Dan Snow's History Hit - We Didn't Start the Fire: Dien Bien Phu

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

This episode of the podcast comes from a show called ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ which is a modern history podcast inspired by the lyrics of the legend that is Billy Joel. In this episode, Dan chats with the wonderful Katie Puckrik and Tom Fordyce about the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which took place in 1954 in Vietnam. If any place on Earth symbolises the end of the European Empire, it’s here.If you want more of those episodes, go and look up the rest of the series right now. They’ve got loads of great episodes from Nixon, Eisenhower and Stalin to Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. There’s a new episode out every Monday, so go and search for ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ and follow or subscribe now.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got a bit of an episode with a difference for you today. We're dropping in someone else's podcast, but it's because A, it's really good, and B, it's because I'm on it, so it all makes sense. Go with it, folks. It's a show that I've been a fan of for a long time called We Didn't Start the Fire. It's a history podcast inspired by the lyrics. It's a really good idea. This really annoys me. It's inspired by the lyrics of the Billy Joel song, We Didn't Start the Fire. And if you remember, it starts like Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red Chana, Johnny Ray. It's a gallop through the history of his life.

And this podcast is going through it line by line with people explaining what every single reference is. It's such a good idea. The one I'm about to play is very special because I talked to the great Katie Puckrick and Tom Fordyce about the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which in 1954 in Vietnam, as you all know because you all love history, it was the nemesis of French Empire in Asia. It was a catastrophic defeat for the French and ended up with them leaving Southeast Asia. It also led to a downfall of the French government.

I mean, it's big, big repercussions. And if any place on earth really symbolizes the end of this era of European empire, it's probably Dien Bien Phu, high in the hills of what is now northern Vietnam. It was really fun to record this. I've always been fascinated by this story. I've been to Vietnam several times. I think it's a fascinating battlefield, fascinating story. I thought you might like to hear it too.

And of course, go and check out the other episodes if you want. Let's do them a favor. They got everything from Einstein, North Korea, Nixon, Catherine the Rye, obviously. Just search We Didn't Start the Fire in your podcast app and do all that following and subscribing and stuff. Anyway, here is We Didn't Start the Fire with Katie Puckrick, Tom Fordyce, and me. Katie Puckrick, Tom Fordyce, and me. This is We Didn't Start the Fire, the only podcast started by me, Billy Joel. Easy for you to say, Katie. Oh, it wasn't that easy.

Hello and welcome to episode 39 of We Didn't Start the Fire, the podcast that is history through a Billy Joel number one hit. All the people, places and moments that shaped our world. The ones racing for space, turning up the Cold War heat, building things up and knocking them down. I'm Tom Fordyce. I'm Katie Puckrick. Shall we start some fires, Katie? Oh, I can't wait. Now, today's fire involves a term that I can barely say. Dien Bien Phu Falls is the lyric and Dien Bien Phu is a place, Tom. Did you know that?

Katie, when I first saw the lyric Dien Bien Phu Falls, I thought it might be a tourist attraction, some lovely waterfalls somewhere in the forest. And I was very wrong. Very wrong. Now, there is somebody who's going to put us on the path of correctness, and I'm really looking forward to this. He is Dan Snow, historian and host of the beloved History Hit podcast. History Hit. Dan, hi. Hey, and by the way, can I just stop you there? No. It is a great tourist attraction. What the hell do you guys do on vacation? Waterfalls.

The first thing I did when I went to Vietnam was go to Dien Bien Phu. Did you go to the Coochie Tunnels? Of course I did. Could you get in them? No. No, I got stuck. Dan, I don't know if you know this, but your aunt,

the historian Margaret Macmillan, has already been forging a trail here on We Didn't Start the Fire. Get out of here. She's been on. Yeah, she was our expert for the H-bomb show and the England's got a new queen. That's so cool.

Yeah, so you have some big stilettos to fill here. Dien Bien Phu refers to the pivotal battle of the first Indochina War and the Viet Minh's victory over the colonial French. You had their hindquarters kicked six ways to Sunday. But to get there, we got to rewind. What were the origins of the conflict, Dan? In 1914, 85% of the world's population was governed by Europeans.

