At 4:00 a.m. on April 4, the 102nd Regiment, 308th Division was ordered to stop fighting and hand over the defense task to friendly units. The attack on Hill A1 was temporarily stopped.
On our side: At 4:00 a.m. on April 4, Regiment 102, Division 308 was ordered to stop the attack on Hill A1, leaving a small unit to build a solid position, protect the occupied land to continue to wear down the enemy, withdraw the majority, and prepare for a new battle. In the South, Division 304 received orders to supplement ammunition to restrain artillery from Hong Cum, limit enemy fire on A1, creating conditions for our troops to consolidate the occupied position on this stronghold.
In the West, after using the method of encroachment, gradually destroying a number of enemy bunkers, breaking through barbed wire fences and digging trenches close to the enemy's position, the 36th Regiment was ordered to switch from open-attack to destroying stronghold 106. Our troops completed the battle within 30 minutes, then forced 2 enemy companies at position 311 to surrender. Later, the experience of "encroachment" by small units of the 36th Regiment was widely applied to other units throughout the front.
On the night of April 4, we attacked base 105, our army destroyed 3/4 of the base, in the morning the enemy sent 1 battalion, 5 tanks to counterattack from Muong Thanh and we destroyed some of them. But by 8 o'clock, the enemy recaptured base 105.
The second attack of our army in the Eastern region ended. During this attack, our army destroyed about 2,300 enemies including 1 battalion and 9 companies. Our anti-aircraft artillery shot down 4 enemy planes.
Officers and soldiers read the People's Army Newspaper to get information from the battlefield during the Dien Bien Phu Campaign. Photo: Archive
- At Inter-zone 5, we ambushed and destroyed 6 enemy vehicles and a number of soldiers.
- In Lower Laos, the Vietnam-Laos coalition ambushed an enemy battalion at km59 of Route 13, destroying 1 enemy company, 30 vehicles and 1 105mm cannon.
On the enemy side: In the memoirs of former US President Eisenhower, it was written: On April 4, Colonel Brohong returned from Indochina to Paris. Although it was Sunday, the colonel still went to see Chief of General Staff Ély immediately. Brohong said that Navarre was concerned that the Vautour operation would lead to reactions from the Chinese air force. But that evening Ély received an urgent telegram from Navarre (written on the night of April 3 to the morning of April 4): "The intervention that Colonel Brohong told me about can only have a decisive effect if it is carried out before the final attack of the Viet Minh". Ély took Brohong to see French Defense Minister Rene Pleven along with the telegram. Pleven could not explain this contradiction, so he took both of them to see French Prime Minister Joseph Laniel. Joseph Laniel decided to immediately convene a meeting of the War Council at the Matignon Palace.
The War Council meeting found it necessary to rely on Navarre's telegram to Ély, as this was probably Navarre's last resort, to formally request US air intervention. At midnight, the US ambassador was summoned. Laniel explained to the US ambassador that the only way left was to use heavy aircraft to destroy the Viet Minh artillery positions deep underground on the hills surrounding the new stronghold to save the troops stationed at Dien Bien Phu. The US ambassador agreed to immediately forward Laniel's proposal to the White House. Ély also immediately informed Valluy, his successor in the permanent section of the North Atlantic military bloc at the Pentagon, of the new decision of the French Prime Minister, in order to influence Radford as soon as possible to implement the new military measures.
THANH VINH/qdnd.vn
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