Doctor at Dien-Bien-Phu
By: by Major Grauwin; translated from the French by E.J. Oliver!.
Publisher: The John Day Company
Published: 1955
Place of publication: USA
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 288
Description: Review Written By Bernie Weisz Historian, Vietnam War Contact: BernWei1@aol.com Pembroke Pines, Florida USA July 24, 2011 
Title of Review: "A book this historically rich & valuable must be reprinted for posterity!"
 
It is truly annoying that such a valuable piece of historically rich literature is unavailable to the masses! While countless mushy love stories containing useless sensationalism is mass produced, this book cannot be found anywhere! This book is the memoir of a physician, Dr. Paul Grauwin, who witnessed the 57 days of bloodshed and carnage wrought by the Viet Minh on the encircled French enclave in North Vietnam called "Dien Bien Phu". This was the climatic battle of what historians refer to as the "First Indochina War" (the U.S. venture was the second) between French Union forces and Ho Chi Minh's Vietnamese "Viet Minh Communist Revolutionary Forces". This 57 day battle that Grauwin wrote about in his memoirs occurred between March and May, 1954 and ended in a decisive French debacle that conclusively ended the war. 

A noted historian, Martin Windrow claimed that Dien Bien Phu was "the first time that a non-European colonial independence movement had evolved through all the stages from guerrilla bands to a conventionally organized and equipped army able to defeat a modern Western occupier in pitched battle". Dr. Grauwin was a doctor working in a Hanoi hospital in 1954 and was supposed to end his tour of duty and return to France. Finding out from his superior of a sick surgeon at the encircled camp of Dien Bien Phu, he is asked to fill in for this ill doctor. Capt. Vittori of the Medical Corps asked him to fill in. Grauwin wrote that Vittori asked him to go for two weeks only, as Grauwin's boat back to France wouldn't leave for a month. Grauwin's answer was:"It's simply a question of finding a substitute for two weeks. I was suddenly seized by a sort of giddiness. Oddly enough, my spirits were rising. I would go". It was a decision Grauwin would live to regret. 

Grauwin flew into the French garrisoned outpost in the Muong Thanh valley, on the western edge of Dien Bien province where he would eventually find himself trapped by the military situation, charged with the responsibility of attending to the medical needs of the injured and dying French troops that were encircled there. David Stone in his book wrote:"Meanwhile, beneath the main defensive position in the waterlogged tunnels and underground bunkers of Major Paul Grauwin's field hospital lay some 878 very severely wounded, and 117 in the hospital bunkers at Isabelle. Aggravated by the communist artillery fire and almost incessant rainfall, the conditions necessarily endured by the French wounded were appalling, despite the almost superhuman efforts of Major Grauwin and his medical assistants and auxiliaries. All these wounded men would, in normal circumstances, have been evacuated from Dien Bien Phu". Howard R. Simpson, in a similar book wrote: "The hospital's commander and chief surgeon, Maj. Paul Grauwin, was an unflappable professional." 

The bald and bespectacled Grauwin had patched and repaired the torn, bloody results of the war for almost ten years. Since his arrival at Dien Bien Phu on February 17, 1954, he had been troubled by the inadequacies of the installation. His predecessor had warned de Castries (Christian M. de Castries, French Chief of Staff at Dien Bien Phu) that the meager facilities would not be able to handle casualties from a major engagement. Some of the dugouts and bunkers needed additional shoring-up; the overhead protection obviously required thicker layers of steel plating, sandbags and earth; and the open communications trenches could become death traps under artillery fire. Grauwin was particularly troubled that the success of the entire medical operation at Dien Bien Phu depended on the thin, vulnerable cord of the air-evacuation process." 

This hard to find book is brimming with information I have never seen in publication before. Grauwin wrote about French military policy in Indochina on men killed in action. Grauwin wrote:" Generally speaking, a man who is killed in battle still belongs to his unit, which is responsible for getting him back to the base. But that is out of the question in a war of movement. Fighting over rice fields or in the mountains, units are unable to transport their dead, and so they entrust them to the divisional command post or that of a mobile group. There, an officer has to concern himself with the formalities, but meanwhile what is to be done with the body? Here there was a morgue, or at least a hole set apart; but what happens in a war of movement? The body is always brought to the field hospital. How can one refuse? How can one neglect these mortal remains which, bloodstained and covered with mud, yet have their own claim to glory? The body has to be undressed, washed, and covered in a white sheet, the hands joined, the eyes closed. This was a task for my orderlies and nurses." 

Grauwin also makes psychological observations on how a soldier reacted at Dien Bien Phu to being shot. Grauwin wrote: "In a civilian hospital, a man who is going to have an operation is prepared for it days beforehand: he is surrounded by his family, who are affectionate and kindly disposed, and he goes into the operating room without fear and without distrust. It is easy to guess the feelings of a lad of twenty who gets a bullet in the abdomen, whether at Dien Bien Phu or elsewhere. He is brought in a stretcher and put in a line behind others who are waiting their turn. To right and left and above him he sees nothing but earth and legs of those with nothing wrong with them, passing by carefree and hurried:"the doctor is just coming, and then you'll be all right. He hears cries and groans. In front of him and behind him are stretchers with men wounded just as he is. "But what are the orderlies up to?" Where are they? Good God, my blood's running away and I'm in pain. I don't want to die out here! What about my parents and my home? To hell with this country." 