European empires covered nearly every part of the globe. There's very, very few bits of the globe. China, for example, bits of China, which didn't have, well, were not incorporated into European empires. After the Second World War, this process completely unraveled. You get decolonization. And in previous bouts of decolonization like when the roman empire falls you know about it right there's guys crossing the

rhine they're smashing the place up when the abbasid empire falls in baghdad the mongols turn up wrap the fight the last caliph in a rug trample him to death burn the library destroy the whole place you know about it the european empires mainly go out with a kind of weird whimper. The British just leave India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, that kind of area. They realise it's just no point going on anymore, apart from the French. Apart from the French.

The French put up one hell of a fight. Now, as a result, at the NBNV, you get the only example in the 20th century of these European empires retreating at the end of a bayonet. They are beaten out of vietnam they don't go there in accord they don't reluctantly leave like the brits do in various places like nigeria they are thrashed by a an indigenous army it's the only time a modern

european army is thrashed like this uh in this period so it's so it's come to sort of symbolize this moment of decolonization um and the french are as you said on the receiving end so that's the kind of background the background is that after france fell in 1940 in one of the most catastrophic military campaigns of all time in a matter of a couple of weeks those germans all nibbling on their speed pills marched across france one and the other very very quickly indeed set all the world records anyway so southeast asia was all french empire lao and what we now lao cambodia vietnam stuff the japanese moved in there after the french fell to the germans japanese kind of moved in to deal with their uh deal with that part of the world and then in 1945

because the french want to kind of reassert their manuals in the world so their vitality go look we're back we're back in the game we're still a great power they decided they were going to go all in getting back their empire in Southeast Asia. And it went badly. It turned into this like grueling, miserable, attritional guerrilla war, which we come to recognize so much now in the 20th century, 21st. And the French said, we know what we'll do. We'll bring things to a head. We're going to fight a big old battle.

We're going to win. This is it. This is the end of our problems. And just looking a little bit before Dien Bien Phu at the warring factions, I think it's very interesting that you had a very dissolute and random cast of characters who were fighting on behalf of the Vietnamese and also the French. So you had like leftover Japanese soldiers. Crazy, yeah. So you had like leftover Japanese soldiers. Crazy, yeah.

Yeah. And then you had some Axis powers like former SS officers coming in on behalf of the French Foreign Legion. A lot of people in 1945 who didn't really want to go and have their day in court. Okay. They had done some things. They had been on the losing side and they had done some things. They had done some things they shouldn't have done and so if you're a japanese uh soldier officer and you've been committing war crimes anywhere across japan japan's giant asian empire you find a way to slip out change uniform and go and support whoever's in town by the same token lots of german amazingly ss obviously some slope way to argentina but many join the french foreign legion particularly of

course because a big chunk of what the germans thought of a germany outsource the rain has now been incorporated back into France. These are actually French citizens now who've been fighting for the Third Reich, often in SS units. So they were part of this motley crew, a little bit like Iraq in our lifetime. Sometimes there's a situation and mercenaries are required, volunteers are required, and they kind of suck in all the baddest people on the planet. Like a lot of dodgy South African mercenaries turn up in Iraq and Basra and Baghdad in the early 21st century.

And obviously we know about the other side, all the kind of Mujahideen folks. So, yeah, it's a little bit – it is a bit like that. So it's like getting the band back together. But it's like a tour, like a super group, if you will. It's like a super group of just evil people. Hateful people. Hateful people. Yeah.

Who just gravitate towards whether a gun's, and license to commit atrocities and things. And by the time of this battle, Dan, in 1954, what is the state of play? Are France losing heavily? Is this one final hurrah? Or do they feel like they're on top? So you've got Ho Chi Minh, who is this legendary father of the Vietnamese people. He was Vietnamese, he travelled to France, he applied to work in the French colonial administration.

