Vietnam Climax
Siege of Khe Sanh

Intelligence and Battles

by John Prados

In both the French and American Wars in Vietnam, there would be a close relationship between the occurrance of climactic battles and the intent of senior Western commanders. Usually a statement like this presages some comment about ingenious strategy, but not in the Vietnam war. Rather, top French and American generals stumbled into battle because they harbored certain expectations about what would be possible given the terrain and circumstances in Indochina.

Though the specific beliefs and intentions of French commander-in-chief General Henri Navarre and American General William C. Westmoreland were different, the mechanisms which led them into the battles of Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh are similar. A comparison of the two experiences suggests some of the ways soldiers end up fighting against the odds.

First, to the French case. General Henri Navarre had had big war experience-- he had fought as a young officer in the last two years of World War I, and then as a tank leader in World War II -- as well as knowledge of the French colonies, where he had served in Syria and Morocco. In the colonies a whiff of grapeshot, that is a minor military effort, had always been sufficient to subdue rebellions.

In Indochina that had not proved the case, but Navarre's military speciality had been intelligence so he presumably knew better (unluckily Navarre had headed the German desk of French military intelligence between 1938 and 1940).

Navarre came to Indochina in the summer of 1953, when the French were hard-pressed by a Vietnamese effort that combined conventional operations of main forces with guerrilla warfare.

The Viet Minh, as the revolutionaries were then known, had discovered the value of opening new fronts in the war as a means of pushimg the French to their limits. Navarre wanted to right the balance in the war by forming a series of fresh units plus conducting offensives into Viet Minh territory.

Already ahead in the game of invading territories, the Viet Minh struck in northern Laos the spring before Navarre's arrival, and toward the end of 1953 General Vo Nguyen Giap, the senior Viet Minh commander, sent a division toward Laos once more. Navarre conceived Dien Bien Phu as a block, a means of preventing any renewed Viet Minh incursion into Laos. But in fact the upland valley could block nothing but one path into the neighboring country.

Dien Bien Phu could only function as a block if it were a maneuver base, and the French could not maneuver once the Viet Minh came into contact and shut them into the valley. When that happened General Navarre made the error of accepting battle rather than conducting an immediate withdrawal.

Since, in the battle that followed, Viet Minh positions overlooked the French, and because the French quickly lost their outlying hill strongpoints, and finally because the Viet Minh had three times the strength and were willing to take losses, the outcome at Dien Bien Phu would be foreordained.

General Westmoreland came to Khe Sanh by a different path, but curiously one that also involved Laos. In this case it would be the Western power that wanted to invade Laos, not the People's Army, for Westy wished to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail that sustained Hanoi's war in the South.

For several years during his stewardship of America's war in Vietnam, Westmoreland came up with a series of plans to get into Laos and cut the Trail. In the earliest years he lacked the forces to make the thing work, in the later ones Westmoreland was held back by logistical constraints and the political restrictions imposed by Washington. Westy, discussing Tchepone, a key base along The Trail, with his planner Colonel John Collins, once said, "I want to get to Tchepone but I can't get the ticket."

Responsible for the most ambitious of the plans to invade Laos and take Tchepone, Colonel Collins wanted to use all the airfields that existed in the area but still couldn't supply the force without roads. The only road into the Tchepone area from U.S. lines was Route 9 that went through Khe Sanh. Aside from anything else, therefore, Khe Sanh became the platform necessary in -any scheme to invade Laos.

Henri Navarre and William Westmoreland held identical views on the feasibility of combat once battle offered itself. Navarre issued a directive on December 3, 1953 in which he envisioned a battle at Dien Bien Phu using the frontier post deliberately to attract Viet Minh forces which he could destroy with his superior firepower.

Almost exactly fourteen years later, on December 10, 1967, General Westmoreland sent Washington a cable in which he declared his great preference for conducting battles along the border of South Vietnam because that would permit MACV to make maximum use of its firepower without worry to nearby civilian populations, because it would engage the adversary farther away from its targets, and because MACV felt this would make better use of available general reserve forces. Henri Navarre's directive and associated reports use almost the same language.

In one respect General Westmoreland was on infinitely more solid ground than Navarre in deciding to accept battle. That was in terms of available firepower. A military officer attached to President Johnson's White House staff in February 1968 estimated that U.S. airpower could deliver 20 tons of munitions at Khe Sanh for every one the French had been able to.

In a maximum surge effort the French could fly 99 fighter-bomber and 38 bomber sorties against Dien Bien Phu in a day in 1954 as against over 500 U.S. fighter-bombers and 30 B-52 sorties in 1968. And the aircraft of 1968 were far more capable than those of Dien Bien Phu. At Khe Sanh there were almost five artillery guns per battalion, and the combat base had the support of a dozen Army 175mm guns stationed at the Rockpile, a firebase not far from LZ Stud, whereas at Dien Bien Phu there had been 2.8 French artillery pieces per battalion.

The Americans also could fire their guns on a much more lavish scale. Artillery expended a final total of 102,660 rounds during the Khe Sanh siege, not counting PEGASUS or the mobile phase of this campaign. It would also be true that Henri Navarre remained limited to a very small number of usable reserve forces (all elite paratroop battalions) whereas Westmoreland could pull together as many as 30,000 troops for the PEGASUS operation with relative ease.

The biggest unanswered questions about Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh concern intentions on the other side. This is more true in regard to the latter. For Dien Bien Phu recent research questions how much of the Viet Minh plan followed from General Giap and how much from his Chinese military advisers, but all agree the Viet Minh had every intention of fighting this battle to a conclusion.

With Khe Sanh our picture is far murkier. Hanoi sources have confirmed that the People's Army's original intention at Khe Sanh was to use it as a diversion to keep the Americans from realizing what was coming up at Tet. A certain number of attacks, a certain amount of aggressive activity, had to occur for that threat to be credible. The number and scope of the attacks which actually happened at Khe Sanh, however, seems greater than required for the deception plan.

One interpretation is that the North Vietnamese commanders themselves were carried away by their successes at Lang Vei and against the Laotian battalion at Ban Houei Sane, and in February 1968 decided to make a real attempt to capture Khe Sanh. It is also possible that the wasteful losses in the attacks of late February came as a result of a renewed round of deceptive attacks designed to cover the withdrawal of People's Army formations from the area.

A further possibility is, as General Westmoreland argued in cables at the time and later in his memoirs, Hanoi's intention was always to fight at Khe Sanh and that Tet was the diversion. There is no evidence here which permits us to move beyond speculation. My reading of what is available is that Hanoi did get carried away by Lang Vei and then proceeded to overreach itself.

Vietnam Climax Siege of Khe Sanh

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