On reading this, it made me wonder how many of our men thought this identical thought after being wounded on the battlefields and rice paddies of S.E. Asia, or the plains, fields and streets of Iraq? Grauwin paints a horrid picture of the misery suffered by the French as the siege continued. Grauwin reported: "When I went to the terrace, I found that a coolie had deposited a bin of used dressings outside the passage, and sticking grotesquely out of this bin was a leg with it's toes pointing towards the sky". There are vivid descriptions by Grauwin of how a French plane from Hanoi tried to land to evacuate the severely wounded, but the surrounding Viet Minh in the hills shelled the runway and destroyed it. Any plane that tried to land was faced with incredibly dense anti-aircraft fire that it had to turn back. In the rare instance that a plane finally did land to evacuate the wounded, Grauwin tells that the wounded and their assistants were too afraid to run to the plane on the airstrip, so the plane would take off without it's passengers. 

After witnessing that, Grauwin wrote:"I returned to the emergency-treatment room, where the beds were all occupied and in stretchers on the ground were the bleeding bodies which gave vent to groans. Gindry (his assistant doctor) with his team, was busy cutting, sawing, carving, nipping, and tying up. He had already done twenty-three amputations and operated on seven abdomens". So many men were dying so fast, that Grauwin reported:"In the future men killed in battle will be buried where they fall". Towards the final French surrender, the Viet Minh cut the phone lines and blew up the electric generator supplying light to Grauwin's field hospital. Grauwin wrote:"The wounded were suddenly scared of the dark and started calling out. They had to be talked to and calmed down. The pool of light from our torches passed rapidly, as in some film designed to curdle the blood, over a squashed face, an open knee, the bloody stump of a foot, a dangerous hole in an abdomen from which blood issued, eyes with dilated pupils, hands grasping half a pint of some cooling drink." There are so many gruesome scenes of death and suffering in this book it is hard to pick out one that stands out. 

Towards the end (the surrender was May 7th, 1954), Grauwin wrote:"At the end of April, when the rains came, it was even worse. Water was trickling everywhere and only evaporating very slowly. The heat became damp and smelly. Blood, vomit and feces mixed with the mud made up a frightful compound which struck to the boots in thick layers". One story (of many that really shook me up!) that really exemplified the horrors of what the French troops endured during the "57 days of hell" trapped at Dien Bien Phu was the story Grauwin told of a lieutenant named Chevalier. Grauwin reported:"Chevalier was a lieutenant: a bullet had gone right through the back of his neck and had severed the spinal cord just below the medulla oblongata (the lowermost portion of the brain that controls circulation, respiration and bodily functions like holding one's bowels). If the medulla had been hit, he would have been killed instantly. It was quite out of the question to undress him: when he was touched he did not cry out, but moaned softly, like a child. The moment he saw me, he said: "Major, I've had it, I know." It was true too. The nervous tissues degenerated daily. Daily, paralysis gained control of the legs, the abdomen, the thorax, the arms:but the respiratory and cardiac centers situated in the brain were only affected a few minutes before death, and he remained conscious up to the last minute. Sensitivity to pain persisted and became more acute;he also remained conscious of hunger and thirst. Twice a day Genevieve (Grauwin's nurse) gave him soup with a teaspoon. The chaplain was often with him, and they had whispered conversations together which lasted some minutes. I tried a whole range of sedatives:Dolosal, Phenergan, Morphine, Sedol and Gardenal. Nothing had any effect; he remained conscious up to the moment of his death. He died after six days of it, still wearing his combat uniform. The chaplain was talking to him when his heart stopped." Aside from similar heart-wrenching stories, the final days and ultimate surrender are well documented. 

Grauwin concludes his memoir by recalling when he was in France and his country surrendered to the Nazi's in June, 1940. "Now I was alone, beyond any hope of relief, alone with my misery, my mud, my sweat, my dead and dying, my wounded. It was going to be June, 1940 all over again. I should be a prisoner all over again". Unfortunately, Grauwin fails to document how he and his fellow P.O.W. Frenchmen were treated as prisoners of war by the victorious Viet Minh. I was not able to find out what happened to Dr. Paul Grauwiin after this period of time and what became of him. Regardless, this is a book that has a story that must be told! It is told in such vivid and graphic measures that it is a very difficult book to not read in one sitting. I feel it is very tragic that this book is not available to the masses who thirst for such an important story that ultimately lead to America's longest war. As I've said with other important and significantly historic books similarly unavailable-REISSUE THIS BOOK NOW!
Notes: Originally published as J'eṫais meḋecin a` Dien-Bien-Phu. Editions France-Empire, 1954.