He's one of these many characters you get in this time, not unlike some of the Indian leaders of independence, not unlike Aung San Suu Kyi's father. They kind of initially think, well, fine, if we're one great happy empire, multinational empire, let me get involved. And then they experience racism and pushback in the colonial center. And he realizes that the French empire is actually just French white supremacy. And he gets ready.

So while he's in France, he's washing dishes. He's doing jobs. He travels on ships, goes to America, we think, and Britain. He lived in Ealing for a while. He becomes an anti-imperialist. And he joins Socialist Party and eventually is attracted to communism. But most of it was an engine of decolonization he just didn't want to he just didn't really want the french running vietnam anymore and he and the tragedy of this whole thing is he admired

george washington he admired western kind of liberal uh republicanism and we now think we can be clever after the people that knew him said look he'd have been cool with um if the french vietnam he'd been pretty happy to be happy to be on a liberal capitalist basis. But he found the only place he'd get a hearing, he wrote these letters to Truman, he wrote letters to people, they all ignored him, the only place he'd get a hearing is the Communist bloc. And they were like, yeah, we hate the Western capitalist empire.

So he reached out to President Truman in the US. Yeah, he reached out and he went to the Treaty of Versailles, he was willing to engage in the Treaty of Versailles and of course everyone ignored him because of basically it's kind of inherent racism at the world at that time and the idea that these people were incapable of governing themselves.

And so he eventually goes to a place where he could get guns, he'd get money, he'd get support and that was communism. And then of course once you, as we see with President Nasser in Asia all through the Cold War,

once you kind of, oh yeah, I'll take that call, the Americans like whack you on the list. So then suddenly you're like a terrorist suddenly you're like oh okay so so you're you're forced constantly to take sides like the x-men films and the so he ends up with his brilliant commander jap uh at fighting an insurgency classic insurgency they've got people they've got supplies they travel light they've got new technology means you carry things like assault rifles that can do a huge amount of damage and don't require massive logistical chains to support them it's the kind of thing we see around the world in the 20th century we see it famously in vietnam a decade later but we see it right here in the 50s

it's just a total pain in the ass for the French. They're not losing, but they're not winning. And in an insurgency, if you're not winning, you are losing. Unless you're restoring order. You're bleeding money. You've got people at home going, let's have a National Health Service, effectively. And you're just going, no, what I think is really important is we're restoring French rule in the jungles of northern Indochina, right? So it's unpopular in France, ironically. And so the French government,

French authorities in Vietnam say what lots of people have always said. It's what you do when you get a bit desperate. It's what Hitler did at the beginning of the Second World War. You seek a decisive confrontation because you think, I'm not going to win the long haul. We're getting ground down here.

What we want is to bring this all to a climax in a dramatic and decisive confrontation that will allow me to overturn the kind of odds and win. It's very attractive. You can see it's very attractive. I mean, we all think, yeah, that's much more fun than just going, let's build a whole network of roads and rural police stations and slowly try and educate people and bring food security to the outlying areas

and convince them that French colonial rule is better. Not super exciting. We're going to stick 6,000 bad men into this valley in North Vietnam, cut off Viet Minh, the rebel supply lines, take the fight into their heartlands, and then bring them in, set ourselves up almost as vulnerable in this kind of rural valley. They'll think, right, let's come in for the kill. And we want them to do that because then we will annihilate them. So they had their strategy all mapped out. But what were their misconceptions? Well, the misconception was that every time you seek decisive battle, the other side might just say yes.

Might be their decisive battle. It might be their decisive battle, but not in the way you intended. So the plan was really good up until the point at which the French had underestimated the Vietnamese warfighting capability. So they said, we'll occupy this valley. There's high peaks around. It's in the middle of jungle. It's near their supply. It's sort of not the obvious place for us to want to fight a modern battle,

which requires modern war folks. People talk all the time about sort of heroism and valor on the battlefield and leadership and speeches. It's irrelevant, really. It's irrelevant. It's not relevant. It's not them.

