Vo Nguyen Giap

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This is a Vietnamese name; the person's family name is Võ, but should be properly referred to as Giáp.

Võ Nguyên Giáp
25 August, 1911-
Image:Vo Nguyen Giap Vietnam.jpg General Võ Nguyên Giáp
Place of birth	Quảng Bình Province, Vietnam
Allegiance	Vietnam People's Army
Years of service	1944–1980
Rank	General
Battles/wars	First Indochina War Vietnam War

General Võ Nguyên Giáp (born circa 1912<ref>There is debate as to what his birthdate is. Most Vietnamese sources give his birthdate as August 22, 1911. However, this is disputed. Most western sources give circa 1912.</ref>) is a Vietnamese four-star general, who was the military leader of the Việt Minh guerrilla group under Hồ Chí Minh's political leadership, and of the Vietnam People's Army in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and later Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

1 Biography
2 Quotes
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Biography

Võ Nguyên Giáp was born in the village of An Xa, Quảng Bình province. His father worked the land, rented some to neighbors, and lived a relatively comfortable lifestyle. At 14, Giáp became a messenger for the Haiphong Power Company and shortly thereafter joined the Tân Việt Cách Mạng Đảng, a romantically-styled revolutionary youth group. Two years later he entered Quốc Học, a French-run lycée in Huế, from which two years later, according to his own account, he was expelled for continued Tân Việt movement activities. In 1933, at the age of twenty-one, Giáp enrolled in Hà Nội University.

Giáp was educated at the University of Hanoi where he gained a bachelor's degree in political economy and a law degree. After graduation, he taught history in Hanoi. During most of 1930s, Giáp remained a schoolteacher while actively participating in various revolutionary movements. He joined the Communist Party in 1934 and took part in several demonstrations against French rule in Vietnam as well as assisting in founding the Democratic Front two years later. All the while, Giap was a dedicated reader of military history and philosophy, revering Napoleon I and Sun Tzu.

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Võ Nguyên Giáp was arrested in 1930. When France outlawed communism in 1939, Giáp fled to China together with Phạm Văn Đồng where he joined up with Hồ Chí Minh, the leader of the Vietnam Independence League (Việt Minh). While he was in exile, his sister, father & sister-in-law were captured and executed. His wife, Nguyen Thi Quang Thai, was also sent to prison, where she died.

Between 1942 to 1945 Võ Nguyên Giáp helped organize resistance to the occupying Japanese Army. When the Japanese surrendered to the Allies in August 1945, The Japanese forces in Vietnam decided to allow nationalist groups to take over public buildings while keeping the French in prison as a way of causing additional trouble to the Allies in the postwar period. The Việt Minh and other groups took over various towns. The Việt Minh formed a provisional government.

In September, 1945, Hồ Chí Minh announced the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Unknown to the Việt Minh, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin had already decided what would happen to post-war Vietnam at a summit meeting at Potsdam. They had agreed that the country would be occupied temporarily to get the Japanese out, the northern half would be under the control of the Chinese and the southern half under the British.

After the Second World War, France attempted to re-establish control over Vietnam. In January 1946, Britain agreed to remove her troops and later that year, China left Vietnam in exchange for a promise from France that she would give up her rights to territory in China.

The Việt Minh at first negotiated with the French and played them off against the Chinese, preferring the return of the French to Chinese control of the country, as Vietnam had a long history of Chinese occupation. Fighting eventually broke out between the Việt Minh and the French troops. At first, the Việt Minh under General Võ Nguyên Giáp had great difficulty in coping with the better trained and equipped French forces. The Việt Minh fled deep into the rural areas of Vietnam to survive. The situation improved in 1949 after Mao Zedong and his communist army defeated Chiang Kai-Shek in China. The Việt Minh now had a safe base where they could take their wounded and train new soldiers. More importantly, the Việt Minh now had access to almost unlimited quantities of weapons and other military supplies.

The war degenerated into a stalemate. While the Việt Minh could not be defeated in the remote countyside, every attempt they made to attack the more densely populated areas of Vietnam was a disastrous failure. By 1953, the Việt Minh controlled several remote areas of northern Vietnam, and through these they were able to receive large amounts of aid from the newly-founded People's Republic of China. The French, however, had a firm hold on the Red River Valley in the north and most of the south. When it became clear that France was becoming involved in a long-drawn-out war, the French government tried to negotiate a deal with the Việt Minh. They offered to help set up a national government and promised they would eventually grant Vietnam its independence. Hồ Chí Minh and the other leaders of the Việt Minh did not trust the word of the French and continued the war.

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French public opinion continued to move against the war. There were five main reasons for this: (1) Between 1946 and 1952 many French troops had been killed, wounded or captured; (2) France was attempting to build up her economy after the devastation of the Second World War. The cost of the war had so far been twice what they had received from the United States under the Marshall Plan; (3) The war had lasted seven years and there was still no sign of an outright French victory; (4) A growing number of people in France had reached the conclusion that their country did not have any moral justification for being in Vietnam; (5) Parts of the French left supported the goal of the Việt Minh to form a socialist state.

