Dien Bien Phu would be the climactic battle of the First Indochina War. Even more than the French, the Viet Minh had no doubts - thousands of soldiers, porters, and villagers toiled day and night to make a battle possible. Despite lengthy supply lines under constant aerial bombardment by the Forces Aeriennes d'Extreme Orient (FAEO), the Viet Minh managed to assemble an assault force of unprecedented size with even stronger and betterprotected artillery than the French. On 13 March 1954, Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap hurled his regiments against the French strongpoints, beginning a siege that would last 56 days. The French had a veritable fortress in the jungle valley, manned by the nine battalions, but General Giap had a four to one superiority and surrounded the French "air-land base." Within a week Giap had overrun the outlying strongpoints; within two, the Viet Minh had put Dien Bien Phu's airfield out of action. To the French the airfield was the critical link with the outside world, for they depended on air power for all their support, supplies, and reinforcements. Without an airfield the possibility of defeat loomed over the French entrenched camp. As the siege unfolded in the high mountain valley, two desperate efforts were mounted to save Dien Bien Phu. One was by land, the other by naval and air power. Initial French planning for an overland relief operation dated from December 1953. Operation "CONDOR" [1] provided for a column of three battalions to march northeastwards from the Laotian royal capital of Luang Prabang to the vicinity of Dien Bien Phu, where they would secure a drop zone for a landing by three parachute battalions. The combined force would then link up with the entrenched camp's forces making a breakout to the southeast. This plan was jointly concocted by Expeditionary Corps headquarters and the Tonkin and Laos regional commands. The execution of CONDOR was in the hands of Colonel Boucher de Crevecoeur, the Laotian regional commander. Crevecoeur was an old Indochina hand, with two prewar tours in the colony. In 1943 he had joined the British commando group for the Far East, Force 136, and later parachuted into Laos to set up guerrilla bands to fight the Japanese. A theorist of revolutionary warfare, Crevecoeur was the most experienced French theater commander in Indochina, having held this post in Laos for six years. Crevecoeur was well aware of the difficulty of any overland relief of Dien Bien Phu. More than 120 miles separated the entrenched camp from the French base at Luang Prabang. Treacherous mountains capped by jungle made the air distance much longer on the ground, and the few trails were watched closely by the Viet Minh and their Pathet Lao allies. The French mountain posts that might have helped support CONDOR had been swept away by the Viet Minh 316th Division when it made a large-scale raid toward Luang Prabang in February 1954. Because of these difficulties Crevecoeur got his forces in motion even before Giap opened the assault at Dien Bien Phu. Groupe Mobile Nord, the French equivalent of a U.S. regimental combat team, was the only major maneuver force in northern Laos and thus the formation Crevecoeur selected for CONDOR. Under Colonel Then, senior field commander of the Royal Lao Army, the mobile group had four battalions: 1st Laotian Paratroops (BPQ; 4th and 5th Laotian Light Infantry (BCQ; and the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Foreign Legion Infantry (11/2 REI), a regiment whose 1st battalion was trapped inside Dien Bien Phu. Colonel Then split the force into eastern and western sub-groups, moving up the Nam Pak from Muong Sai with his own force, comprising the two BCLs, and dispatching Lt. Col. Yvel Godard with the remaining troops up the Nam Ou river past Muong Ngoi. In the first phase of CONDOR the troops would link up, in the another phase they would push forward to protect the airborne drop. Progress was much slowerthan expected, however, and Dien Bien Phu was soon in trouble. General Henri Navarre, the Expeditionary Corps commander, began to focus his hopes instead on aerial intervention by the United States. To Save Dien Bien Phu The French in Indochina Introduction Dien Bien Phu Efforts US Naval and Air Support French Plans Operation Vulture to the Fall Large Map of Overland Relief (slow: 107K) Back to Table of Contents: CounterAttack # 3 To CounterAttack List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1991 by Pacific Rim Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com