It's not as important as something else, which is logistics. You need bombs. You need bullets. You need shells. You need food. You need cans. You need oil, petrol, aircraft parts.

And so it's a bit weird for the French to disappear off the most remote part of Vietnam, set up this weird base that is vulnerable to fire from the hills around it and think that they're going to fight this giant battle from there. But they had an airfield, though. An airfield, yes.

So they were like, the Vietnamese, this is so clever. They'll think, huh, they will be dangling a little ripe, juicy target the Vietnamese will not be able to say no to. And they will do what guerrillas never do, which is stop coming in ones and twos at night and stabbing this bloke and blowing up that post office. We want to get them all in the same place and then we can smash them

with our crazy Western armour and our firepower and our bombs and our machine guns. That's what we want. We need the guerrillas to come out of their hiding places. And that's what we're going to offer ourselves up as a target.

We've built a runway and all night and every day our planes will take off from this airfield and napalm them and blow them to pieces, right? And we will win. We will win this war. This unwinnable war. We will win and we'll show those politicians in Paris that are talking about and all those liberals and intelligentsia people are dissing us. And we will show that France can be great again. Now, as you describe it like that, Dan, I can imagine a table, a nice, probably a circular table.

There are French generals all the way around the outside. And I can imagine standing up and cheering because it sounds like an amazing plan but once they actually get to dn bin foo i imagine they change their minds because when i first read about this katie in my head it's a huge garrison already it's a spectacular fortress it's a vast town maybe it's even a city rather than this very, Dan, where you've got five or six or seven disparate little bases that all look like they can be picked off one at a time. There you go. Military. Here we go. Military strategist over. You've potted the problem immediately. Yeah, this is not a fortress that they've done. This is not the Maginot Line. This is not a kind of gigantic fortifications

that you expect Hitler to try and build to stop the Soviet army in 1943, 1944. This is just, it's a weird plan. Fundamentally, they're racist. They used to refer to the Vietnamese in racially derogatory ways. They assumed that they were incapable of fighting modern war, positional warfare on the scale. So what they do is they build an airstrip and they surround it with little docks. war positional warfare on the scale so what they do is they they build a an airstrip and they surround it with little dots each one apparently named after the mistresses of this kind of really charismatic and brilliant aristocratic uh general who was in charge the castry so french so french

so french and i say brilliant of course actually turns out not to be brilliant at all but he thought this is great we'll have all these little fire bases they're mutually supporting that either guns can sort of cover each other uh and so a key thing as you point out is airfield in the middle air power is the answer to western strategists fever dreams because the vietnamese don't have air power they're jet aircraft capable of dropping you know precision munitions uh and and it sort of um it doesn't really work you sort of doesn't really work. You say it doesn't really work. There is one image, Katie, and that's when they decide to drop a bulldozer out of an aeroplane.

With a parachute attached to it, right? With a parachute attached. Unfortunately, it misses the landing zone and ends up in a paddy field. Yeah, in a rice paddy. And whoops, well, you can't use that anymore. It's just waterlogged. Too bad.

They ended up having to parachute not only bulldozers, but, you know, armed supplies, men, because what happened to that airfield? This is a critical moment. They got everything wrong in that the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese rebels, were able to assemble a vast stockpile of very modern weapons, but using the most primitive form,

which is humans carrying it all. And of course, not to underestimate probably the most important decisive weapon of the battle, which was a bicycle. So through the jungle canopy, you can create these trails from their supply bases and you can move an astonishing amount of men and material. And there's young children carrying, there's women working as porters.

And you can filter through the forest. When there is a successful airstrike, even when they do happen, you simply move out. You haven't built a particular road, you haven't built big concrete bridges, steel reinforced. It's brutal, and no European would think of doing it, because frankly, we've lost that kind of that that agrarian toughness that you'd expect in terms of portrait you know that that we we rely on vehicles europeans yeah we're soft we've gone very soft right yeah the french rely on um motor vehicles transport so they look at their enemy and think they'll never be able to

tow 10 ton guns up through this jungle to mountainous positions to then rain down fire on this base. It's impossible. How are you going to do it? Well, they do it because they disassemble them. They carry them. They lug them. They drag them.

