Vo Nguyen Giap

The military commander who gave the Communist Viet Minh victory over France in 1954, over the US in 1975 and China in 1979, has died, aged 102. He was the figurehead of the army that defeated three permanent members of the UN security council—no other modern military figure can claim any similar standing.

It was the Battle of Dien Bien Phu that secured Giap’s status. His Viet Minh forces defeated the French in that remote north-western province of Vietnam, in which enemy forces had constructed a “base aéroterrestre”. The French, commanded by an aristocract called De Castries, intended to flush out the Vietnamese insurgents, draw them into battle and destroy them.

But Giap engineered a victory of such efficient brutality that it stunned the French, effectively expelling them from the colony. It also illustrated Giap’s capacity for outrageous military thought, which would express itself throughout the American war - most markedly during the 1968 Tet Offensive.

At Dein Bien Phu, exceeding all of the expectations of the French military, Giap’s forces dragged heavy artillery across miles of dense jungle, erecting the guns at points overlooking the French base. It was an almost unbelievable logistical feat, one which the French mistakenly judged to be impossible. The twin airstrips of the Dien Bien Phu base would be safe, assumed De Castries.

Bernard Fall, in Hell in a Very Small Place, his account of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, described the moment when the first 88 millimetre heavy artillery began to fall on the French positions—the officer in charge of the batteries, who had re-assured his senior officers that it was impossible for the Vietnamese to deploy artillery, lay on his bed and pulled the pin from a grenade.

Giap's use of artillery and trench fighting was resonant of the method of war pursued during the First World War. As anti-aircraft guns prevented the French from re-supplying by air, his forces dug ever closer to the French positions, which were being pounded relentlessly with artillery fire. Giap won victory after a brutal two month fight.

The victory, however, was not complete in the military sense—only a fraction of France’s total forces were lost in the defeat. It was part of Giap’s iron-clad view of war that helped him to see the political dimension to the conflict: that the victory on the battlefield was only a precursor to the negotiations between the French and Vietnamese delegations in Geneva, that were scheduled to start on May 1954. Giap’s victory came on the day before the start of these negotiations and delivered Ho Chi Minh the political lever he needed.

The settlement negotiated at Geneva included the division of Viet Nam at the 17^th parallel and the promise of national elections to follow. Those elections never came about in part due to the unwillingness of the southern Vietnamese government to hold them. Thus the slide towards the American war began.

Giap was a gifted self-taught military tactician and leader, who delivered a victory and political settlement in 1954 that set in train the circumstances that sparked the US war of 1965-75. As such, he was at the centre of the most charged, damaging and contentious conflict of the Cold War.

He was also a brutal ideologue, who expended huge numbers of his men’s lives using cumbersome, profligate tactics. Giap’s life was marked by revolution, war and almost unimaginable suffering and loss. But he was also victorious.