Henri Navarre

Henri Navarre commanded French forces in Indochina and chose the ground at Dien Bien Phu. He was a cavalry officer and an intelligence specialist who had run counter-espionage in North Africa and served on de Lattre's staff, and he arrived in Saigon in May 1953 with no experience of the theatre and instructions that amounted to producing a situation from which France could negotiate. His plan was to avoid decisive battle in the north until 1955 while building up Vietnamese forces. He then did the opposite. To draw the Viet Minh into a set-piece battle and to block the route into Laos, he had an airborne force occupy a valley 200 miles behind enemy lines in November 1953 and fortify it, on the assumption that Giap could not move heavy artillery through the surrounding jungle and could not supply an army there. Both assumptions were wrong. Guns were disassembled and carried up the reverse slopes by tens of thousands of porters and dug into the hillsides firing over open sights, the airstrip was closed within days of the assault beginning in March 1954, and the garrison of some 11,000 surrendered on 7 May, the day before the Geneva conference opened on Indochina. He was relieved in June, spent the rest of his life arguing that the government had denied him the means and then made him the scapegoat, and published a book saying so. France left Indochina within months. The country was partitioned at the seventeenth parallel by the conference that opened the morning after the garrison surrendered, and the Americans took over the southern half of the problem within a year. Giap had studied the same French staff manuals Navarre had.

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