In 1953 the French army high command in Indochina decided to challenge the Viet Minh to a set-piece battle. The Viet Minh’s premature attempt to wage conventional warfare had been punished by heavy defeats in 1951. By establishing a base on the border between Laos and Tonkin, the French hoped to trigger a massive response: their airpower, armour and elite parachute battalions would deliver a battlefield victory just as peace talks opened in Geneva. There was, as Capitaine Vipère-Noire would have observed, only one thing wrong with this plan: it was bollocks. In an intelligence failure that the historian Henri Lefebvre likens to that preceding the German assault on Verdun, the French army failed to appreciate the size of the Viet Minh’s conventional forces, the scale of its logistical preparations, and the quantity of Soviet bloc aid enjoyed by General Giap’s forces. The ensuing disaster for the French colonial forces is best known to English-speaking readers through Bernard Fall’s two books written in the early 1960s, Hell in a Very Small Place and Street Without Joy. Issue 33 of Vae Victis includes a game covering the siege of Dien Bien Phu and a fascinating article accompanies it. The authors visited the battlefield where they discovered, among other things, a Vietnamese version of the Vietnam memorial in Washington DC. At 39 Francs per issue (£4.00 -- no naughty jokes about euro currencies) you can have a year’s worth of Vae Victis for a single issue of S&T, give or take a few squid. And the production values are outstanding. This is terrific value for money - so long as the game is worth playing, of course. As published, Issue 34 (Tobrouk) is unfinished, unplayable (and unspellable). Dien Bien Phu, by contrast, is an entertaining and atmospheric game. You can order online by credit card. Components The map shows the valley in which the French chose to establish their airfield. For reasons I forget they established one position (‘Isabelle’) considerably further to the south. This sits in the corner of the map, separated from the main camp by an area of jungle. The map is divided into jungle zones (around the edges); ‘peripheral zones’ and the CRC (Camp Retranché Central - the main camp around the airfield). In the game, the battalion positions, named after the romantic conquests of the French commander, consist of one or more PAs (Points d’appui) intended to be occupied by one or two infantry companies. Counters represent companies of French or battalions of Viet Minh. Units are rated for firepower, close quarter battle and morale - and they repay close study. The Viet Minh vary in quality. You’ll know where the punch is coming when you identify the hard men of Hanoi in the ‘capital’ division (308th); some other outfits may show signs of what their commander called ‘rightist tendencies’ (the right to survive the battle…). The French have some sub-standard T’ai companies, some acceptable Moroccan and Algerian battalions, a ferocious Foreign Legion element, and the legendary Paras (colonial army and Legion). Morale ranges from a timid ‘2’ of the unfortunate T’ai tribesmen to ‘5’ for Bigeard’s ‘centurions’. And if a para company takes a step loss, its morale increases to 6. Not a printing error: as Luc Olivier explains in his errata/addenda sheet ‘this represents the pugnacity and greater combat experience of the survivors’. Don’t mess with the guys in tenue léopard. The artwork on the counters is nothing less than a mini-guide to the range of uniforms worn by the French colonial army. Nifty colour art of soldiers wearing USMC 1943 pattern, British 1942 airborne (‘sausage skin’) windproofs, French splinter camo… a treat for webbing sniffers. There are three scenarios: a one-turn intro (the initial Viet Minh assault); a mid-term affair I haven’t looked at, and the eight-turn campaign. At the time of writing (11 October) Luc has produced an errata/addenda sheet that will hopefully be posted on grognards.com and in VV35 by the time you read this. The most crucial points are that when the rules talk about a ‘level’ (niveau) of munitions, this means 5 artillery bombardment points for the Viet Minh and 3 for the French. (The VM get 2 of these ‘levels’ per turn; the French can reduce their supply by one level for each 2pts of aviation they divert from the battlefield to bombing the enemy supply routes). And if a unit fails a morale test it becomes disorganised. At the start of each turn the French player rolls a single D6 to determine how much ammunition is dropped into the fortress; how many companies of reinforcements can be parachuted in per phase, and how many points of air support he has. As positions fall, deliveries falter. Once the perimeter has shrunk to a tiny cluster around the airfield (and it will) the Viets can pick up extra points of artillery ammo as supply drops fall their side of the lines. The Viet Minh can withdraw units into the jungle where they regenerate in finest Sci-Fi monster style, 1 step per turn. They also burrow away excavating up to 12 points of trenches every go. I was not clear about how these trench counters were placed, but Luc Olivier responded with commendable speed to my rules questions [thank Al Gore for the internet :)]. Place one trench marker per peripheral area: its level (+1, +2 or +3) affects all attacks into the area. Attacks are made from ‘assault bases’, connected by lines to the relevant PAs, or from PA to PA. The Viets can attack with up to three battalions (of the same regiment), the limit being the trench level. It costs double points to dig trenches in the swamp areas (‘pass the bucket again, comrade’…). If a cheeky French recce raid catches the Viets defending one of their prized +3 trenches with nothing more than a dummy counter, the trench is reduced to a +2. The Viets can only move between peripheral zones that have trenches in them, so these are the first to be dug up; after that, they can force additional losses through attrition on some strongpoints situated on the west bank of the Nam Youm. Units move from area to area and from PA to PA within the named strongpoints. A phase of ‘operational movement’ for the VM and then the French is followed by four phases, each divided into three VM ‘assault impulses’ and three for the French. If you have the ammunition and the manpower, you can keep going until you don’t. The Viets operate face-down, identities and combat strengths the flip-side of an anonymous soldier figure - SOP for guerrillas in boardgames, after all. So the French operational phase begins with a reconnaissance segment in which they try to turn over VM units in adjacent areas to see which are real and which are the dummies. Because their counters are identical one side, with their identity on the other, the VM can’t suffer step losses by flipping them over. You have to stack -1 and -2 step loss markers with them if