The battle of Tay Nguyen (Chien Dich Tay Nguyen) or the battle of the Central Highlands as the Vietnamese know it, began in January 1954 and reached a dramatic climax in June 1954, when elements of the Vietnamese 320th Division wiped out much of the elite French Groupe Mobile 100. On 20 January 1954, General Henri Navarre launched a sea and airborne operation in central Vietnam designed to retake Inter-Zone V (Lien Khu V) and its population of some two million people living under the control of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) since 1945. Navarre also felt that this operation would provide needed experience to the Associated State of Vietnam’s armed forces; furnish an important piece of territory to the State of Vietnam before diplomatic negotiations opened on ending the war; and prevent the Vietnamese adversary from launching offensive strikes towards southern Indochina from the strategically important highlands. While Navarre had the final say, he authorized his Vietnamese allies to lead the Associated State’s troops during this operation. This would show that France’s Vietnamese allies could eventually take over from the Expeditionary Corps when it began to withdraw.
Navarre claimed that this operation in Inter-Zone V did not disperse or divert needed troop strength away from the building battle for Dien Bien Phu to the north. Navarre’s adversary, General Vo Nguyen Giap, would have disagreed entirely. He welcomed Atlante as an opportunity for the DRV to draw as many French forces as possible away from Dien Bien Phu, so that Giap could isolate and wipe out the French camp in the north before negotiations opened in Geneva on Indochina. Vo Nguyen Giap ordered the 320th division towards the south to disperse and defend Inter-Zone V. Even when Navarre privately conceded to his superiors on 1 January 1954 that the DRV’s potential acquisition of artillery would rule out certain victory at Dien Bien Phu, he went ahead with Atlante. By refusing to call off this operation, Navarre turned Dien Bien Phu into a gamble, as Bernard Fall has put it. The main target for Vo Nguyen Giap was Dien Bien Phu, which he wiped out on 7 May 1954.
Hardly a month later, as diplomats were locked in difficult negotiations at Geneva to end the war, elements of the 320th decimated much of the elite Groupe Mobile 100 in the strategically important highlands, in what Fall famously called the Street without Joy. It was there where the first battles between the Americans and the North Vietnamese Army occurred in 1965. This was no accident.