Rating: 
Summary: Very detailed and informitive.
Review: Great book if you want to know every minute detail about Dien Bien Phu. To me it spends way to much time with the politics of why and how France found itself in Vietnam. The book was full of redundant information. If half of that was removed from the content you would have 200 page book. Instead we have to slug through 500. I thought the best reading of the entire book was the last two chapters where the author threw off the formalities and gave a good overall picture of the French defeat. It seemed to take forever to get there though. The Finale, detailing the journeys of those that escaped was also fascinating. As well as the Postface, "Where are they now". Other than that I'd pass this one up unless you are really insane for French Indochina military history. I only gave it 4 stars because it is historically, about the most thorough writing on the subject.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent!
Review: Hell In a Very Small Place is a masterful and, I felt, at times moving account of a classic battle. Superbly researched and well written, the book was hard to put down. A must for military history readers!
Rating:
Summary: Dien Bien Phu
Review: I have just read what I consider to be the best account of this epic battle I have ever come across. It dispells quite a few myths of events at Dien Bien Phu and gives a very accurate yet personal, and readable slant on the whole situation. One of the best books I have read for many years.
Rating:
Summary: SHOULD HAVE BEEN REQUIRED READING
Review: I read this book while serving as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam in 1967. I found the book in a Special Services Library. My first thought was, "Has anyone in our government read this book?" My second thought was, "Why hasn't EVERY commander in Vietnam been required to read this book?"There were so many parallels to so many situations I observed in Vietnam that it was incredible. Two that immediately came to mind were Khe Sanh and Dak To, both located in valleys surrounded by higher ground, safely accessible only by air and isolated from the nearest major support facilities. We never benefitted from any of the lessons that the Viet Minh taught the French and we let the Viet Cong teach them to us all over again. Bernard B. Fall wrote from the persective of a former member of the French military and continued to write throughout most of the American involvement. He died covering the war in Vietnam. Other books by Mr. Fall include: Vietnam Reader, Vietnam Witness, The Viet Minh Regime and Street Without Joy.
Rating: 
Summary: wordy
Review: I will never understand all the praise this guy gets.
I could not even finish this book, it was so boring and wordy.
For one thing, he has ten times the information in this book than you need to understand what's happining.
He also seem's to praise the French even though every thing they did was the wrong thing to do. And yet he has the nerve to very slyly put down the American's. After reading around 75 to 80 books about the wars fought in Vietnam, I can honestly say this was the most boring, wordy, mind numbing book I ever tried to read.
I honestly tried very hard to read all of this book, but after 10 minutes my eye's would glaze over and I wouldn't even remember what I just read.
I also read Mr. Fall's book "Street Without Joy" and at least got through it. The very same story was put down in print by Howard R. Simpson titled "Dien Bien Phu: The Epic Battle America Forgot". Mr. Simpson's account of the very same battle that Mr. Fall wrote about was very easy to read and very well written and very easy to understand. All in all, this was a lesson in how one person know's how to write a very interesting and informative book that hold's your interest, as opposed to Mr. Fall's book on how to write a very boring wordy book with a lot of useless information. As far as Mr. Fall's Book "Hell in a Very Small Place" This is the first book I ever read where I couldn't finish it no matter how hard I tried. To put it bluntly, This book [is terrible]. In all honesty, I couldn't and wouldn't recommend this book to anyone no matter how voracious a reader they were.
Rating:
Summary: One Of the Best
Review: If you have an interest in the history of the Vietnam War, or the Indochina War, then this is basically a must read, it will simply put the entire French war in Indochina in perspective for you (though I would also recommend you read "Street Without Joy"). As other reviewers have said, its almost appalling at the similarities between the French mistakes during their war in Indochina and the US's mistakes during its war, so much of it could have been avoided if the right people would have listened and done the proper background work on Vietnam. As far as the book goes, if you want to know something about the Battle of Dien Ben Phu, this book can tell you, it simply has everything, maps, strategies, the times and places that the individual attacks/counterattacks happened, absolutely everything. Yes, there are a lot of military terms and units that will be referenced in the book, but its still well worth the read. Also gives a nice buildup to the battle, as to what had been happening in the war up to that point, and why the French felt it necessary to take such a gamble behind enemy lines. Trust me, its a long book, but its all well worth it, and you will come away with a better understanding of how the French got there, and why we eventually took over after they pulled out. Its unfortunate that our men had to suffer or die needlessly because the right people didnt get their hands on some of the great books out of this era, things could have been a lot different, but hindsight is always 20-20.
