Giap, Gen Vo Nguyen (b. 1912). Giap was born in the village of An Xa, Quang Binh province, just north of the 17th Parallel of Latitude. His father, an educated man who was both a mandarin and a farmer, took a close interest in his son's education, and helped to imbue the boy with the spirit of nationalism that he himself had inherited from Giap's grandfather.

Giap was caught up in nationalist agitation in the late 1920s and came to study the writings of Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh). Finding them persuasive Giap became a communist and was arrested in the course of the French suppression of the Nghe An Soviets in 1930. Spending only a few months of his sentence in prison Giap then devoted himself to study, gaining the baccalaureate in Hué before moving to Hanoi where he completed a degree in law in 1937. He then taught in a secondary school where he was able to pursue a deep interest in military history.

By this time he had become a recognized leader of the national communist movement and in 1940, with several of his contemporaries, he fled from another wave of French suppression to join Ho Chi Minh in southern China. Here he worked with Ho, Pham Van Dong, and Truong Chinh to build the core of the Vietminh (Vietnam Independence League). Returning to the far north of Vietnam in 1941, Giap's first major task was to disseminate propaganda. The (Vichy) French countered his teams, and he had to form armed bands to protect them.

From this beginning Giap began his rise as the senior military specialist in Ho's immediate entourage. As the Vietminh armed forces grew from a few hundred to many thousands, Giap's experience and confidence developed. By 1950, when Mao's armies had taken control of China and substantially equipped the Vietminh, Giap was at the head of an army of five divisions, ready to challenge the French for control of Indochina.

Initially successful in driving the French out of northern Tonkin he attempted too much and suffered three successive defeats in 1951. Giap then decided to lure the French out of the Red River delta, rather than continue to beat his head against the firm defences of the de Lattre Line. In 1952 and 1953, in a daring series of campaigns he gained control of the highlands of Tonkin, penetrating into Laos and threatening the royal capital Luang Prabang. Major French counter-offensives achieved little and in late 1953 Gen Henri Navarre took the gamble of parachuting over 10, 000 men deep into the interior. Based at Dien Bien Phu and supplied by air, this force was intended to force Giap to fight a pitched battle where the superiority of French conventional armament would tell. Not quite. The outcome was a smashing conventional-force victory for Giap, sufficient to destroy the remaining credibility of and public support for the French government's policies. A local engagement in a remote area broke the French will to continue the struggle. At the Geneva Conference of mid-1954 Vietnam was divided between communist and non-communist nationalist governments and the French departed.

In the late 1950s the communists in the north transformed their domain on Marxist-Leninist principles. Giap, now defence minister and deputy PM, became significant as a political counterweight to the more radical Truong Chinh in the abortive Land Reform programme. Continuing to expand, equip, and train his army, Giap did not challenge the southern government led by Ngo Dinh Diem directly, preferring to exert pressure through the Vietcong, the southern communist guerrilla forces. In 1964, following a series of military coups in the south, Giap sent elements of his army in to press the conflict to a conclusion.

He was thwarted by the speed of USA and Allied intervention. Giap's plan to take Saigon by 1967 had to be set aside as Gen Westmoreland built up a force of manoeuvre with strong offensive capability. Giap then focused on luring Westmoreland's forces out into the countryside, where he kept them engaged while the Vietcong prepared to rise in the cities, damaging Westmoreland's credibility and humiliating Pres Lyndon Johnson. The Tet offensive of 1968 was a military victory for the Americans and South Vietnamese but a political triumph for the North and Vietcong, because it broke US political will. From then on the US aim was to get out and hand over responsibility for defence of the south to the South Vietnamese. Pres Richard Nixon's policy of ‘Vietnamization’ proved inadequate to hold Giap and his divisions, and Saigon fell in 1975.

Since the end of the war for unification, Giap's fortunes have waned in the face of new challenges such as those of the Cambodian invasion and the Chinese attack of 1979-80, and competition from younger commanders and old political rivals. He retired essentially in 1982, continuing to hold a place of honour in Hanoi. With some 30 years in the position of supreme military command of his nation's forces, Giap has had a career which few can match. He has, however, had to learn by bitter failures and costly defeats. He was fortunate in having under his command soldiers who were imbued with strong faith in their cause and ready to die because the alternatives to victory were unacceptable to them. Giap himself played a notable part in creating both this spirit and the force which it bound together in victory and defeat.

