Hinh xam vo nguyen giap biography

In the anti-French 9-year long protracted resistance war, under the leadership of the Party and President Ho Chi Minh, he had personally commanded many important campaigns. He was the member of the Party Central Committee of the 2 nd3 rd4 th5 th and 6 th tenures; Politburo member of the 2 nd3 rd and 4 th tenures; deputy of the National Assembly from the 1 st to the 7 th Legislature.

He had undertaken the great important tasks when he was only 37 years old; yet, with the extraordinary willpower and energy, the ceaseless striving, he had completed remarkably his assigned tasks, deserving with the trust of the Party, great President Ho Chi Minh and the heroic Vietnamese people. From a Vietnam liberation army propaganda team - the first main force with only 34 fighters and several dozen rifles and rudimentary flintflock guns — it had step by step developed into the seasoned regiments and divisions which were staunch in fighting and won over the aggressive enemies.

The Dien Bien Phu Victory is the lively evidence to the maturity and growth in strength of our army under the clear-sighted leadership of the Party and esteemed Uncle Ho and the talented command of the General. For the first time in the world, the army of a small and backward colonial country had defeated the professional army of a powerful colonialist-imperialist force.

The key decision is to seize the opportunity promptly Every day counts. It must be a quick, lightning-quick, complete victory, definitely a complete victory. Under the timely direction of the Politburo and with the spirit of "lightning-quick" advancement, on the Route 1 axis, General Vo Nguyen Giap, on behalf of the Politburo, signed the decision to establish the Coastal Army Corps also known as the Eastern Corps on April 5,and directly assigned the mission to break through the enemy's defences from Nha Trang to Saigon.

The Commander-in-Chief set the requirement for the Eastern Corps to explore all methods to increase the marching speed in order to meet the timeline for participating in the Saigon liberation campaign. The marching process had to be one of reinforcement, merging, and continuous combat coordination, with the motto "fight while marching, opening the road while advancing".

Fight decisively and achieve total victory. Along with directing military operations to liberate land territories, on April 2 the General directly instructed Comrade Le Trong Tan to relay orders to Military Region 5 and the Navy Command and organise attacks to liberate islands, particularly the Truong Sa Spratly Archipelago. The orders were executed immediately.

Military Region 5 and the Navy Command implemented combat plans. The next day, upon learning that enemy forces were preparing to withdraw from Truong Sa, the general notified Military Region 5 that the opportunity to capture the archipelago was favourable. Monitor closely and report regularly to Headquarters. By April 28, our forces had completed the liberation of the islands in the Truong Sa Archipelago.

By April 30, the liberation flag was flying in front of Independence Palace, signalling the historic Ho Chi Minh Campaign had achieved total victory — a sacred moment for millions of Vietnamese as the country was liberated and reunified. Generations of officers and soldiers in the army nicknamed him as the Elder Brother of the Vietnam People's Army.

But Giap showed them the way. Both fields are intertwined and support each other; both are excellent: military - politics - economics — culture. The overwhelming economic power and technological advantages, not to mention the immense military strength and firepower of Western countries, were defeated by a general who once used to be a teacher of history.

By he had recruited more thanPAVN troops and two million regional and local militia forces to fight for Vietnam's independence from France. Giap always characterized the Vietnamese struggle for independence as a "people's war. Within the Communist government, Giap argued that it would take all of the resources of the nation to defeat the French, including the full emotional commitment of the people.

As a military leader, Giap fought to win regardless of the cost. To overcome his opponent's advantages, he relied on Communist principles that divided a revolution into three stages: first, using tactics of guerrilla warfare while building political support for the revolution among the people; second, gradually advancing from tactics of guerrilla warfare to those of conventional warfare; and third, launching a large-scale offensive attack that leads to political revolution.

Giap believed that patience was key to the success of this plan. He told the Vietnamese people that they must continue fighting for many years to achieve a total victory. The Vietnamese Communists finally achieved a major victory against France after nine years of war. First Giap convinced the French to position 14, men in a remote outpost near the border of Laos.

Then he surrounded the fort with 50, PAVN soldiers, pounded it with artillery fire, and eventually forced the French to surrender. This battle marked the end of the Indochina War. In July the two sides signed a peace agreement that provided for France to withdraw from Indochina. Under the hinh xam vo nguyen giap biographies of the agreement, the two parts of Vietnam were supposed to hold nationwide free elections in in order to reunite the country under one government.