They dig ditches, don't they? They dig ditches. They hide them. Yeah. That's a very good point. So you can't see it all happening under jungle canopy. It's sort of like under street level, so to speak. They dig enormous tunnels and through the hillsides. They've got a lot of support,

we should say. So the Americans have started giving the French a lot of money and support here. It's the classic Cold War proxy war thing going on. The puppet masters. You've got China and USSR pouring money and supplies towards the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese got lots of people, 50,000 people or so, but they get heavy guns from the Chinese, often captured in the Korean War, by the way, it's just finishing, finished slightly earlier. Well, you know, they're recycling, why not? It's very green. They're using shells, it must have been dispiriting to get, you know, Western manufactured shells raining down on the French. And so you're just carrying, that is the logistics, the logistics is what is the beginning, middle and end of this

story. You open fire on these French bases. You shock the French. They cannot believe they are receiving this volume and intensity of fire. But then you've got to send, unfortunately, in war, you do have to send in the lads to fight at close quarters, get across that barbed wire. And there is unimaginably brutal hand-to-hand fighting. And one by one, these outlying bases are picked off.

You listened to me talking about Dien Bien Phu. More coming up. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week and the story dan of how these outlying bases are picked off seems to follow a similar pattern where there is a certain haplessness in leadership on the ground and an inability to work out what is happening around them then a large degree of heroism from the people defending that particular base and then ultimately a capitulation yeah so that's that's fair um i think although we we should say the

vietnam men perform brilliantly there as well so we shouldn't play again it's tempting to be as europeans or blame everything on europeans i'm i think not sure the french could know anything differently really but but the plan was flawed and the people on the ground then had to live with that and and go through the in almost inevitable um tragedy that unfolded so yeah so you bring down massive fires you said katie's tunnels being built so it's very like the first world war. You inch forward trenches, you've got unlimited manpower and womanpower. So you're digging these unbelievably long trenches. The airstrip is put out of action by the artillery fire that the Vietnamese managed to achieve. And from that moment, they're just done. It's done, done, done. It's only a matter of time. is smashing the airfield, it's smashing these outlying bases, bringing down unbelievable torrents of fire that no French army was ever expecting from these Asian peasant volunteer guerrilla forces.

Yeah, women and children on Peugeot bicycles. Right, so what are they doing? Firing 105mm shells in extraordinary quantities. No, it's not cool. It's not meant to happen, right? So then, also because they've got limited manpower, having attrited, having ground out, you haven't let them sleep,

you haven't defended these bases sleep, you've pounded them, you haven't let them repair their defences, you then send infantry in waves, outnumbering them 10 to 1. So waves of human beings. First of all, we say, oh, Battle of Somme, terrible, incompetent generals.

Well, that's exactly what General Japp does in this conflict. He softens up the French and then he just sends these overwhelming waves of human attack, a human sort of wave of attacks at these little bases. Each one that falls, you then get a foothold and you then make the other base untenable because they're all mutually reinforcing. The trouble is they're all mutually, it's pretty destructive when one part falls. It's like a cancer.

It will start to spread through the whole system. And wasn't there a moment where the U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, offers the French two atomic bombs? This is the big debate. There's a moment. But you're right. Things get so desperate. I mean, one of the worst moments. Very early on.

It's just after the first two forts fall within a day. two forts fall within a day, the artillery commander at the base, like Mr. Artillery, who's meant to be bringing down, you know, fire on the Vietnamese and winning this decisive battle, he takes a hand grenade into his tent and blows himself up,

which is bad for morale. No, there's not a lot of... Bad for him as well. Well, it's bad for him. Not a lot of confidence. Yeah, it's like, how's the leadership doing? Well, he's...

Okay, so then the French panic and go to the Americans and say, listen, these guys are communists. You know what, communists, right? We don't like these guys. Yeah, remember, you don't like them either. Yeah, it's like, you know. That's the trigger word. Yeah, exactly.

