I've mentioned Vietnam's military leader a few times.
General Võ Nguyên Giáp, possibly the greatest general of the 20th century, defeated in turn, the French empire, the U.S.A. Cambodia and China in 1954, 1975, 1978 and 1979 respectively.
That last conflict was the result of China's invasion of Vietnam in an attempt to force Vietnam out of Cambodia which Vietnam had invaded in 1978, putting Pol Pot and the Kmer Rouge génocidaires out of business. It didn't work, Vietnam stayed in Cambodia until 1989.
The General died in 2013 age 102. He outlived all his adversaries.
This battle came to mind when a bunch of 7th century* tribesmen ran the U.S. out of Afghanistan in August 2021:
Kabul: The Incredibly Vulnerable Position Of The Remaining Troops—This Isn't Saigon, This Is Điện Biên Phủ
And From New Left Review, May 10, 2021, logistics:
The Winning Side
If the battle of Điện Biên Phủ – the Stalingrad of decolonization – were in need of a symbol, you could do worse than a bicycle. One saddled with pieces of Katyusha rocket artillery, en route to be reassembled on the rim of the highlands overlooking the valley where the army divisions of Võ Nguyên Giáp smashed the French imperial forces seventy years ago. To commemorate their victory, the Vietnamese state this week staged a full-scale re-enactment of the events, with thousands taking up the roles of peasant porters and army regulars who won the First Indochina War. Everything was in place except for actors to play the French, though if the invitation had gone out to veterans of the French New Wave, it’s hard to see them turning down the call. Jean-Pierre Léaud as Henri Navarre!
One of the central dramas of Điện Biên Phủ is that both sides wanted the showdown. The commander of the French, Navarre, was confident they could rout the Vietnamese army just as they had done at Nà Sản two years before. He wanted to shut off any Vietnamese incursion into Laos in the north, turning Điện Biên Phủ into an ‘entrenched camp’ populated by 12,000 French troops, while simultaneously dispatching 53 battalions to root out the Vietnamese forces in the southern river delta. His second in command, René Cogny, wanted to meet Giáp’s soldiers out in the open in the style of battles of the previous century: ‘I want a clash at Điện Biên Phủ. I’ll do everything possible to make him eat dirt and forget about wanting to try his hand at grand strategy.’ Giáp was happy to take up the gauntlet, telling his planners that ‘Điện Biên Phủ could be the battle’.
The battle itself had features that seemed to look backwards rather than forwards: a set-piece confrontation, in open terrain, with trenches that, with tropical monsoons, must have rivalled Verdun (a few of whose veterans fought on the French side). There were calls to go over the top; there were attempts to tunnel under the enemy; there were even poets involved on both sides. French politicians tried to gin up war fever by suggesting that Ho’s forces were nothing less than Nazis. ‘I say that any current policy of capitulation in Indochina would be just like Vichy’, Edmond Michelet told the French deputies in Paris. (The call went unheeded by the dockworkers of Marseilles who refused to unload the coffins that came back from Điện Biên Phủ.)
But for Ho the battle was even more existential: it would be the masterstroke that would put Hanoi in a strong position in the postwar negotiations in Geneva. In the month leading up the clash, the Chinese supplied the Vietnamese troops with a bounty of artillery and ammunition. Giáp’s guns took out the French airstrip within the early days of bombardment. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese, the majority of them women, were recruited as porters, providing food and weapons. The French focused on breaking their access to rice. ‘Starve the adversary’, was Raoul Salan’s command. The robustness of food supply chains was paramount for such an extended battle, and northern Vietnamese memories were raw from the experience of famine brought on by the US aerial blockade in 1944-5 – a famine in which at least a million people died, and which deserves a firmer place in the annals of liberal-capitalist infamy.
The First Indochina War was in many ways a continuation of the US–China confrontation in Korea, carried out on new terrain, with the US supplying the French. The 1950s were a decade when nuclear weapons still figured as a godsend in the Western military mind, and their use was not at all off limits. MacArthur had mused about their deployment in Korea; Eisenhower would threaten China with them in the Taiwan Straits Crisis. Whether or not Secretary of State John Dulles offered to supply the French forces with atomic weapons – as Georges Bidault said he had – the idea of nuking a coalescing communist state was far from fantastical for Washington or Langley....
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