— Robert O'Neill

(1910–), North Vietnamese general and government minister

Born into a family of small landowners in Quang Binh, Central Vietnam, Giap had an early education in Chinese, followed by one in French. Involved in student political disturbances of 1926, he was expelled from school. Thereafter, he joined the New Vietnam Revolutionary party advocating independence from French rule. In the 1930s, he was a political prisoner for two years and became a member of the Indochinese Communist Party. He also became a history teacher and a journalist who campaigned for press freedom and the diffusion of the national language. In 1939, he wrote a book on the military situation in China and co‐authored another about Vietnamese peasants. Two years later, he joined Ho Chi Minh in China and learned more about guerrilla warfare.

Back in Vietnam by 1944, Giap helped to organize the Viet Minh forces, the nucleus of the Vietnam People's Army (VPA), in order to oust the Japanese and, after World War II, the French. After the August 1945 revolution, he held a number of posts in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, including minister for defense and commander in chief of the VPA. In 1954, he overrode Chinese tactical advice and decisively defeated the French in the battle for Dien Bien Phu. From 1958, Giap as vice premier (1955) envisaged development of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to supply South Vietnamese insurgents. An authority on guerrilla warfare, General Giap had a major influence on strategy in the war against American and/south Vietnamese forces. His many books include People's War People's Army (1961), and The Military Art of People's War (1970).

He began to shed his military posts in 1976, and became minister for science and technology. During an interview he gave Greg Lockhart in Hanoi in 1989, he stated that he had become “a general of peace.”

[See also Vietnam War.]

Bibliography

• R. J. O'Neill, General Giap, 1969.
• Peter MacDonald, Giap: Victor in Vietnam, 1994

Giap, Vo Nguyen (1910?-) general in the Vietnamese army, born in Quang binh, Vietnam. Giap is credited with the victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu (1954) and later, as both political and military leader of North Vietnam after its partition, for the victory over South Vietnam and the United States in the Vietnam War. Giap had been active in the Vietnamese independence movement and the Communist party since his youth. He was considered a brilliant military strategist and tactician, and an authority on guerrilla warfare. Giap held several high government positions after the reunification of Vietnam.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Vo Nguyen Giap (born 1912) was a Vietnamese Communist military strategist and architect of the 1954 defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. He also directed the Communist campaign of the 1960s and 1970s against the government of South Vietnam.

Born in Quang Binh in what was to become the Communist state of North Vietnam, Vo Nguyen Giap was raised in a middle-class family of high educational attainment. He joined the anti-French movement as a student at Quoc Hoc College in Hue, becoming a Communist after reading some of the writings of Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh's earlier alias).

Giap was a founding member of the Indochinese Communist party organized by Ho in Hong Kong in 1930. Subsequently detained by the French in prison (where he met his wife), Giap afterward obtained a doctorate of law from Hanoi University and became a history teacher at Thang Long College. His study and teaching of Vietnamese stimulated his growing nationalism as well as his resentment of both China and France as oppressors of the Vietnamese people in historical and modern times. He also developed a great admiration for Napoleon, with whom, as a military leader, he was later said to identify.

Fleeing to China at the beginning of World War II after the French banned the Communist party, Giap joined Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam Independence League (Viet Minh) and assumed responsibility for guerrilla activities in northern Tonkin (in present-day North Vietnam). Giap's wife and sister were subsequently arrested by the French and died in prison, increasing Giap's anti-French feelings.

In 1945 Giap became defense minister in the government formed by Ho Chi Minh before the return of France to Vietnam. Giap's inability to control himself from passionately expressing his hatred of France caused Ho to exclude him from the 1946 delegation to the unsuccessful Fontainebleau negotiations. Giap's ruthlessness also antagonized many of his Viet Minh comrades.

Triumphed Against the French

The military successes of his eight years' leadership of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) against the French, however, made Giap virtually indispensable to the cause of the Communists. Not all of his strategy against the French succeeded, but Giap learned valuable lessons from his setbacks at the hands of French forces. In a tactical blunder in 1951, Giap ordered a general counteroffensive and lost some 20,000 men in battles in the Red River delta. His great triumph at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 after a 55-day siege boosted him to a position second only to Ho Chi Minh in the eyes of his countrymen. Considered by many to be a military genius, Giap probably would have driven the French from the country had Ho not acquiesced to Soviet and Chinese pressures for a political settlement.