Rating:
Summary: Minor perspectives on Fall's book
Review: Many will be surprised that Bernard Fall is considered by the French to be an American. He is perhaps the most well known of "French" authors of the period simply because he was among the very few writing in English. As for his book, it is certainly long, occasionally hard to read, but an important account of this politically significant battle. Dien Bien Phu was not the first time that the French high command had tried to lure the Viet Minh battle corps into committing itself to a fight. De Lattre had done so at Hoa Binh in late '51 through early '52, and had found himself forced to withdraw French forces back to Hanoi after Giap shut the Black River and Colonial Route 6 main supply routes down. Giap emereged from Hoa Binh the winner, at least in the eyes of the junior officers who fought there. Later that year, the French tried the air-land base concept at Na San, further up the Black River on the road to Dien Bien Phu, but Salan was intelligent enough to declare victory and get out before the rainy season began in earnest. It was Salan who launched the Dien Bien Phu operation, ostensibly for building a CGMA guerrilla base, who thereafter took his entire staff home and left Navarre and his newbies on the hook. Both sides still bitterly debate who really made the fateful decision to draw the line at Dien Bien Phu. What subsequently took place was the destruction of the French Strategic Reserve, not the French Army in Indochina itself. But, akin to our own Tet-68 battle, this translated into a Viet Minh victory in the political arena. The peace conference then convening in Geneva, gave them ample opportunity to exploit that. Jules Roy's book, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, is another fine work, and while pertinent, both had very little to offer U.S. tactical fighters of the 1962-72 period. Our problem was that the "down in the trenches view" of that war, which would have been very useful, had yet to be penned by the Trinquiers, Loustaus, Cabiros, and Denois de St. Marcs, all of whom had left Indochina to go on to a further via-crucis in Algeria, followed by the 13 May 1958 revolt, the April 1961 Putsch, and either exile, jail, or early retirement into obscurity. Theirs were the experiences that we really needed to study.
Rating:
Summary: Minor perspectives on Fall's book
Review: Many will be surprised that Bernard Fall is considered by the French to be an American. He is perhaps the most well known of "French" authors of the period simply because he was among the very few writing in English. As for his book, it is certainly long, occasionally hard to read, but an important account of this politically significant battle. Dien Bien Phu was not the first time that the French high command had tried to lure the Viet Minh battle corps into committing itself to a fight. De Lattre had done so at Hoa Binh in late '51 through early '52, and had found himself forced to withdraw French forces back to Hanoi after Giap shut the Black River and Colonial Route 6 main supply routes down. Giap emereged from Hoa Binh the winner, at least in the eyes of the junior officers who fought there. Later that year, the French tried the air-land base concept at Na San, further up the Black River on the road to Dien Bien Phu, but Salan was intelligent enough to declare victory and get out before the rainy season began in earnest. It was Salan who launched the Dien Bien Phu operation, ostensibly for building a CGMA guerrilla base, who thereafter took his entire staff home and left Navarre and his newbies on the hook. Both sides still bitterly debate who really made the fateful decision to draw the line at Dien Bien Phu. What subsequently took place was the destruction of the French Strategic Reserve, not the French Army in Indochina itself. But, akin to our own Tet-68 battle, this translated into a Viet Minh victory in the political arena. The peace conference then convening in Geneva, gave them ample opportunity to exploit that. Jules Roy's book, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, is another fine work, and while pertinent, both had very little to offer U.S. tactical fighters of the 1962-72 period. Our problem was that the "down in the trenches view" of that war, which would have been very useful, had yet to be penned by the Trinquiers, Loustaus, Cabiros, and Denois de St. Marcs, all of whom had left Indochina to go on to a further via-crucis in Algeria, followed by the 13 May 1958 revolt, the April 1961 Putsch, and either exile, jail, or early retirement into obscurity. Theirs were the experiences that we really needed to study.
