "Hell in a Very Small Place" and his courage as a writer. A riveting true story.

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Absolutely Riveting - Tactical/operational level study of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu from the French perspective

I knew virtually nothing about Dien Bien Phu other than the standard types of things that it was the pivotal battle of the First Indochina War, effectively ended French colonialsim in SE Asia, etc. and decided to buy this book to learn more. In short, if you have any interest in military history, French or US history, or are just looking for a good read, don't hesitate to buy this book. There is an ENORMOUS amount of detail about the battle in this book, but it is wonderfully written with a deft prose. This is not some dry scholarly work that will require discipline to finish. You will feel the agony of the French soldiers as they continue to hold on while the Viet Minh are slowly squeezing them. I literally could not put this book down.

The book starts with a description of the initial parachute drop into Dien Bien Phu, then backtracks a bit to set the stage and introduce the players. Fall then describes the build-up by the Viet Minh through a horrendous jungle supply line, and the preparation of the position by the French. The bulk of the book describes in great detail the siege. Outlying positions are reduced and pressure is slowly but steadly put on the central position until it is finally overrun. There is an incredible amount of detail here, the battles are often described (from the French side at least) at the platoon level. Perhaps the most interesting chapter is the discuss of Great Game politics between the US, France, and Britian as DBP is slowly being strangled. One thing that I never realized is that there was an intimate link between the French war in Indochina and the US/UN police action in Korea.

There are several specific points made in this book that may be of general interest. First, Fall does not specifically blame one individual or decision for the catastrophe at Dien Bien Phu, but he does point out errors. He also dispells several myths that have grown up around the battle. For example, the French made several key errors in judgement by overestimating the effect of their own artillery, underestimating the effect of the Viet Minh artillery, not having a clear goal as to why a battle was being fought at Dien Bien Phu in the first place, among a host of other. One of the most interesting things stated by Fall though is that Dien Bien Phu was a failure of combat engineering. French intelligence knew that the Viet Minh were transporting 105 mm howitzers to the battle area. The fortifications required to defend a fixed position against such artillery were well known from WWII. The airlift capability of the French Air Force was in no possible way capable of delivering the required materials to protect 10,000 men. Fall discounts the idea that French intel failed (they predicted the size of the Viet Minh army at Dien Bien Phu to 10%). Fall also states that only a relatively small fraction of the Legionnaires at DBP were Germans. From other research, this claim seems still to be controversial, but there is a myth that many of the defenders of Dien Bien Phu were former German/SS soldiers.

I strongly disagree with one of the reviewer Paul Conners on several counts. First, this is not the `definitive' work on the battle. Fall wrote this book in the mid-60s and had no access to Viet Minh records. He did have some access to soldiers who fought on the Viet Minh side, but the complete story can only be told once full access to Viet Minh records is given to (Western) professional historians. This is, however, one of the best works of military history ever written in my view, even if it is not complete. Second, this is not an all encompassing account of the First Indochina War. Fall does put the battle into perspective of the larger war at some level, but this is certainly not his emphasis. Having read this book, I'm left with the feeling that I need to put it into a larger perspective. Don't let these small criticisms of the book (or of Mr. Conner's otherwise excellent review) prevent you from buying the book. I simply wanted to clarify a few points.

Finally, several of the reviewers used their reviews to take shots at the French soldiers and officier (cowards, incompetent, etc.). I think after reading this book you will have a new appreciation for the French soldiers. Yes, mistakes were made by the French leadership in many aspects of the battle, but to call them cowardly or incompetent shows that these reviewers have no idea what they are talking about. Are General Navarre and his staff any less incompetent than General Westmoreland a decade later, or the current US (political and military) leadership in Iraq? Read the book, I think you'll develop an appreciation for the martial qualities of the French Army.

I would give this book six stars if I could. One of the best, most detailed, yet readible books in military history ever written.

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The Indochina War

This is a great book but to get a better idea of what led to Dien Bien Phu, I recommend "Street Without Joy" of the same author.

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Absorbing and comprehensive

Most books like this -- tightly focused on a single, poorly-known battle -- are dry and techical. Hell in a Very Small Place is an absorbing volume, something that comes off feeling half novel, half "I was there" newspaper report. Fall understands the feel of Vietnam and makes sure it comes through. At every point, this book is both personal and detailed, making it a good choice for the technician or the reader interested in personal stories.

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An empire sacrifices its non-commissioned officers...

Bernard Fall uses a very fitting epigraph from Menachem Begin, of all people, to foreshadow one of his book's themes: "When a nation re-awakens, its finest sons are prepared to give their lives for it liberation. When Empires are threatened with collapse, they are prepared to sacrifice their non-commissioned officers." (as Fall goes on to indicate, all too often those non-coms were not even the French of the "Hexagon."). Fall states in the introduction that for three years he "lived" in this small valley in extreme northwest Vietnam, with the prosaic name, "Seat of the Border County Prefecture", or, in Vietnamese, "Dien Bien Phu." The product of those three years labor is an absolutely superlative book on one of the classic battles of the 20th Century, whose ramifications are being felt even today.