Following the 1954 Geneva partition of Vietnam, Gen. Giap served as a vice premier of North Vietnam as well as defense minister and army chief. He was also a member of the politburo of the Lao Dong (Workers') party. When a major war erupted between South Vietnam and North Vietnam and U.S. armed forces came to the defense of the Saigon regime, Giap split again with Ho and the majority of the North Vietnamese leadership in arguing against conventional warfare in the south. He expressed serious doubt that the PAVN could win against the better equipped U.S. and South Vietnamese forces and argued instead for the same sort of guerrilla warfare that had succeeded against the French.

Mapped Tet Offensive

Ho remained firmly convinced that aggressive conventional warfare would win the day in the south. Giap and a handful of Politburo members who sided with him steadfastly argued for first-phase revolutionary warfare, consisting of guerrilla assaults and the covert buildup of a political base in the south. Badly outnumbered, Giap barely managed to retain his position as head of the PAVN, though he was demoted a couple of notches in the Politburo, moving from fourth highest rank to sixth highest. A series of stinging defeats for PAVN forces in 1965 and 1966 helped to redeem Giap in the eyes of the majority of North Vietnamese party officials. When a key political adversary, Nguyen Chi Thanh, died in 1967, Giap regained control of strategy for the People's Army. He was the architect of the Tet Offensive in 1967, which represented textbook "people's" warfare, coordinating political and military initiatives. The offensive failed, however, when the general population in South Vietnam failed to rise up in support of their northern liberators, as had been expected. In the four years from 1968 to 1972, Giap mapped guerrilla attacks by small units, frustrating their U.S. and South Vietnamese opponents and doubling U.S. combat casualties. Emboldened by high-tech weaponry supplied by the Soviet Union and the apparent weakness of South Vietnamese armed forces, Giap in 1972 finally endorsed the idea of conventional warfare in the south. However, his Easter Offensive was thwarted by decisive U.S. power in the air and on the sea and the inability of the People's Army to better coordinate its operations.

Surrendered Army Command

The following year, Giap gave up direct command of North Vietnamese armed forces, reportedly because he was suffering from Hodgkin's disease. In 1980, he resigned as defense minister. Two years later, he assumed the leadership of the Science and Technology Commission and lost his seat in the Politburo. The North Vietnamese people, however, continued to look upon Giap with great affection. In 1992, Giap was given North Vietnam's highest honor, the Gold Star Order, for his contributions "to the revolutionary cause of party and nation."

Author of various books and articles, Giap extended his views to a worldwide audience. For many, his series of articles published in 1961 as People's War: People's Army became a virtual bible of guerrilla warfare. In 1970, Giap's The Military Art of a People's War, edited by Russell Stetler, was published.

Further Reading

Glimpses of Giap are all that can be obtained from much of the literature on Vietnam in the years since he became prominent. Exceptions are Giap's own collected articles, People's War: People's Army (1961) and Big Victory, Great Task: North Viet-Nam's Minister of Defense Assesses the Course of the War (1968), both of which provide considerable insight into his military ability. P. J. Honey, ed., North Vietnam Today: Profile of a Communist Satellite (1962), offers a somewhat dated but still valuable overview of Communist-ruled North Vietnam, including some perceptive insights into Giap himself, while Australian Communist journalist Wilfred G. Burchett, Vietnam North (1966), presents a later, if highly partisan, picture. For good background to both Giap's triumph at Dien Bien Phu and his subsequent direction of the assault against South Vietnam see Bernard Fall, The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis (1963; 2d rev. ed. 1967). A more recent assessment of Giap's contributions during the Dien Bien Phu offensive against the French and the war for the political reunification of Vietnam can be found in Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, edited by Stanley I. Kutler and published by Scribner's, New York, in 1996. See also Britannica Online, at , for its entries on Giap and the Vietnam War.

For more information on Vo Nguyen Giap, visit Britannica.com.

(vô nəwē'ĕn jäp) , 1911–, soldier and government official of North Vietnam and later of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. A nationalist, he joined the Vietnamese Communist party in the 1930s, later joining Ho Chi Minh in China. Giap helped to organize the Viet Minh forces, fighting to oust the Japanese in World War II and the French after the war; he became commander of the Viet Minh in 1946. A master of guerrilla warfare, he was credited with the defeat of the French at Dienbienphu (1954) and later directed the strategy of the North in the Vietnam War, notably in the 1968 Tet offensive. In addition to his position as commander in chief, Giap was also deputy prime minister and minister of defense. He resigned from defense in 1980 and was dropped from the politburo in 1982, but remained deputy prime minister until 1991.

Bibliography

See his Military Art of People's War: Selected Writings, ed. by R. Stetler (1970); R. J. O'Neill, General Giap (1969); C. B. Currey, Victory at Any Cost (1997).