In November 1953 the French army dropped thousands of paratroopers into a remote valley in northwest Vietnam, repaired an old Japanese-built airstrip and dared the Viet Minh to attack. Dien Bien Phu was meant to be an airhead: a fortress that lived and fought entirely from the sky. Six months later it died the same way.

The battle is usually told as an artillery story. It was just as much an aviation story, about transport crews flying into flak to keep a garrison alive, a CIA-owned airline whose American pilots were not supposed to be there, and a French Air Force nurse who flew in on a medical flight and could not fly out.

A fortress supplied by air

Operation Castor began on 20 November 1953, when about 9,000 French troops were flown or parachuted into the valley over three days. The plan only worked if aircraft could keep coming. There was no road. Everything, from shells to blood plasma, arrived by C-47 Dakota or by parachute.

The Viet Minh had other ideas. When the siege began on 13 March 1954, artillery on the surrounding hills started hitting the airstrip, and within about a day it was largely unusable for normal operations. A few medical evacuation Dakotas still slipped in at night until late March. After that, every round, ration and replacement had to be dropped, by crews ordered to fly at 2,000 metres or higher to stay above the flak, which made accurate drops much harder.

The nurse who stayed

On 28 March 1954 Geneviève de Galard, a French Air Force flight nurse, flew in on a C-47 medevac. The Dakota was damaged on landing and then destroyed by shellfire, and she was stranded. She spent the rest of the siege in the underground hospital, the only French woman nurse in the garrison.

She was awarded the Légion d'honneur and the Croix de Guerre during the siege, on 29 April 1954, and after her release with the first group of wounded on 24 May she received the US Medal of Freedom from President Eisenhower. The press called her the "Angel of Dien Bien Phu". She died in May 2024.

Real Time History on why France lost the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

The CIA's airline

France did not have enough transport aircraft or crews. The United States made C-119 Flying Boxcars available, their USAF markings hurriedly painted over with French roundels, according to the CIA. Some were flown by pilots of Civil Air Transport, a CIA proprietary airline and the forerunner of Air America. Thirty-seven CAT pilots volunteered and flew 682 airdrop sorties over the valley between 13 March and 6 May 1954, mostly from Haiphong.

The best known was James B. McGovern Jr., a big, larger-than-life former fighter pilot who had flown with the 14th Air Force in China in the Second World War. His nickname, "Earthquake McGoon", came from a hulking character in the Li'l Abner comic strip.

Earthquake McGoon's last flight

On 6 May 1954, the day before the garrison fell, McGovern was dropping a howitzer to the defenders when his C-119 was hit by flak, first in the left engine and then in the horizontal stabiliser. He held the crippled aircraft in the air for about 75 miles into Laos before a wingtip clipped a tree and it crashed. McGovern, his co-pilot Wallace Buford and French crew were killed; two cargo handlers were thrown clear.

The CIA describes McGovern and Buford as the first two Americans to die in what became the Vietnam War. McGovern's remains were found in an unmarked grave in northern Laos in 2002, identified in 2006 and buried at Arlington National Cemetery on 24 May 2007. On 24 February 2005, at his residence in Washington, French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte made the CAT pilots of Dien Bien Phu knights of the Légion d'honneur, with McGovern and Buford honoured posthumously.

British Pathé newsreel from 1954: the airlift of wounded from Dien Bien Phu.

British Pathé on Geneviève de Galard, the nurse of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954.

Sources: CIA Museum, Air America Association (AP), Vietnam War Commemoration, Stars and Stripes, HistoryNet, Wikipedia; Bernard Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place (via secondary sources)