It's a good bit of branding. But they were communists by that stage and they were being helped by the Chinese, of course. So the Americans, Nixon, predictably, and Dulles, the Secretary of State, was quite hawkish. And the French say, this might be a lost in translation moment, the French say that Dulles floated the idea of atomic weapons being, so by this stage, so-called tactical nuclear weapons, because the insanity of mankind knows no bounds. And after dropping the nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

what the US military thought was these are great, but they're a bit clumsy. You know what? They wipe out and hold it. What we need is stuff that we can actually use on the battlefield. They made atomic things that are remarkably smaller than what we might think. They made atomic handheld weapons. Oh, like portable, like locale.

Yeah, exactly. So you could just almost throw a hand grenade, almost better have an atomic yield. It was seen as a brilliant bit of new technology that would just obviously expand the killing capability of individuals on the battlefield. So there were so-called tactical weapons where you would be able to just nuke quite a small area, but you would absolutely be able to destroy it.

And then the French would be able to take that terrain straight after. So they did those nuclear tests you may have seen in the people watching them in Vegas with the sort of funny glasses on. And they would have, what they'd do is they'd drop an atomic weapon and then people would get out of their trenches straight away and march over that terrain and take it, quote unquote. And of course, they suffered terrible health complications and disasters both at the time and ever since.

But well, whatever Dulles suggested, the Americans decided not to do it because it would be potentially catastrophic. But they did throw some money. The U.S. paid for about 80% of the supplies, didn't they, for the French? Very much so. Very much so, yeah. I mean, the Americans – when you're kind of globally hegemonic power like the Brits were in the 19th century or the Americans were in the 20th century, it's a great expression. The Brits – people hate the Brits in the 19th century because they basically throw money at problems without having to get their own hands dirty.

So it's famously one European said, the British are willing to fight the death of the last austrian because you know basically austria's had a limited manpower just loads of them right and obviously australian empire really big and that's it and the brits just keep sending money go please raise more armies fight napoleon we can't do it ourselves but here's some cash and so anyway so in a similar way the amer Americans found themselves fighting through these proxies and obviously famously, you know, whether it's in Africa, whether it's supporting the French in Indochina. And then when that falls through, the Americans then decide they're going to get involved themselves. But yeah. What point does America realize that it might have backed the wrong horse here?

Well, it's very clear when these bases just inexorably fall the airstrip gets put out of action so the french even if they had a plan they can no longer use their plan to to use tactical air power fighter bombers to destroy the troops on the ground vietnam on the ground partly because they can't see them uh partly because the airstrip doesn't work anymore it's a horror show so slowly it's inexorable they just capture one after the other they just grind closer and closer and there's this amazing kind of radio communications between them and their the their hq in hanoi and so it becomes yes they just like it's a slow motion it's a relatively slow motion catastrophe it plays out over about a month and what is the radio communication there was a

conversation between castri and his French superior in Hanoi. And that's amazing because at that stage, he tells him, do not surrender. Any account, do not surrender. So they're like, please, can we just flash that white flag? Because like, we've run out of tricks. And the bloke who's sitting in probably a nice colonial mansion in Hanoi with probably a glass of claret. He's had a nice lunch. He's got his feet

up on the desk a cigar yeah lads don't surrender under any circumstances see you later yeah all the best and what's amazing

about that is people the bullshit that people land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the poisonisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence.

Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week come up with when they're in senior positions of military and political power is like that's exactly what hit us at Stalingrad these people think you know surrendering will be worse than everyone being killed and taken like it's just nonsense like how do they come up with this mad stuff like so so he is told for purely political purposes fight the last man the last bullet and

then we'll try and turn it into a national myth right which is what hitler does at stalingrad it's like it's not going to be a national myth brother that's like plan d and it's a crap plan so they pay for this with their lives i've always found it really chilling he's there's a radio transmission from somebody going the enemy troops are outside my headquarters every position has been overrun the last words are the enemy has overrun us we are blowing up everything vive la France it's just so grim

and again just to come back like the fighting there was as bad as anything that you guys will imagine the first world war being like it's also during a monsoon it's a tropical monsoon so the mud the intensity, the intensity

and the hand-to-hand nature of it. And of course, the kind of hatred, I think, given an extra layer of racial antipathy going on there as well. And what an utter humiliation

for the French. How did they deal with that? Not well. They agreed the party was over in Vietnam. So by July, the French Empire in South Asia is over. The government has collapsed. It's the end of kind of a vision of the world in which European empires dominated.

It actually fomented, the news of it got back to Algeria, was literally considered to be a piece of France at that point, Algeria, and the first riots, uprisings against French rule occurred within weeks of news arriving to Mbienfu. Algeria would see the French in broad and another appalling insurgency, criminality, atrocities committed, and led to a military push against the French government, led to the fall of the Fourth Republic, and the return of Charles de Gaulle as a sort of national figure of salvation. So, I mean, the answer is few battles have had bigger political ramifications, I think, than this one. So, I think the French came at about a thousand dead, a thousand lost, which effectively dead, and then 4,000 people wounded to greater or lesser extent. And the Vietnamese, we just don't know, but over 20,000. So astonishing, astonishing sacrifice.

Those numbers aren't huge compared to some of the numbers, for example, the battles of the First War, of course. But it's a good example that military and politics is not about scale sometimes. This is one of the most decisive battles of the 20th century, even though it was, I mean, quite small, but there was nothing small about it for the people involved. So, Tom, the Vietnamese say that it took a thousand years to be rid of the Chinese, 70 years to be rid of the French, and 15 years to be rid of the USA. So, Dan, this failure at Dien Bien Phu leads the US into 10 years of the Vietnam War or the

American War as the Vietnamese knew it as. Yeah. And Dien Bien Phu was uppermost. I mean, they were obsessed with Dien Bien Phu. In fact, President Johnson, there was a sort of strangely similar situation at Firebase called KSAN, where also Americans had an airfield and they tried to tempt the Vietnamese to attack it. And the Vietnamese did. And in fact, there the Americans did unleash unimaginable casualties on the Vietnamese attackers. But Johnson freaked out about Khe Sanh and he built a model of it in the White House basement

and went down there every day. And he used to say, people over here, I heard him talking to himself, he says, I don't want no Dien Bien Phu. He was texting that so much, I won't attempt, but he talked no Dien Bien Phu. He was texting that, I'm not sure of what intent, but he talked about Dien Bien Phu a lot.

It is a spectre that haunts anybody fighting complex insurgencies in the so-called third world for decades to come. Why does America, Dan, not look at what happened to the French and think, hang on,

this looks like an awful place to fight against people who are doing things they're almost impossible to counter asymmetrical do you know what we might just have a little bit of chats here this might be Georgia or not World War because unfortunately we are not very good we back ourselves don't we and we probably think well so-and-so's had a go before, but they're crap compared to us. And we will do everything correct. So, and you see that in Afghanistan. I mean, you know,

why did the Americans invade Afghanistan in 2001? After the Soviets had such a tough time. Literally 15 years before. Yeah. But the answer was, well, because we got smart weapons and all the new stuff and GPS and cool stuff and we'll be fine. So there is a kind of myopia there.

But there is also a bigger, probably a bigger point, which is they knew it was an auspicious place to go and fight, but they felt it was absolutely essential because this idea of a domino theory of these states of Southeast Asia, South Asia falling one by one to communism. The Chinese Civil War and the victory of the communists in China is regarded as the greatest American foreign policy mistake of all time, virtually, even though China's specialists say there's not much America has

done about it. Lots of people in America still believe it was their fault that they lost, quote unquote, lost China. And so having lost China, you develop a communist superpower in East Asia. You then, quote unquote, to lose Vietnam. The Brits were fighting brutal communist insurgency in Malaysia at the same time. There was this idea that you may end up with a situation where Australia would be threatened, India might get...