Make no mistake about it, the book is primarily a military history replete with unit designations and the military lingo, mindset, and outlook (contrary to some reviewers, I thought the maps were excellent.) But for those who are not "specialists" in that area, or students at some War College, the slog through those parts are well worth it, (imagine learning that the re-supply effort involved delivering almost 50,000 gal. of wine and 60 kg. of mustard, inter alia). Fall gives equal stage to the principal actors on the French side (he had far less access to those on the Vietnamese side), their egos, (did de Castries give female names to those strong points in honor of his mistresses?) as well as the incredible hubris of the French ruling elite that brought this disaster upon them. Fall offered lessons that the Americans did not learn in Vietnam (that same hubris in operation again - mainly "we" are not the French, and "we" don't lose). On page 8 "The fact that such mixed French-Vietnamese units on the whole fought far better than purely Vietnamese units and also purely European unit...was forgotten in South Vietnam ten years later." And from page 440, "When everything was said and done, it remained a fact that the anti-Communists Vietnamese simply had not fought like the Vietnamese on the Communist side."

Although Fall is primarily a military historian, he can offer achingly poignant insights and passages. He covered the "mon vieux," (old buddy) radio farewell between Cogny and de Castries, but the climatic point has to be when the Vietnamese radio operator, who had been monitoring the French radio traffic, breaks in, and requests that the French not destroy their radio sets quite yet, that "President Ho Chi Minh offers you a rendition of the Chant des Partisans," and the Vietnamese proceed to sing the same song the French resistance did when the Germans were occupying their country.

In the Epilogue section Fall covers the various "might-have-beens," but deals only with the tactical ones. He never asks what might-have-been on a strategic level: What if the United States, in 1946, had supported the one force that had fought with it during WW II, Ho Chi Minh, and his band of partisans, who had coordinated with the OSS; while telling the 40,000 French colonists who had supported the Japanese that it was time to go home, and give the country back to the Vietnamese.

My life has been intertwined with this book for a very long time. I recently re-read it, but first read it when I was in Vietnam, in 1968. Shortly thereafter, I was deployed to a similar valley, in extreme northwestern II Corps, Polei Klang, along with a company of tanks, to re-enforce the Special Forces camp there. The NVA held the hills, with their 122 mm rockets, we held the cratered runway on the valley floor. Fall's italicized statement on p 455 proved to be prophetic: "Air power on a more massive scale than was then available could not have changed the outcome of the Indochina War, but it would have saved Dien Bien Phu." It saved Polei Klang, until we chose to abandon it. But it did not change the outcome of that war either. It was Westmoreland's rigid adherence to Johnson's ultimatum to ensure "that there were no other (euphemism) Dien Bien Phus" that lead to his focus on Khe Sanh, taking his eye off the danger to the cities, which lead to the Vietnamese Tet offensive, a tactical failure, but a strategic success. I returned to Vietnam three times in the `90's. In 1995 I was one of perhaps the first 1000 Westerners to travel overland from Hanoi to DBP, as the Vietnamese were relaxing their travel restrictions. It took a total of 20 hours, over two days, in a Russian jeep, to cover the 320 km - clearly underscoring the difficulty of re-supply. We arrived the sixth day of Tet, but they opened the museum for us, with its large "heroic" paintings of the Viet Minh dragging the 105's up the opposite side of the mountains surrounding the valley. The bunker that de Castries walked out of to surrender on May 07, 1954 is still preserved. There is also a small memorial to the French dead, the result of the work of Jules Roy, which Mitterrand "commissioned" in 1984.

This book is excellent history, meticulously researched, and well-written.

And today? The lessons are still unlearned. With at least 95% of the American population utterly unaffected, and many of those totally disinterested, the American empire continues to sacrifice its non-coms in Afghanistan and Iraq. Plus ca change...

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The siege of Dien Bien Phu, in which a guerrilla force of Viet Minh destroyed a technologically superior French colonial army, must rank with Waterloo, Gettysburg, Midway, Stalingrad, and Tet as one of the decisive battles in military history. Not only did Dien Bien Phu put an end to French imperial efforts in Indo-china, but it also convinced the Viet Minh, when they came to power in Communist North Vietnam, that similar tactics would prevail in their war with the United States. As an American army officer told Bernard Fall during the Vietnam War: ?What we?re doing here basically is, we?re exorcising Dien Bien Phu.?Bernard Fall in this monumental work has written an exhaustive, revelatory, and vivid account of the battle, leading the reader from the conference rooms of the U.S. State Department to the French Foreign Office to the front lines of Indo-China and the strategy sessions led by General Giap and Ho Chi Minh. Among the many historical curiosities here disclosed is evidence that then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offered atomic bombs to the beleaguered French, and that then-Senator Lyndon Johnson played a key role in defeating a proposal to aid the French with critical air support. Without U. S. aid, the fortress at Dien Bien Phu fell on the very day that the cease-fire conference opened in Geneva.Based on hitherto unavailable documentation from the French Defense Ministry, and replete with detailed maps of the many assaults, Hell in a Very Small Place is a first-rate military history. But even more powerful is the political wisdom it imparts about a war that was not only the beginning of the end of the French colonial empire but a rehearsal for American involvement in Vietnam.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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