Operation Castor was a plan of the French high command in Hanoi to draw the Vietnamese guerrillas—then called the Viet Minh—into a set piece division-sized battle along European lines in which, they were confident, they could defeat and destroy the Viet Minh guerrillas who had no experience in maneuvering large formations. To this end, the French flew in or parachuted in late 1953 more than 26,000 French, Foreign Legion and colonial troops, plus tanks and artillery, into the remote valley of Dien Bien Phu and, in effect, dared the Viet Minh to “come and get us.”

The Viet Minh obliged. But because they had no trucks, transport planes or helicopters, they used thousands of bicycles to haul up tons and tons of supplies, equipment and munitions—including disassembled US-made 105mm artillery pieces captured by Mao Zedung's guerrillas from the Chiang Kaishek's Kuomintang Nationalist army—into the mountains surrounding Dien Bien Phu valley.

What the lowly bicycle can do! By the time the battle began in March, Viet Minh artillery outnumbered French artillery four-to-one. In addition, they occupied the high ground, while the French were sitting ducks in the valley. Napoleon would never have allowed himself to fall into such a hole. In shame and despair, the French artillery commander, Col. Piroth, blew himself up with a grenade.

The French overall commander, Col. (later Gen.) Christian de Castries, was a flamboyant aristocrat and womanizer who named all his outposts after his many girlfriends: Luli, Gabrielle, Beatrice, Isabelle, Anne-Marie, etc. During the battle, other Viet Minh units simultaneously attacked other towns and cities in Indo-China (a precursor of Tet) to tie down French reinforcements, while the French perimeter in Dien Bien Phu gradually shrank as one outpost after another was overrun by the Viet Minh.

On May 7, 1954, the Vietnamese penetrated the French command bunker. The French did not resist. They were drinking wine to celebrate their defeat.

As defeat loomed, the French appealed to the USA where Vice-President Nixon and Air Force General Le May planned to drop atomic bombs on the Vietnamese supply dumps. It fell to Winston Churchill to block the use of atomic weapons in Vietnam: President Eisenhower would not employ them without his consent. What followed became a Stalingrad in the jungle: the French were worn down and destroyed. The French withdrew from Vietnam but the country was divided at US insistence, creating the short-lived 'Republic of South Vietnam' for which 55,000 US servicemen would die over the next 20 years. The French colonial army regrouped in Algeria where a new war began, one it was so determined to win that its officers would ultimately attempt a coup d'etat. Dien Bien Phu is a true landmark battle. Its political consequences were profound.

In 1963, as Washington was deepening its commitment in Vietnam, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made a telling remark to a U.S. official. "If you want to, go ahead and fight in the jungles of Vietnam, the French fought there for seven years and still had to quit in the end. Perhaps the Americans will be able to stick it out for a little longer, but eventually they will have to quit, too."

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From The Economist:

DIEN BIEN PHU was an isolated outpost in the mountains of Vietnam, a 20th-century colony where the French were at war with the national liberation movement, the Vietminh. No longer ragged guerrillas, the Vietminh by the early 1950s were armed by the Chinese with the latest weaponry. In the spring of 1954, as the leaders of East and West—John Foster Dulles and Anthony Eden, Vyacheslav Molotov and Zhou Enlai—met in Geneva to decide the future of French Indochina, Dien Bien Phu was garrisoned by 10,000 soldiers of the French Republic.

Most of them were not French. They were Algerians, Moroccans, Africans, Vietnamese, along with a few elite French paratroops. There were also four battalions of the Foreign Legion, their officers French, but most of their men Germans, many of them survivors of the Russian front. There was also an official “mobile campaign brothel”. The girls would soon be needed as nurses.

General Giap, the Vietminh commander, has been compared to his own model, that other artilleryman, Napoleon. On March 13th he launched his attack, firing 60 shells a minute on the French perimeter. Without attracting suspicion, General Giap's skinny soldiers had dragged hundreds of guns over the mountains and hidden them in deep firing positions. The Vietminh attack came as a complete surprise.

For just under two months Dien Bien Phu was cut off. The fortified hilltops, christened by the French with girls' names such as Anne-Marie, Claudine and Eliane, were reduced one by one. First the garrison lost the airstrip, which meant it could only be reinforced by parachute. Soon the trenches and the hospital were places of horror. The Foreign Legion and the paras fought like tigers. Hundreds of Vietminh dead lay unburied in front of the wire.

On May 5th General Giap moved in for the kill. In three days of fighting as murderous as any of the legionnaires had seen at Stalingrad, the last trenches were overrun. Thousands of men were killed in those last days, and thousands more were taken prisoner. Four hundred were forced on a “death march” to a prison camp 400km (250 miles) away. Later some compared the march and the camp to Dachau or Buchenwald. Others asked what else a third-world army, whose soldiers received only handfuls of rice, could have done with so many more mouths to feed.

Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War. By Ted Morgan. Random House; 752 pages; $35. Presidio Press; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

The battle begins ...