Vo Nguyen Giap
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- This is a Vietnamese name; the person's family name is Vo, but should be properly referred to as Giap.
General Vo Nguyen Giap (born 1912) is a Vietnamese four-star general, who was the military leader of the Viet Minh guerrilla group under Ho Chi Minh's political leadership, and of the Peoples' Army of Vietnam (PAVN) in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
Biography
Vo Nguyen Giap was born in the village of An Xa, Quang Binh province. His father worked the land, rented out land to neighbors, and was not poor. At 14, Giap 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 Quoc Hoc, a French-run lycée in Hue, from which two years later, according to his account, he was expelled for continued Tan Viet movement activities. In 1933, at the age of twenty-one, Giap enrolled in Hanoi University.
He was educated at the University of Hanoi where he gained a bachelor's degree in political economy and laws. After leaving university he taught history in Hanoi. He later joined the Communist Party and took part in several demonstrations against French rule in Vietnam.
Vo Nguyen Giap was arrested in 1930. In 1940 he escaped to China together with Pham Van Dong where he joined up with Hồ Chí Minh, the leader of the Vietnam Revolutionary League (Viet 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 Vo Nguyen Giap 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 Viet Minh and other groups took over various towns. The Viet Minh formed a provisional government.
In September, 1945, Ho Chi Minh announced the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Unknown to the Viet 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 Viet 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. Fighting eventually broke out between the Viet Minh and the French troops. At first, the Viet Minh under General Vo Nguyen Giap had great difficulty in coping with the better trained and equipped French forces. The Viet 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 Vietminh now had a safe base where they could take their wounded and train new soldiers. More importantly, the Vietminh now had access to almost unlimited quantities of weapons and other military supplies.
The war degenerated into a stalemate. While the Vietminh could not be defeated in the remote countyside, every attempt they made to attack the more densely populated areas of Vietnam was a disasterous failure. By 1953, the Viet 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 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 Viet Minh. They offered to help set up a national government and promised they would eventually grant Vietnam its independence. Ho Chi Minh and the other leaders of the Viet Minh did not trust the word of the French and continued the war.
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 Vietminh to form a socialist state.
While the Vietminh 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 Dien Bien Phu, which would block the route of the Viet Minh forces trying attack neighbouring Laos. Navarre surmised that in an attempt to reestablish the route to Laos, General Giap would be forced to organise a mass attack on the French forces at Dien Bein Phu.
Navarre's plan worked and General Giap took up the French challenge. However Giap chose to surround Dien Bien Phu 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 on the French troops defending Dien Bein Phu.
While these preparations were going on, Giap brought up members of the Viet Minh from all over Vietnam. By the time the battle was ready to start, Giap had 70,000 soldiers surrounding Dien Bien Phu, five times the number of French troops enclosed within.
Employing recently obtained anti-aircraft guns and howitzers from China, Giap was able to restrict severely the ability of the French to supply their forces in Dien Bein Phu. 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 height 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 Vietminh but this was never seriously considered. Another suggestion was that conventional air-raids would be enough to scatter Giap'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, Giap launched his offensive. For fifty-six days the Viet Minh pushed the French forces back until they only occupied a small area of Dien Bein Phu. 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 7th. 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.
Vo Nguyen Giap remained commander-in-chief of the Vietminh throughout the Vietnam War. Peace talks between representatives from 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.
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 Hanoi. 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.
The main problem with this formula was that whereas 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 Hanoi and Haiphong.
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 allowed 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 Nguyen Van Thieu 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 dollars 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.
In the spring of 1975, North Vietnam launched a full conventional invasion of South Vietnam. The Soviet-financed and equipped army poured over the border. After important areas such as Danang and Huế were lost in March, the ARVN was forced to make a chaotic retreat southward..
The army of North Vietnam arrived in Saigon on April 30, 1975. Soon afterwards the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was established. In the new government, Vo Nguyen Giap was minister of defence and deputy premier until 1980.
Vo Nguyen Giap as leader of the armed forces was also responsible for the establishment of a puppet government in Laos under the control of Vietnam in 1975. He was also responsible for eventually installing a provisional government in Cambodia after Vietnam invaded the Country saving it from the genocidal regime of Pol Pot in 1978. Vietnam withdrew militarily from Cambodia in 1993.
Vo has been a prolific writer whose titles include "Big Victory, Great Task", "Dien Bien Phu" and "Once Again We Will Win."
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