'The Road to Dien Bien Phu' by Christopher Goscha
Ho Chi Minh’s Communists won the First Vietnam War—the independence conflict against the French and their allies—through determination, organization, propaganda (stiffened by terror) and—after 1950—generous military aid from China. After the costly battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954), France was forced to withdraw from Indo-China.
In his magisterial account of that war, Christopher Goscha (of Université du Québec) outlines how Ho, a veteran Soviet-trained agitator, packaged his ideas with an appealing Confucian veneer accompanied by a call to his country’s patriots. Expel the colonialists and reestablish the nation! He was also a shrewd politician who compromised with non-Communists as he prepared to build a one-party state on Soviet lines. He fought not only the French but a gaggle of warlords, sectarians and tribal leaders in a twilight war where villages changed hands from day to day or day to night, where anyone might be a double or triple agent and atrocities were common.