Rating:
Summary: Hell Indeed
Review: Non-fiction books can be dry and tedious sometimes. Especially books on military history. But I could not put this book down. It is a very good read. Very suspenseful. Grim yet enlightening. Like C. Ryan's A BRIDGE TOO FAR, it just captures your attention. I am of French/Vietnamese/Chinese heritage and come away as a better person after reading this masterpiece. I have the utmost respect for both adversaries. Fall has written a very human account. I highly recommend it. Especially for persons like me who yearn for pieces of their history.
Rating:
Summary: The title says it all
Review: Small? By the time of the final French collapse, the area left in their hands was virtually the size of a baseball diamond. This book, along with End Of The Line:The Seige Of Khe Sanh, is absolutely essential reading for anybody who wants to understand some of the key differences between the Western and Vietnamese approaches to combat and politics. While nobody could doubt the courage of the French soldiers, who were plunged into a cauldron of Death by a group of arrogant and totally out of touch leaders, you cannot fail to admire the courage and skill of a relentless and ingenious Enemy. The idea of setting up a base in a remote valley to draw in Enemy units and destroy them, was fatally flawed for several reasons. As the book shows, one of them being the failure to conceive of the VM's ability to deploy significant numbers of artillery pieces and anti-aircraft units so quickly and so far away. Yet the real nail in the French coffin lay in the fact that unlike the British and Americans, the French had no strategic heavy bombers. By comparison, the Air operation (Operation Niagara) in support of the Marine garrison at Khe Sanh in 1968 (during the Tet offensive) began with a strike by 36 B-52 bombers, each carrying a 30 ton payload. The small single-engined French planes could barely carry any weapons load, especially at such extreme range. Even then, they often fell prey to the radar-predicted flak that nobody believed the VM could deploy. Naturally, it was all courtesy of the Communist Chinese. Fall gives you a tremendous overview of the entire disaster, from the political machinations to the ghastly conditions on the base. One of the commanders who had refused extra artillery before the main battle began, shot himself. The desperate measures employed by the French included dropping two tanks in pieces, which the Army engineers assembled on the ground, and which caused havoc among the VM until they were overwhelmed by suicide squads, firing point blank into the observation slits and rolling grenades down the barrels of the guns. Hell indeed. Not just for the troops, but for the hopelessly overworked doctor, who had to crawl over a pile of amputated limbs to reach his bunk. As another reviewer mentioned, the French finally had to beg for US air support, and while the US decided not to commit carrier-based strike aircraft (they also decided against a tactical nuclear strike because of the danger to French troops), they did provide the French with a squadron of B-26's, two of which were shot down on the first raid by radar-controlled flak, at 10,000 feet. While these bombers may have made some difference had they arrived much earlier, the writing was really on the wall from Day One. A disaster, yes, and it should have been a wake up call. The clowns who sent US troops into Nam in the early sixties should have known that you cannot fight a vague holding operation against such a resourceful and fanatical enemy. The only reason the US fatalities did not far exceed 58,000 is because of the massive tactical and strategic air support that the French simply never had. Equally, the US helicopter force provided a level of mobility and close air support that simply did not exist at the time of Dien Bien Phu. The same helicopters saved countless lives by (usually) rapidly evacuating wounded to field hospitals where they could receive urgently needed surgery. Imagine Vietnam without the Hueys, the B-52's, the Phantoms, the Skyraiders, the AC-130's, the miniguns, the firebases, the Daisy Cutters, the cluster munitions, the Fuel-Air bombs, the napalm, the phosporous, the satellite photographs, the U-2 and SR-71 flights, the night vision equipment, the armoured units, the God-bless-'em-all men AND women who sewed everybody back together, and you will have some idea of what the French boys faced at Dien Bien Phu. As somebody else rightly said, it's a pity none of the US "planners" ever actually read anything about the French experience. An essential book.
|
