Battle of Vĩnh Yên, 1951: de Lattre stops Giáp at the gates of Hanoi

Vĩnh Yên was the battle that saved Hanoi in 1951. Coming after a string of French disasters, it showed that the Việt Minh could be beaten in a set-piece battle, and it made the reputation of the general who had promised that the French would not yield another inch.²

Who won the Battle of Vĩnh Yên and why?

The French Union won. Outnumbered about three to one in battalions, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny's troops held the hills north of Vĩnh Yên, and on 17 January General Võ Nguyên Giáp pulled his divisions back. Aircraft, artillery and American-supplied napalm decided it: the Việt Minh attacked in the open and by day, where French firepower could reach them.³

A war going badly

The war between France and the Việt Minh, the Communist-led movement of Hồ Chí Minh, had begun in December 1946. It changed character when the Chinese Communists reached Vietnam's northern border at the end of 1949. From then on, Fall writes, the Việt Minh had a sanctuary across the frontier where its battalions could be trained and rearmed. In October 1950 Giáp destroyed the chain of French posts along the Chinese border, from Cao Bằng to Lạng Sơn, and the French gave up the north of Tonkin.⁴

By the end of 1950 Giáp had organized his regular troops into divisions: the 308th, formed in August 1949, and the 312th, formed in December 1950, among them. He meant to use them against the Red River delta, the crowded lowland around Hanoi and Haiphong that was the heart of French Tonkin, and the defensive belt the French held across the midlands to its north.⁵

De Lattre takes command

Paris answered the disaster with reinforcements and a new commander. General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, who had led the First French Army from Provence to the Danube in 1944 and 1945, arrived in Indochina on 17 December 1950 as both high commissioner and commander in chief, with civil as well as military authority.⁶

His first task was to restore the morale of an army that had just been beaten. He canceled the planned evacuation of French women and children from Hanoi; as Fall reports him, he reasoned that as long as the families stayed, the men would not dare to let go. He promised publicly that French Union troops would not give up another inch of ground, and he later admitted to the American minister in Saigon, Donald Heath, that he had said so to raise morale before he was sure the line would hold.⁷

Giáp's offensive

Giáp struck first. In Vietnamese military history the attack is the Trần Hưng Đạo campaign, named after the thirteenth-century general who beat the Mongols, and its aim was to break the French defensive belt across the midlands, from Việt Trì to Bắc Giang. The US Army's official history puts the stakes plainly: if Vĩnh Yên fell, the road to Hanoi would be open.⁸

The main blow fell on Vĩnh Yên, a provincial town northwest of Hanoi at the foot of the Tam Đảo massif. According to French accounts passed to Heath, the Việt Minh attacked there with 21 battalions against six or seven French Union battalions; the US Army history gives the defenders about 6,000 men and says Giáp's strength rose to 21 battalions as he fed in reinforcements. The attack was carried by two Việt Minh divisions, the 308th and the 312th. The French held the approaches with mobile groups, combined units of infantry, armor and artillery roughly like an American regimental combat team.⁹

13 to 15 January: the ambush

The Việt Minh attack opened on 13 January 1951. Its first move was against Bảo Chúc, a small French outpost: Fall dates the assault to the 13th, the Vietnamese military encyclopedia the capture of the post to the 14th. As the Việt Minh intended, Mobile Group 3 hurried north to relieve the garrison and ran into an ambush near Đạo Tú, where it suffered heavy losses before it could fight its way back toward Vĩnh Yên.¹⁰

De Lattre then took the battle in hand himself. He threw in every reserve he could find and almost every aircraft the French had in Indochina. On 15 January Mobile Group 1 pushed up the road to Vĩnh Yên, and the French set out to hold the line of low hills north of the town.¹¹

16 and 17 January: the hills north of Vĩnh Yên

The decisive fighting came on 16 and 17 January. Late on the 16th the Việt Minh came out of the forested Tam Đảo hills and attacked the hill line north of the town in wave after wave, assaults the US Army history calls human-wave attacks. The Vietnamese account has its 209th Regiment taking Hill 210 and then being driven off it, and Fall describes the hills changing hands in close fighting with grenades and submachine guns.¹²