While the Việt Minh constantly failed in their attempts to capture the main areas of Vietnam, they expanded the war and forced the French into battles on unfavorable terms by attacking remote areas such as Laos. General Navarre, the French commander in Vietnam, was forced to redeploy large numbers of his forces from their safe zone in order to protect Laos. In December, 1953, General Navarre set up a defensive complex at Ðiện Biên Phủ, which would block the route of the Việt Minh forces trying to attack neighbouring Laos. Navarre surmised that in an attempt to reestablish the route to Laos, General Giáp would be forced to organise a mass attack on the French forces at Ðiện Biên Phủ.

Navarre's plan worked and General Giáp took up the French challenge. However, Giáp chose to surround Ðiện Biên Phủ and ordered his men to dig a trench that encircled the French troops. From the outer trench, other trenches and tunnels were dug inwards towards the centre. The Viet Minh were now able to move in close to the French troops defending Ðiện Biên Phủ.

While these preparations were going on, Giáp brought up members of the Việt Minh from all over Vietnam. By the time the battle was ready to start, Giáp had 70,000 soldiers surrounding Ðiện Biên Phủ, five times the number of French troops enclosed within.

Employing recently obtained anti-aircraft guns and howitzers from China, Giáp was able to restrict severely the ability of the French to supply their forces in Ðiện Biên Phủ. The anti-aircraft and artillery fire neutralised the French artillery, denied them the use of the airstrip and forced them to inaccurately drop supplies from high altitudes to the besieged troops. When Navarre realised that he was trapped, he appealed for help. The United States was approached and some advisers suggested the use of tactical nuclear weapons against the Việt Minh but this was never seriously considered. Another suggestion was that conventional air-raids would be enough to scatter Giáp's troops.

The United States President, Dwight Eisenhower, however, refused to intervene unless he could persuade Britain and his other western allies to participate. Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, declined claiming that he wanted to wait for the outcome of the peace negotiations taking place in Geneva before becoming involved in escalating the war.

On March 13, 1954, Giáp launched his offensive. For fifty-six days the Việt Minh pushed the French forces back until they only occupied a small area of Ðiện Biên Phủ. Colonel Piroth, the artillery commander, blamed himself for the tactics that had been employed and after telling his fellow officers that he had been "completely dishonoured" committed suicide by pulling the safety pin out of a grenade.

The French surrendered on May 7^th. French casualties totalled over 7,000 and a further 11,000 soldiers were taken prisoner. The following day the French government announced that it intended to withdraw from Vietnam.

Võ Nguyên Giáp remained commander-in-chief of the Việt Minh throughout the Vietnam War. Peace talks between representatives from the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the NLF had been taking place in Paris since January, 1969. By 1972, Richard Nixon, like Lyndon B. Johnson before him, had been gradually convinced that a victory in Vietnam was unobtainable.

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In October, 1972, the negotiators came close to agreeing to a formula to end the war. The plan was that U.S. troops would withdraw from Vietnam in exchange for a cease-fire and the return of 566 American prisoners held in Hànội. It was also agreed that the governments in North and South Vietnam would remain in power until new elections could be arranged to unite the whole country.

Though the U.S. troops would leave the country, the North Vietnamese troops could remain in their positions in the south. In an effort to put pressure on North Vietnam during the negotiations, President Nixon ordered a new series of air-raids on Hà Nội and Hải Phòng.

The North Vietnamese accepted the terms of the agreement and so in January, 1973, Nixon agreed to sign the peace plan that had been proposed in October. However, America agreed to let NVA troops remain in the south and hold the areas they captured.

The last U.S. combat troops left in March, 1973. It was an uneasy peace and by 1974, serious fighting had broken out between North Vietnamese units which had stayed behind and the ARVN. The ARVN held its own successfully in this fighting.

President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu of South Vietnam appealed to President Richard Nixon for continued financial aid. Nixon was sympathetic but the United States Congress was not and the move was blocked. At its peak, U.S. aid to South Vietnam had reached $30 billion a year. By 1974 it had fallen to $1 billion. Starved of funds, Thiệu's government had difficulty even paying the wages of the army and desertions became a problem. On the other side, the army of North Vietnam received billions of dollars in new equipment from the Soviet Union.

The spring of 1975 saw a series of National Liberation Front victories. After important areas such as Danang and Hue were lost in March, panic swept through the AVRN. Senior officers, fearing what would happen after the establishment of an NLF government, abandoned their men and went into hiding.

The National Liberation Front arrived in Saigon on April 30, 1975. Soon afterwards the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was established. In the new government Võ Nguyên Giáp was minister of defence and deputy premier until he retired in 1980.

General Giáp has been known as a writer whose titles include "Big Victory, Great Task", "Ðiện Biên Phủ" and "Once Again We Will Win."