M-M-kay, but the fighting at Dien Bien Phu was positional, siege warfare in nature with a lot of close air support substituted for artillery. The biggest thing that got the French was their poor selection of terrain to set up a blocking position, a valley bottom with the Viets on the high ground around them. The Viet Minh had at great effort manhandled artillery and bags of ammo into well hidden positions where they could dominate the French firebase. French counter-battery artillery was ineffective because they could not locate the well hidden and dug in Viet guns. The French didn't have enough close air support to substitute for artillery and their CAS was in daytime only. The French eventually lost their airstrip and didn't have the capability to conduct re-supply by airlanding or by airdropping. The end result was that the Viets kept infiltrating the French positions until they could overwhelm them with infantry.
The US firebase concept worked a lot better in Vietnam because they enjoyed round the clock air support and continuous fire support from their own artillery with the benefit of heavy lift helicopters and tactical airlift. US firebases stood up and killed a lot of VC, but the US didn't have the political will to continue with what was ultimately attritional warfare where the Viets were prepared to expend large numbers of people to achieve their ends in the face of superior US firepower. The Chicoms did the same thing in Korea.
The dilemma for the allies in WW1 was that the infantry could not get into the German trenches unless and until the artillery had destroyed the wire obstacles in front of them. This was a real problem until HE shells and the correct type of fuzes for them were developed. Until that time the infantry got into the wire where they were slaughtered like partridges. In addition to the preliminary bombardments, which often went on continuously for days on end process and quite often obliterated the German front line trenches, the infantry learned to use a creeping barrage which they advanced behind, and which kept the surviving Germans suppressed until the infantry got into the trenches. Having taken parts of the German trenches the infantry did not have the mobility to exploit further because the intensive artillery preparations had made the ground impassable.
Successive German lines in depth could not be tackled without artillery preparation. This was always a problem because the artillery had to move forward to be in range to support the next jump, a problem which was again compounded by the cratered nature of the ground which the artillery itself had created. Logistics support was also a big problem, esp re-supply of arty ammo. Most of the transport was either horse drawn or dependant on constructing narrow gauge railroads, a huge challenge when trying to get through the churned up, cratered terrain to support the advance. Primitive communications also prevented the allies from recognizing and exploiting success by moving fresh infantry forward at the correct place and time. There were always some surviving Germans who would stagger out of their concrete pillboxes and take a toll of the advancing infantry. The allies eventually learned to deal with this by designating units as "moppers-up" to deal with bypassed and surviving Germans so that the advance could continue. Lack of reliable communications also prevented the use of on call artillery support to deal with enemy positions which continued to hold out.
There were a lot of painful lessons for the allies in WW1, but it all started to come together with the big advances in the summer of 1918 where we saw the first use of combined arms warfare involving the use of better radio communications, air observation and direction of artillery, air reconnaissance, close air support, continued use of creeping barrages and on-call artillery support, tanks for close support of the infantry with the specific task of taking out German MG positions and engineers to overcome obstacles and maintain mobility. The infantry was re-organized at section level to include LMGs and grenadiers in addition to the rifleman. The Cdn Corps was a real leader in the development of artillery doctrine incl the refinement of the creeping barrage, the use of radio and air observation to direct artillery fire, and the use of sound ranging to locate and neutralize German artillery.
What it all says is that reliance on one fighting arm alone is done at great risk, and that combined arms warfare is always the baseline when planning operations. A fairly recent illustration of this was in the Yom Kippur war where the tank had become pre-eminent after the spectacular gains in the 1967 war. The IDF neglected their infantry and artillery and put a lot of faith in armour alone. This all came unstuck after the Suez canal crossing where Egyptian infantry with man packed Sagger missiles were able to blunt the IDF armoured response. There was not enough on call artillery support or mechanized infantry with the armour to deal with this problem, a deficiency which the IDF soon resolved after some pretty painful losses.
