By late 1951, the French army had recovered from their disasters along Colonial Route 4 the previous autumn. Giap's newly invigorated Viet Minh battle corps had been stopped on the doorstep of Hanoi at the Battle of Dong Trieu in March 1951. In May 1951 its move into the Red River Delta via the Day River was checked during hard fighting at Ninh Binh, Yen Phuc and Thai Binh. Then, in October 1951, the Viet Minh had been temporarily expelled from the Black River highlands at Nghia Lo after a daring airborne drop into their rear. In the course of a year, the French army had gone from panic verging on defeat to seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Vietnam Magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

The architect of these victories was General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, a cavalry officer from the landed nobility who had abandoned his horse and the 12th Dragoons for trench fighting with the infantry during the darkest days of World War I. De Lattre had gone on to serve in Morocco and had commanded the French First Army from the south of France to the Rhine and Danube rivers during World War II. He was vain, arrogant and often unfair to subordinates, but he had abandoned the safety of France and a sinecure with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to risk his reputation in Indochina, in a war that many senior officers wanted no part of.

If de Lattre was the terror of staff officers and tidy little garrison commanders, he had the undying respect of the combat lieutenants and captains. While his nominal fief was Saigon, he directed the defense of Hanoi personally, and the Day River battles cost him his only son, killed while commanding Vietnamese troops on a promontory overlooking the river at Ninh Binh.

French aims in Indochina by 1951 included the development of Vietnam as an independent state within the French Union and the establishment of a viable Vietnamese national army. Following the battle of Dong Trieu, de Lattre had sketched out a blueprint for victory that foresaw the end of reactive operations and a return to offensive warfare that would re-establish French military and subsequent Vietnamese national authority in disputed and enemy-held territory. The test case for his offensive strategy would be Hoa Binh. De Lattre had made that decision upon arrival back in Saigon from a whirlwind tour of the United States and France in October 1951. He had been ill since the death of his son, but had put his sickness down to grief, stress and fatigue. He now learned that he had cancer.

As he was sending men into a campaign that he might not live to see through, he called in his ground commanders and talked to each of them individually. They were all in agreement. Intelligence had noted that the Viet Minh were preparing another offensive for the Delta. It was time to go on the offensive and force the enemy to react. Hoa Binh would do just that.

Hoa Binh (the name means 'peace' in Vietnamese) was the capital of the Muong tribal minority. Unique among Vietnam's Highland minorities, the Muong are racially identical to Lowland Vietnamese, but in 1951 this group still retained some of the tribal organization and culture that marked North Vietnam prior to the arrival of Chinese civilization. Sited some 62 kilometers west southwest of Hanoi, Hoa Binh sits on the west bank of the Black River, where it bends north to join the Red River above Son Tay. By boat, the town lies 134 kilometers up the Red and Black rivers, past Son Tay, Viet Tri, La Phu (modern-day La Hao-Phu An), and Rocher Notre-Dame (now Cho Che). Much of this distance was safe for riverine forces, but the last 21 kilometers between Rocher Notre-Dame and Hoa Binh ran under the view of looming mountains and narrow strips of littoral forest, broken by an occasional bluff or outcrop. By road, Hoa Binh lay a mere 67 kilometers of map distance from Hanoi via Colonial Route 6. The first 35 kilometers ran to Xuan Mai; from there the road snaked up under the Vietnam and Cham mountains for 31 kilometers–the whole of that distance full of switchbacks and turns–emerging on the Black River just below Hoa Binh at Ben Ngoc.In 1946, the French had retaken Hoa Binh with a drop by airborne forces, but they had abandoned it in October 1950 in the panic following Giap's victories on Colonial Route 4.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to