Võ Nguyên Giáp

Võ Nguyên Giáp was a former history teacher with no formal military training who became the chief commander of Vietnam's communist forces for three decades. He built the Việt Minh guerrilla bands of the early 1940s into a large modern army, defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and led North Vietnam's army through much of the war against South Vietnam and the United States. He died in Hanoi in 2013, aged 102.

Giáp was born on 25 August 1911 (some sources say 1912) in Quảng Bình province, in the French protectorate of Annam. His father, a minor official and nationalist, died in French custody in 1919. Giáp attended the French-run National Academy in Huế, from which he was expelled for joining protests, and was jailed for 13 months after student demonstrations in 1930. He went on to study law at the Indochinese University in Hanoi, then taught history at a Hanoi school while writing for radical newspapers. He read widely in military history, admiring Sun Tzu, Napoleon and T. E. Lawrence.

After the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 the French banned the Indochinese Communist Party, and the party sent him to China, where he joined Ho Chi Minh in 1940. His first wife, arrested in Vietnam, died in a Hanoi prison; Giáp learned of her death in 1943.

From 1942 Giáp and a few dozen followers worked from caves in the northern mountains, winning over local people and recruiting for the Việt Minh. In December 1944 he formed the first armed propaganda unit, of 34 men and women with a handful of weapons, and that month it took two French outposts. As Japan's grip weakened in 1945, American officers briefly trained and supplied the Việt Minh against the Japanese. Giáp's troops entered Hanoi on 28 August 1945, and Ho declared Vietnamese independence on 2 September, with Giáp as interior minister and later defence minister. With Ho in France in 1946, Giáp ran the government, closing opposition newspapers and arresting rival nationalist leaders.

Full war with France broke out in December 1946. For years Giáp's forces avoided pitched battles, raiding French supply lines. In late 1953 the French commander, General Henri Navarre, fortified the valley of Dien Bien Phu near Laos, hoping to lure the Việt Minh into a conventional fight. Giáp accepted. His men hauled artillery by hand into dug-in positions on the surrounding hills, while Soviet-supplied anti-aircraft guns choked French air supply. The assault began on 13 March 1954 and, after 54 days, the garrison surrendered on 7 May. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu effectively ended French rule in French Indochina and inspired anti-colonial movements, especially in French North Africa.

As defence minister and army commander of North Vietnam, Giáp modernised the army with Soviet and Chinese weapons and, in 1959, ordered the opening of the supply route later known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. In 1956 he publicly admitted "grave errors" in the land reform campaign, saying many thousands had been executed. During the Vietnam War he favoured a more protracted, cautious strategy than Lê Duẩn and other leaders, and he is reported to have opposed the Tet Offensive of 1968, which failed militarily but weakened American resolve. After the costly Easter Offensive of 1972 he was replaced as field commander by Văn Tiến Dũng, who led the final offensive that took Saigon in 1975.

Giáp became deputy prime minister of reunited Vietnam in 1976 and oversaw the invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the response to China's attack in 1979. He left the defence ministry around 1980, the Politburo in 1982, and government in 1991. He died on 4 October 2013 and was given a state funeral. Opinions of his generalship differ: William Westmoreland called his acceptance of heavy losses no mark of genius, while others argue that Giáp understood the war as a political struggle to outlast his enemies.

Our 1945 map shows the region as the Second World War ended, and the 1960 map shows Vietnam divided between North and South after the Geneva settlement.