So it was just... Communism had to be stopped where it was. And unfortunately, where it was was in the jungles of Vietnam. And I think it's probably easy for us to look back with hindsight and question domino theory, because it just seems to be the source of so many problems geopolitically for 20, 30, 40 years. But at the time, Dan, was there something in it? Was there a legitimate concern?

I always feel a bit embarrassed, but I mean, it's not my period of subject, but I do think there was, yeah, there was an element, I guess, of supporting, as it turned out, horrific regimes like the Southern Vietnamese and the Southern South Koreans and the Malaysians, as it turned out. But the idea was eventually you might persuade them to come around to kind of become liberal democracies and sort and bring them into a kind of mature global trading system and stuff. And to see them all go one after the other to communists without putting up any kind of resistance, I think, did make sense at the time. Who knows what the counterfactual is, but it was just brutal. what the counterfactual is,

but it was just, you know, it was brutal. Vietnam was a monumental catastrophe for America, but it was born out of this determination that the communists couldn't, they were hoping the French would manage it, it didn't work, so they thought we're just going to have to step in here. Katie, that's what, I think it's that that feels like the double tragedy

of the NBN foo. Not only what happened at that battle, but what we know happened afterwards as a result to all those americans to those young lads it's really frustrating because you just see people it's just hubris driving uh the commanders the leaders of america just to throw the cannon fodder kids right into the line of fire but um just to be completely cheeky uh the vietnamese did get some good french snacks out of the whole situation because uh baguettes they still love their baguettes i mean that that just seems odd to me i mean i'm being flippant but um you know culturally they

picked up a few expressions they picked picked up some food, some snacks. It's interesting how maybe on the soft power side of things, the French could have been a little more convincing and maybe kept the Vietnamese on side. Well, what's so interesting about soft power, of course, is the first – Vietnam is now like a bastion of American capitalism in Asia. I mean, the whole thing is so bonkers. That's where you get your Nike trainers from. Yeah, of course. And it's like McDonald's. So this is, in fact, if anything,

Vietnam is now being sort of recruited by the Americans as a bit of a counterweight to China's dominance in the region. So often throughout history, the extension of formal intervention, military control, political control is so counterproductive. And famously, the Brits, for example, in South America had an option after Spanish war had been kicked out. The Brits kind of thought, should we take those former colonies over like Argentina and Chile? And there was quite a discussion within Britain about that. And they went, no, you're crazy.

Just, you know, flog them off stuff, send our experts. And what do you get? You get railways built by the British. You get football being exported and started in Buenos Aires and elsewhere. And actually, South America gets incorporated in the so-called informal empire in the 19th century, which is kind of crazy. And you think about what the Americans spent in blood and treasure in Vietnam. But it's just, as you say, hubris.

And to bring it back to the start, Dan, you can actually go to the remnants of Dien Bien Phu now, and it is not quite a holiday attraction, but you can go and walk around it, and if you are Vietnamese, you can celebrate your great victory. And if you are vietnamese you can celebrate your great victory and if you're um anyone else you just sort of look on you mighty in despair right i mean it's just um it's a it's a place of where you if any place on earth symbolizes the end of the era of european empire is dnb and foo it's a graveyard of of empire so and so i think unlike lots of things in this song

and other parts of 20th century history that we revere, I think people will still be talking about this place for centuries to come. Billy did a good thing here, Katie. Billy got it on the nose. Nailed it. Cheers, Dan. Cheers, man. Thank you very much. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition

of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. There we go, folks. DMDN3. Thank you very much for listening. What a place, what a story. Remember, if you want more of these episodes, go and look up the rest of the series now.

They've got lots of great episodes. Nixon, Eisenhower, Stalin, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe. Billy Joel did a lot of living. Interesting times. And there's a new episode out every Monday, so go and search. We didn't start the fire. Or follow. Subscribe now. Meanwhile, Dan Snow's history here. We'll be back tomorrow. you