Michael Batson

Last time I was herein Ha Noi the Army Museum was closed. Also called the Military History Museum, it’s well worth a visit. Entry is reasonable at 20,000 dong (just over US$1) and the same again if you wish to take photos. The price is standard price for entry to cultural centres, designed for affordability for Vietnamese, who pay the same price and visit such places in their droves.  One room upstairs was given over to the battle of Dien Bien Phu that defined an era, ending French colonial rule in Vietnam and the region. In it were displayed captured French weapons, uniform regalia of captured French officers, photographs, including one of vice president Richard Nixon visiting Vietnamese soldiers loyal to the colonial government at the time, but not at site of that battle.

The screen showed a documentary from footage taken at the time. The rows of bench seats were filled with Vietnamese families. When the show ended, they left, and the English version began, so I got the place virtually to myself. Unfortunately, the officials appeared uninterested in showing the entire 13 minutes to a single foreigner (I could tell the film duration thanks to the Windows media toolbar at the foot of the screen) and switched it off after it barely got started.

The battle of Dien Bien Phu was significant for it was the location where France chose to battle the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese communist forces head on, for control of the country. The French Indochina War had dragged on indecisively since 19 December 1946, when France had wrested control of Indochina back from the Japanese, and after, in the north at least, the Nationalist Chinese. According to the French commander-in-chief in Indochina at the time, France had lost sight of any clearly definable war aims, and indeed those espoused, were in fact, contradictory.

France never had the strength for a large-scale unilateral commitment and a short range solution to the conflict was required. French law restricted the use of draftees to French “homeland” territory, which included North Africa and occupied Germany but not Indochina, severely limiting the number of troops that could be made available. Eventually, 70 percent of the total French forces used at Dien Bien Phu were not French at all, but North Africans, Legionnaires and Vietnamese.

For these and other reasons, it therefore became imperative for the French to destroy at least a large part of the Viet Minh battle force as rapidly as possible. To achieve this, France chose to induce the Viet Minh to face up to them in a set piece battle. On its success hinged not only the fate of the French forces in Indochina and France’s political role in Southeast Asia, but the survival of Vietnam as a non-communist state and, to a certain extent, that of Cambodia and Laos as well.

French defeat to a large extent, was due to their failure to anticipate the ability of the Viet Minh with mounting a sustained, coordinated, and concentrated heavy artillery action over long periods. The irony was that while the US provided the French with almost US$1 billion in military aid including heavy artillery, much of the Viet Minh’s heavy artillery was of American manufacture also, captured by the Chinese during the Korean War.

In the grounds of the museum are the assorted detritus of war; planes, missiles, bombs, tanks and helicopters and self-propelled guns. Of the latter is the so-called “Lord of the Battlefield” which resembles a large naval gun mounted on a tracked vehicle. From this era, America produced grossly over-sized cars, so why not grossly over-sized artillery. Near the main building is a pyramid of aircraft scrap constructed from pieces of downed US planes the pinnacle of which is the entire tail section of one craft.

Centerpiece of the display is a large framed photograph almost life size, of a young Vietnamese girl shod in sandals with a carbine slung over her shoulder, dragging a piece from a downed American plane off a beach. The original T-59 tank that crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon in April 1975 takes centre stage in one hall. A replica of this tank is still on show at the palace, now renamed the Unification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City. Also there is the captured US Army jeep, in immaculate condition, used to drive away the last president of South Vietnam from the palace that same day.

Lunch was at the Café de Paris. The sepia coloured map of Indochine from my previous visit almost four years ago had gone from the wall, replaced by a blackboard menu. The manager or perhaps the new owner, because he wasn’t the guy I’d met on my first visit, resembled a youthful Yves St Laurent with his broad black framed glasses and open necked business shirt, his shoulder length hair unkempt but in a fashion that no doubt required time to attain the desired look. He greeted his customers in French, but when he came to my table he spoke in English. Apparently he must know all his customers by name, or there is something intrinsically Anglophile about me. Much of his time was divided between the laptop on the small bar and smoking with the punters at the outside tables. The chef, a heavy set Vietnamese woman, when not preparing the orders, sat behind bar with the young Vietnamese waitress, before missing some sort of cocktail for herself and disappearing back into the tiny kitchen.