[robowombat]

You bring up an interesting point. the truly decisive edge that gave the Viet minh the victory at Dien Bien Phu was the massed artillery and anti-aircraft artillery that they dragged over mountains and through jungles to implace. The French realized they had been lured into a trap when Viet counter battery fire overwhelmed the French artillery and then began to subject the fortress to relentless bombardment. Col. Piroth, the French artillery commander, in the fortress committed suicide over the shame of being out gunned by the Viets. Anti-aircraft artillery fire was so intense that the French and US staffed Civil Air Transport aircraft were reduced to erratic high altitude parachute drops.
The question is where did the mass of artillery come from? From Chinese stocks made up of captured KMT tube artillery or were the guns from the vast stocks of the USSR. The Viet Minh propaganda film made about Dien Bien Phu while quite detailed and graphic carefully avoids showing any direct shots of VN artillery in action beyond stylized muzzleblast sequences.

This is an interesting question since the Soviets essentially reequipped the ‘Chinese Peoples Volunteers’ force in Korea after the war entered its static phase. US and allied forces reported massive artillery barrages from the communist side laid on with real professional skill. The US perception was the combination of massive Soviet material support and the limitless and disciplined masses of the Chinese made resumption of offensive warfare in 1952 impossible without resorting to atomic weapons. Was this the same combination that clenched Dien Bien Phu or did Mao push enough of his own artillery into the hands of the Viets to ensure the humiliating defeat of the ‘colonialist’ French forces?

[Zhang Fei]

Was this the same combination that clenched Dien Bien Phu or did Mao push enough of his own artillery into the hands of the Viets to ensure the humiliating defeat of the ‘colonialist’ French forces?

Soviet material support for the PLA was possible because of China's common border with the Soviet Union. This, too was a loan - the Chinese peasantry spent a decade paying for this loan (on top of billions of dollars in Mao's weapons grants to communist revolutionaries around the world), at a time when tens of millions of them were starving to death. Ultimately, it has to be said that Mao was a traitor to his own people - he placed a higher value on revolution abroad than the physical survival of tens of millions of his own people.

Without a Communist China, the Viet Minh could not have gotten the volume of weaponry it did - through a combination of Chicom generosity and a friendly northern border. Vietnam's coastline was controlled by the French. Without a friendly Communist China next to French-held Vietnam, the Soviets could give the Viet Minh cash, but getting the weapons in would be an entirely different matter.