De Lattre answered with air power. Fighter-bombers and transport aircraft dropped napalm, American-made and newly delivered, on the attacking troops; it was the first time the French used napalm in Indochina. Heath, who toured the battlefield with de Lattre on 19 January, judged it one decisive factor in the French holding.¹³

A Việt Minh officer whose diary Fall quotes described what it was like on the receiving end: aircraft diving without firing, then sheets of flame spreading over hundreds of meters, his men running in all directions, and a platoon commander asking whether this was the atomic bomb.¹⁴

By midday on 17 January the attacks had failed. The Vietnamese account says the campaign command ordered the withdrawal at two in the afternoon, after heavy losses and with little hope of further success; Fall has Giáp's troops fading back into the Tam Đảo woods around noon. The French were left holding the field.¹⁵

The commanders' decisions

De Lattre's decisions were simple and costly. He chose to fight for Vĩnh Yên rather than fall back on Hanoi, stripped the rest of Indochina of reserves and aircraft to do it, and accepted heavy losses in his mobile groups to keep the hill line. The US Army history judges that his forces were so worn by the end that they could not follow up their success.¹⁶

Giáp's choice was the opposite gamble. He brought his divisions down from the hills to fight a set-piece battle in open country and by day, where the French could use their aircraft, artillery and armor. The American diplomat Edmund Gullion pointed out that the daytime attack let the French use their new American weapons to the full, and the Vietnamese military encyclopedia itself concludes that choosing the midlands as the target was not suitable given the balance of forces.¹⁷

The method that had worked so well on the Chinese border, luring French relief columns into ambushes and destroying them, worked again against Mobile Group 3; the Vietnamese account names it as the principle of the campaign. It failed once the battle turned into frontal attacks on hills under artillery fire and air attack.¹⁸

How many died at Vĩnh Yên?

No count of the dead is reliable, and the sources differ widely. For the Việt Minh, Heath thought at least a thousand killed a fair estimate, with several hundred prisoners; the US Army history says the Việt Minh left about 1,500 dead and some 500 prisoners on the battlefield; Fall puts the cost at 6,000 dead and 500 prisoners. The Vietnamese military encyclopedia gives no total for its own side, only partial figures, among them 172 killed, 51 wounded and 40 missing in the 209th Regiment in the fight for the hills.¹⁹

French losses are no better documented. The French told Heath that one mobile group of three battalions, about 2,000 men, had 540 casualties, a figure the US Army history repeats; Fall writes that Mobile Group 3 lost nearly a whole Senegalese battalion in the ambush near Đạo Tú. The Vietnamese account claims about 5,000 French Union troops killed or captured over the whole campaign, with six battalions badly mauled.²⁰

The Vietnamese view

Vietnamese histories remember the campaign as a hard lesson rather than a simple defeat. The military encyclopedia calls it a step forward for the People's Army, which learned there to attack fortified positions and to fight in open country by night and by day, and it records that the campaign cleared the country north of Vĩnh Yên and part of Phúc Yên province. It also concedes heavy casualties and a target poorly chosen for the balance of forces. Gullion, on the American side, drew the same lesson from the other direction: the Việt Minh had paid dearly, but they had gained experience of fighting in the delta.²¹

After Vĩnh Yên

Vĩnh Yên was the first of three Việt Minh offensives against the delta in 1951. Giáp attacked again at Mao Khê, near Haiphong, in March, and on the Day River in the south of the delta in June, and both times French air power and artillery threw him back.²²

De Lattre used the respite to fortify. He began a belt of concrete blockhouses around the delta, soon called the de Lattre Line, and he told Heath that he needed at least a division and a half of reinforcements from France and would resign if he did not get them. American aid kept arriving, and the US Army history concludes that without it, napalm and howitzers above all, the narrow victory at Vĩnh Yên would have been impossible.²³

American observers were more cautious than the French, who celebrated Vĩnh Yên as a glorious victory. Gullion warned against reading it as a turning point. Fall reached the same conclusion: Giáp's troops were not yet ready for a general offensive, and the French lacked the mobility and the men to exploit their success.²⁴

For de Lattre the year of victories ended in grief. His only son, Bernard, was killed in Vietnam in 1951, and de Lattre himself died on 11 January 1952; he was made a Marshal of France after his death. Three years later the war ended at Điện Biên Phủ.²⁵ › 13 January in military history