It was 7:20 a.m. on November 20, 1953, when two paratrooper commandos, under the orders of Marcel Bigeard and Jean Bréchignac, took off from the base in Hanoi, in Tonkin.
Operation “Castor” has just begun.
Objective: parachute the French soldiers into Diên Bien Phu, in North Vietnam, a vast plain 15 kilometers long and 7 wide.
Four months later, it would be the scene of the bloodiest battle since the Second World War.
Secretly held, the objective of the operation is to retake the valley from the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese nationalist and communist movement, to install an air-land base there.
It is also about protecting Laos, with which France signed an independence-association treaty a month earlier.
A flood of fire
On the night of March 13, five Viet Minh divisions, led by General Giáp, attacked the valley, marking the real start of the battle.
It was a veritable deluge of fire, the French general staff having clearly underestimated the power of the Viet Minh artillery which benefited from massive supplies from neighboring Communist China.
In two days, the surge left 500 dead on the French side and 2,000 in the Vietnamese People's Army.
Diên Bien Phu: the fall of the French entrenched camp on May 7, 1954
The Viet Minh will end up taking back the support points and the hills one by one, at the cost of fierce French resistance.
Between March 13 and May 7, 1954, French soldiers faced an enemy four times their number: 3,300 of them lost their lives;
10,300 were taken prisoner and sent to camps to be "re-educated", 70% of whom never returned.
A strategic error?
The choice of confrontation in Diên Bien Phu has been sanctioned by history.
A vain sacrifice?
The courageous French soldiers especially came up against the contradictions of French diplomacy and its procrastination.
In reality, in Diên Bien Phu, the Viet Minh armies suffered a real bloodletting (20,000 men killed out of 48,000 mobilized).
Return to this “hell” which was the bloodiest battle after World War II.