Vo Nguyen Giap masterminded battle of Dien Bien Phu, which led to
France leaving Indo-China, and commanded North's forces in Vietnam
war
General Vo Nguyen Giap, who known as the Red Napoleon, died at a
military hospital in Hanoi aged 102. Photograph: Na Son
Nguyen/AP
Vo
Nguyen Giap, the celebrated general who masterminded the defeat of
the French military at Dien Bien Phu and led North Vietnam's forces
against the US, has died aged 102 at a military hospital in
Hanoi.
Giap,
whose victory at Dien Bien Phu triggered France's departure from
Indo-China, was a self-taught leader regarded as one of the great
military geniuses of the post-second world war era.
He
remained as the commander of the North's forces supporting the Viet
Cong throughout the subsequent Vietnam war, being credited with the
1968 Tet offensive.
Giap,
known as the Red Napoleon, was a national hero whose reputation was
second only to that of Ho Chi Minh.
While
some, such as the American journalist Stanley Karnow, regarded him
as a strategist in the mould of Wellington, others, including the
US general William Westmorland, believed his success was down to
his ruthlessness.
Indeed,
Westmorland complained to Karnow: "Any American commander who took
the same vast losses as General Giap would have been sacked
overnight."
Giap was
born in the village of An Xa on 25 August 1911 and attended the
University of Hanoi, gaining degrees in politics and law, before
working as a journalist.
It was
his command of Viet Minh forces during the eight-week battle of
Dien Bien Phu, which raged from March to May in 1954, that made his
reputation.
Vietnamese forces, who wore sandals made of car tyres and lugged
their artillery piece by piece over mountains, managed to encircle
and crush the French troops in a bloody engagement immortalised in
Bernard Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place.
Although
he was at first a renowned exponent of guerilla tactics, Giap
commanded a devastating conventional assault at Dien Bien Phu, in
which his forces used Chinese-supplied artillery to prevent
effective resupply by air of the base deep in the hills of
north-western Vietnam.
During
the bitter fighting that would follow, the garrison, comprising a
series of outposts in a deep valley, gradually succumbed.
On the
brink of being overrun by Giap's forces, the French commander,
Christian de Castries, was forbidden to surrender in an infamous
order from his superior, General René Cogny in Hanoi, who told him:
"You will fight to the end. It is out of the question to run up the
white flag after your heroic resistance."
The
unlikely victory, which is still studied at military schools, led
not only to Vietnam's independence but hastened the collapse of
colonialism across Indochina and beyond.
Giap
went on to defeat the US-backed South Vietnam government in April
1975, reuniting a country that had been split into communist and
non-communist states. He regularly accepted heavy combat losses to
achieve his goals.
"No
other wars for national liberation were as fierce or caused as many
losses as this war," Giap told the Associated Press in 2005 in one
of his last-known interviews with foreign media on the eve of the
30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the former South Vietnamese
capital.
"But we
still fought because for Vietnam, nothing is more precious than
independence and freedom," he said, repeating a famous quote by Ho
Chi Minh.
In later
life Giap served as deputy premier and minister of defence.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/vietnam-general-giap-dies