The Road to Dien Bien Phu

The Road to Dien Bien Phu
Author: Christopher Goscha
Publsiher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 568
Release: 2023-08-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780691228648

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A multifaceted history of Ho Chi Minh’s climactic victory over French colonial might that foreshadowed America’s experience in Vietnam On May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power and win. After nearly a decade of struggle, a nation forged in the crucible of war had achieved a victory undreamed of by any other national liberation movement. The Road to Dien Bien Phu tells the story of how Ho Chi Minh turned a ragtag guerrilla army into a modern fighting force capable of bringing down the formidable French army. Taking readers from the outbreak of fighting in 1945 to the epic battle at Dien Bien Phu, Christopher Goscha shows how Ho transformed Vietnam from a decentralized guerrilla state based in the countryside to a single-party communist state shaped by a specific form of “War Communism.” Goscha discusses how the Vietnamese operated both states through economics, trade, policing, information gathering, and communications technology. He challenges the wisdom of counterinsurgency methods developed by the French and still used by the Americans today, and explains why the First Indochina War was arguably the most brutal war of decolonization in the twentieth century, killing a million Vietnamese, most of them civilians. Panoramic in scope, The Road to Dien Bien Phu transforms our understanding of this conflict and the one the United States would later enter, and sheds new light on communist warfare and statecraft in East Asia today.

Valley of Death

Valley of Death
Author: Ted Morgan
Publsiher: Random House
Total Pages: 769
Release: 2010-02-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781588369802

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Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ted Morgan has now written a rich and definitive account of the fateful battle that ended French rule in Indochina—and led inexorably to America’s Vietnam War. Dien Bien Phu was a remote valley on the border of Laos along a simple rural trade route. But it would also be where a great European power fell to an underestimated insurgent army and lost control of a crucial colony. Valley of Death is the untold story of the 1954 battle that, in six weeks, changed the course of history. A veteran of the French Army, Ted Morgan has made use of exclusive firsthand reports to create the most complete and dramatic telling of the conflict ever written. Here is the history of the Vietminh liberation movement’s rebellion against French occupation after World War II and its growth as an adversary, eventually backed by Communist China. Here too is the ill-fated French plan to build a base in Dien Bien Phu and draw the Vietminh into a debilitating defeat—which instead led to the Europeans being encircled in the surrounding hills, besieged by heavy artillery, overrun, and defeated. Making expert use of recently unearthed or released information, Morgan reveals the inner workings of the American effort to aid France, with Eisenhower secretly disdainful of the French effort and prophetically worried that “no military victory was possible in that type of theater.” Morgan paints indelible portraits of all the major players, from Henri Navarre, head of the French Union forces, a rigid professional unprepared for an enemy fortified by rice carried on bicycles, to his commander, General Christian de Castries, a privileged, miscast cavalry officer, and General Vo Nguyen Giap, a master of guerrilla warfare working out of a one-room hut on the side of a hill. Most devastatingly, Morgan sets the stage for the Vietnam quagmire that was to come. Superbly researched and powerfully written, Valley of Death is the crowning achievement of an author whose work has always been as compulsively readable as it is important.

Dien Bien Phu

Dien Bien Phu
Author: Howard R. Simpson
Publsiher: History of War
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005
Genre: Dien Bien Phu, Battle of, Điện Biên Phù, Vietnam, 1954
ISBN: 1574888404

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A military classic. Publishers Weekly

Valley of the Shadow

Valley of the Shadow
Author: Kevin Boylan,Luc Olivier
Publsiher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2018-07-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781472824387

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Following the end of World War II, France attempted to reassert control over its colonies in Indochina. In Vietnam, this was resisted by the Viet Minh leading to the First Indochina War. By 1954, the French army was on the defensive and determined to force the Viet Minh into a decisive set-piece battle at Dien Bien Phu. Over the past five decades, Western authors have generally followed a standard narrative of the siege of Dien Bien Phu, depicting the Viet Minh besiegers as a faceless horde which overwhelmed the intrepid garrison by sheer weight of numbers, superior firepower, and logistics. However, a wealth of new Vietnamese-language sources tell a very different story, revealing for the first time the true Viet Minh order of battle and the details of the severe logistical constraints within which the besiegers had to operate. Using these sources, complemented by interviews with French veterans and research in the French Army and French Foreign Legion archives, this book, now publishing in paperback, provides a new telling of the climactic battle in the Indochina War, the conflict that set the stage for the Vietnam War a decade later.

The Last Valley

The Last Valley
Author: Martin Windrow
Publsiher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 736
Release: 2011-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781780222479

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Stalingrad in the jungle: the battle that doomed the French Empire and led America into Vietnam In winter 1953-54 the French army in Vietnam challenged its elusive enemy, General Giap's Viet Minh, to pitched battle. Ten thousand French paras and légionnaires, with artillery and tanks, were flown to the remote valley of Dien Bien Phu to build a fortress upon which Giap could smash his inexperienced regiments. The siege which followed became a Stalingrad in the jungle, and its outcome shocked the world.

Angel of Dien Bien Phu

Angel of Dien Bien Phu
Author: Genevieve de Galard
Publsiher: Naval Institute Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2013-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781612513867

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As the only French woman among some 11,000 defenders at Dien Bien Phu, Geneviève de Galard had a unique perspective of the siege and fall of the French fortress. This memoir about her years as a flight nurse for the French air force offers previously unknown details about their defeat. De Galard was on the flights that evacuated casualties from the battle, often landing in the midst of Vietminh artillery barrages. After a French air force C-47 with de Galard on board was seriously damaged, she tended to the wounded and dying in a field hospital. Her efforts won her the Knight's Cross and the Croix de Guerre, and from the American press the name Angel of Dien Bien Phu. Following a tickertape parade in New York, President Eisenhower awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1954. Now, Americans can learn the full story.

Hell in a Very Small Place

Hell in a Very Small Place
Author: Bernard B. Fall
Publsiher: Unknown
Total Pages: 576
Release: 1967
Genre: Dien Bien Phu (Vietnam), Battle of, 1954
ISBN: UOM:39015004082577

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The 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu ranks with Stalingrad and Tet for what it ended (imperial ambitions), what it foretold (American involvement), and what it symbolized: A guerrilla force of Viet Minh destroyed a technologically superior French army, convincing the Viet Minh that similar tactics might prevail in battle with the U.S.

Street Without Joy

Street Without Joy
Author: Bernard B. Fall
Publsiher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2018-02-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780811767750

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First published in 1961 by Stackpole Books, Street without Joy is a classic of military history. Journalist and scholar Bernard Fall vividly captured the sights, sounds, and smells of the brutal— and politically complicated—conflict between the French and the Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists in Indochina. The French fought to the bitter end, but even with the lethal advantages of a modern military, they could not stave off the Viet Minh insurgency of hit-and-run tactics, ambushes, booby traps, and nighttime raids. The final French defeat came at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, setting the stage for American involvement and a far bloodier chapter in Vietnam‘s history. Fall combined graphic reporting with deep scholarly knowledge of Vietnam and its colonial history in a book memorable in its descriptions of jungle fighting and insightful in its arguments. After more than a half a century in print, Street without Joy remains required reading.