Vo Nguyen Giap

Looks sharp! Who was he?

General Giap was one of the 20th century’s foremost military commanders. He made his name commanding the military wing of the Viet Minh during the Second World War, before becoming commander-in-chief of the People’s Army of Vietnam.

Born: 1911
Nationality: Vietnamese
Occupation: commander in the People’s Army of Vietnam; Minister of Defence; Deputy Prime Minster of Vietnam
Key qualities: strategy, activism, charisma
Greatest achievement: being the first general to defeat the United States in war
Died: 2013

So what did he fight for?

Vietnamese independence. France colonised the whole of the Indochinese Peninsula between 1862 and 1945, using the agriculturally rich territory as a base from which to export raw materials for the benefit of the French colonial empire.

The Japanese invaded French Indochina in 1940, and the Vichy regime permitted them to station troops in Vietnam, as long as France retained administrative control. The Japanese rose up against the French and assumed full control of the country in March 1945, only to be defeated by the Allies in September.

During the same period, resistance to foreign occupation grew in Vietnam. Giap joined the Communist Party in 1931 to campaign against French rule, and by the mid-1940s he had gathered enough fighters to challenge both the French and the Japanese, despite being outnumbered.

That’s Brave! Did he succeed?

Over time, yes. Having been exiled to China with the rest of Vietnam’s Communists in 1940, Giap joined Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam Independence League (the Viet Minh). He helped spread the Party’s message by writing propaganda, but soon found himself back in Vietnam in armed combat.

Giap was a gifted strategist and guerrilla-war mastermind. Hiding in the mountains of north-eastern Vietnam, he built a small force of combatants sympathetic to the nationalist-Communist cause. Ho Chi Minh appointed him commander of the newly formed Vietnam Liberation Army (later renamed the People’s Army of Vietnam) in 1944, which began attacking French outposts in December of that year.

By April 1945, the Viet Minh numbered some 5,000 fighters, and, with US support, Giap’s army forced the Japanese to surrender, making huge territorial gains.