they take casualties. This can be tricky to keep track of, especially if you have recently trimmed your fingernails and you are involved in a furious succession of attacks and counter-attacks across Dominique. Assault Impulse During an assault impulse the French can drop in a para company or two (if they have the reinforcements available); the Viets bombard PAs with artillery; the French infantry garrisons fire (+ column shifts for air support) then down comes the French artillery (provided there is ammunition available). Then the VM come to close quarters. After any possible advance after combat, the defender can make some limited movement in sectors under attack. There are some nice touches here. Artillery or aerial bombardment cannot kill off the last step in a position: you have to winkle the buggers out with bayonets and hand grenades. Units can be ‘disorganised’ by fire or close combat, which halves their ratings; however, you can elect to take an extra step loss instead. Since disorganised units cannot advance after combat, VM players will often take the extra hit (‘human wave tactics’). However, a ‘D’ result on a stack attacking a PA affects the whole stack, so there’s a lot to be said for successive waves of attacks over the course of a turn. The French never have enough artillery ammunition to deal with all of them. Make your secondary attacks first to soak up their shells. Morale is crucial in close quarter battle, translating into big column shifts especially for the French whose morale is doubled by the presence of one of their M24 light tank platoons. At the end of each assault phase, disorganised units become ‘fatigued’ instead. The negative modifiers for combat are not quite as drastic, but they remain fragile until automatically recovered at the end of the turn. This system rewards the husbanding of reserves: many a lost PA has been retrieved by judicious counter-attacks, with another company or two of paras to hand in case the VM have another go. This is not difficult to administer, but a neat and convincing mechanism. Some positions are more important than are others. The loss of the high ground to the east left the airfield under direct fire from the Viet Minh guns. For each key point lost the French forfeit a step during the attrition phase. If the Viets focus on seizing these, the French soon find themselves losing 4 or 5 steps at the end of each turn. You can use replacement points to satisfy attrition, but if a PA is encircled by +3 trenches, it also suffers attrition and that has to come from the beleaguered forces therein. Attrition can break the French defence. The French garrison is very quickly depleted of its low value units, the rule neatly simulating the rapid disappearance of the wretched T’ai companies. Once they’re gone, you are down to the elite, and if you have to start sacrificing les Paras to the attrition rules, your future probably lies in one of Uncle Ho’s ‘re-education camps’. The single turn scenario is a good place to start. Our first attempt saw +3 trenches deployed in areas O (to attack Gabrielle), B (Béatrice), A (in between the two), and F (Mont Chauve). I am not sure this is such a good choice if playing the campaign game because VM units can only move through peripheral zones with trenches in them. It might be worth dispensing with one of the ‘3’s to put three ‘1’s elsewhere, if only to allow dummy units to lurk at the edge of the French defences. However, spade-work complete, the Viets went for a historical all-out assault on Gabrielle and Béatrice. Both fell in the first VM operational phase, although victory was expensive: 7 and 6 steps respectively. Victory conditions for the single turn scenario demand that the Viet Minh capture 10 PAs for no more than 20 casualties. An attack by the less frightening 312 division on Elaine 1 was driven off with another 2 VM casualties. The bodycount was driven up by several ‘D’ results being converted to hits. But defensive fires had cost the French two-thirds of their ammunition. This is one slight niggle: each time either side fires its artillery, the ammunition counter drops down one box. But said box contains a factor by which infantry defensive fire is multiplied (from x3 at the top, when you can barely see over the huge crates of ammo, to x½ when you’re knee deep in spent cases). So firing off an artillery barrage can suddenly halve the firepower of your infantry by dropping them from the magical x2 to x1. On the other hand, do you want two types of ammunition marker? Next you’ll be accounting for tank fuel… First French Operations Phase The first French operations phase witnessed a counter-attack by 6BPC against Béatrice. Unfortunately it was disorganised by the VM artillery and thus unable to advance after combat. The second VM phase saw the red flag finally planted on Elaine 1 at the cost of another 2 steps from the hardcore 308 division. A French counter attack met the same fate as the attempt on Béatrice. The third VM phase involved an attempt by another regiment of the 308th to attack Elaine 4 from Elaine 1; but the French had seen that coming and the Moroccan garrison had a tank there to double their morale. Turn 1 ended with ten PAs in VM hands for the loss of 17 steps: a narrow victory for Uncle Ho. Experience suggests that there is a lot more the French can do to frustrate the commie hordes, but they have alternatives of their own which I will leave you to discover for yourselves. The campaign game has a random events option, printed in issue 34. Roll 2D6 at the beginning of turn 6 for options that range from the addition of a couple of extra VM battalions to the various rescue plans mooted, criminally late in the day, to rescue the doomed garrison. Options include a relief column drawing off substantial VM forces; the spooks and tribal soldiers of the GCMAs do the same; or…if you roll double one…60 USAF B-29 Superfortresses (in French colours) fly from the Philippines to flatten the VM supply depots. (There’ll be a slight pause while I hold that thought). As a French commander said of the position at Sedan in 1870, ‘nous sommes dans un pot de chambre, et nous y serons emmerdés’. This is pretty much what will happen at Dien Bien Phu, but a judiciously managed French defence can achieve victory. (There are casualty thresholds at which the VM lose their +1 close combat bonus; have to suspend attacks for one phase; and lose the game, respectively). The French can mount some spectacular counter-attacks with tanks and Paras, and if the blow is well-aimed, can seriously delay the VM timetable. This is a high risk strategy, but personally, I would expect nothing less from anyone in a casquette Bigeard. You won’t win by skulking in the command post till the Viets are at the door. Bonne Chance! Back to Perfidious Albion #102 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com