More scaling ladders were brought forward, but the Vietnamese managed to keep them off the walls. A French engineer detachment began digging a hasty sap to undermine the wall of the Mandarin Fort. A witness to the fighting called it ‘a furious hurricane.’ Using firesteps and loopholes, the Vietnamese kept up an intense fire. A French chaplain raced from wounded man to wounded man. Smoke filled the confined space. There were cries of pain amid the constant rattle of small-arms fire.

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Waiting on horseback from behind the first line of Vietnamese obstacles, but unable to see anything of the bitter battle raging inside the walls of Ky Hoa, an anxious Charner ordered two companies of the 2nd Light Infantry Battalion to aid the Franco-Spanish force and another company to reinforce the left column, which was still struggling to overcome what would turn out to be the Mandarin Fort’s north wall. The admiral’s only reserve was now the single light infantry company guarding the artillery.

The attack on the Mandarin Fort began to falter, and the Vietnamese redoubled their resistance. Charner was in danger of being forced to order a retreat when, finally, the marine infantry, engineers, light infantry and a company of native (Vietnamese) troops of the left column managed to scale the wall and poured into the back of the Mandarin Fort. At almost the same time, French engineers with the right column reached the main gate of the fort and breached it with hatchets and axes. Caught now between two forces, Vietnamese resistance quickly collapsed. The bitterness of the fighting provoked an unspoken agreement among the French and Spanish troops to give no quarter. Those Vietnamese unable to flee the fort were given no chance to surrender before they were slaughtered.

By late morning the Battle of the Ky Hoa Forts was over. It had taken Admiral Charner little more than a day to break Emperor Tu Duc’s power in Cochinchina. The younger brother of military mandarin Nguyen was killed during the battle. The Vietnamese commander himself was wounded but escaped across Thi Nghe Creek to the town of Binh Hoa.

In his official report to the minister of the navy, Charner expressed admiration for his Vietnamese foes. ‘Enemy resistance was stiff,’ he wrote, ‘and he gave ground only before the fervor and persistent courage of our troops.’

The combined French and Spanish force suffered 225 casualties, most of them in the enclosed space in front of the Mandarin Fort. Twelve men were killed, including Colonel Testard of the marine infantry. The Vietnamese, according to Charner, left behind ‘many bodies.’ At least 300 of the defenders were dead. Nguyen Tri Phuong survived his wound but, despite the French evaluation of Vietnamese resistance, he had lost and was demoted. Eventually he regained his status and was to fight the French again.

Charner was criticized in some circles for being rash, if not reckless. Indeed, the admiral had taken a great risk. He had ordered a vastly inferior force across open ground to attack a fortified position about whose actual layout he knew next to nothing. But he did the most important thing a military commander can do to mute criticism: He won. Eventually, a major boulevard in the growing French colonial city of Saigon would bear his name, and in 1944 the government of the colony of Cochinchina would issue a series of stamps to honor him.

Within months of the Battle of the Ky Hoa Forts, the French extended their control to include most of the six provinces of Cochinchina. There was resistance in the form of uprisings and more battles, but with the French in complete control of Saigon the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The Vietnamese empire survived for a while, but the emperor and his mandarins were weakened in the eyes of their own people. They would lose ground in military campaigns for the next 25 years, and in the end, the last vestiges of Vietnamese independence would be lost for almost a century.

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