But U. They felt that a Communist hinh xam vo nguyen giap biography in Vietnam would increase the power of China and the Soviet Union and threaten the security of the United States. As a result, the South Vietnamese government and its American advisors refused to hold the elections. Giap and the other North Vietnamese leaders grew very angry when the elections did not take place as scheduled.

They remained determined to reunite the two parts of the country under a Communist government, by force if necessary. Despite his position as head of the military, Giap initially hoped to reunite Vietnam through peaceful negotiations. But more militant members of the Communist government convinced Ho Chi Minh to resume fighting. Within a short time, a new war began between the two sections of Vietnam.

During the early years of the Vietnam WarNorth Vietnam followed Giap's overall plan for the three stages of revolution. Using tactics of guerrilla warfare, the Viet Cong gradually gained control of large areas of the South Vietnamese countryside. In the late s and early s the U. In President Lyndon Johnson see entry authorized U. But deepening U.

Instead, the Vietnam War turned into a bloody stalemate. The Viet Cong guerrillas frustrated the American forces and reduced the advantage of their superior firepower. In January North Vietnamese government leaders decided that the time had come to put the final stage of the revolution into motion. Giap launched a coordinated series of attacks on major South Vietnamese cities, which was known as the Tet Offensive.

In designing the Tet Offensive, Giap assumed that the large-scale attack would encourage South Vietnamese citizens and soldiers to join the Communist forces and overthrow the South Vietnamese government. But the offensive failed to spark a revolt among the people, and American forces rallied to turn back the attack. The Tet Offensive ended up being a serious military defeat for North Vietnam, but it also shocked the American people and helped turn public opinion against the war.

Between and Giap and the North Vietnamese military returned to the guerrilla warfare tactics that had frustrated the U. In the meantime, the U. In March Giap tried to take advantage of this situation by launching another attack, known as the Easter Offensive. But the South Vietnamese military managed to fight off the attack with the help of U.

In Giap stepped down from his position as commander of the NVA. According to some reports, his health had begun to fail. But other sources claimed that he had disagreed with Communist Party leaders over military strategy. After decades of fighting, they finally achieved Giap's dream of an independent Vietnam under a Communist government.

After the war ended, Giap continued to fall from power within the government. He resigned as minister of defense inand he lost his position within the Communist Party leadership two years later. In Junethe U. Congress passed the Case—Church Amendmentwhich prohibited any further U. Soon after the fall of Saigon, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was established.

In December he oversaw the successful Cambodian—Vietnamese War which drove the Khmer Rouge from power and ended the Cambodian genocide. Informer U. The final evidence that there had not been any Vietnamese attack against U. He reported this. Now such a disregard for human life may make a formidable adversary, but it does not make a military genius.

An American commander losing men like that would hardly have lasted more than a few weeks. According to Frisby, "Giap understood that protracted warfare would cost many lives but that did not always translate into winning or losing the war. In the final analysis, Giap won the war despite losing many battles, and as long as the army survived to fight another day, the idea of Vietnam lived in the hearts of the people who would support it, and that is the essence of 'revolutionary war'.

We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape — to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

However, he was willing to spend the lives of his soldiers with what American commanders would regard as reckless abandon, if that was what it took to win the war. Our intention was to break the will of the American government to continue the war. Westmoreland was wrong to expect that his superior firepower would grind us down. If we had focused on the balance of forces, we would have been defeated in two hours.

We were waging a people's war. America's sophisticated arms, electronic devices and all the rest were to no avail in the end. Ultimately, though, human beings are the decisive factor. The subsequent passage from one of his books explains his method of defeating a powerful foreign enemy:. It is the means whereby the people of a weak, badly equipped country can stand up against an aggressive army possessing better equipment and techniques.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item. Vietnamese general and communist politician — Biography [ edit ]. Early life [ edit ]. Political activism [ edit ]. Military career [ edit ]. First Indochina War [ edit ].

Interwar years [ edit ]. Vietnam War [ edit ]. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. December Learn how and when to remove this message. Fall of Saigon [ edit ]. Main articles: Spring Offensive and Fall of Saigon.

Later life [ edit ]. Death and legacy [ edit ]. Awards and decorations [ edit ].

Hinh xam vo nguyen giap biography

See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. The Independent. Retrieved 4 October Vo Nguyen Giap. U of Nebraska Press. ISBN Vietnam War. Retrieved 15 March Pacific Atrocities Education. Retrieved 13 March Air Force Historical Support Division. Archived from the original on 13 March Buk's Historical Ad Hockery. Retrieved 14 March