The Road to Dien Bien Phu : A History of the First War for Vietnam

**A multifaceted history of Ho Chi Minh’s climactic victory over French colonial might that foreshadowed America’s experience in Vietnam** On May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power and win. After nearly a decade of struggle, a nation forged in the crucible of war had achieved a victory undreamed of by any other national liberation movement. __The Road to Dien Bien Phu__ tells the story of how Ho Chi Minh turned a ragtag guerrilla army into a modern fighting force capable of bringing down the formidable French army. Taking readers from the outbreak of fighting in 1945 to the epic battle at Dien Bien Phu, Christopher Goscha shows how Ho transformed Vietnam from a decentralized guerrilla state based in the countryside to a single-party communist state shaped by a specific form of “War Communism.” Goscha discusses how the Vietnamese operated both states through economics, trade, policing, information gathering, and communications technology. He challenges the wisdom of counterinsurgency methods developed by the French and still used by the Americans today, and explains why the First Indochina War was arguably the most brutal war of decolonization in the twentieth century, killing a million Vietnamese, most of them civilians. Panoramic in scope, __The Road to Dien Bien Phu__ transforms our understanding of this conflict and the one the United States would later enter, and sheds new light on communist warfare and statecraft in East Asia today. "On May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power-and win. After nearly a decade of war, the country that had been forged in the crucible of the Indochina War had achieved a victory unseen in any other movement for national liberation. In The Road to Dien Bien Phu, historian Christopher Goscha explains the making of this extraordinary battle, telling the first comprehensive history of how Vietnam brought down the French in the Indochina War. Between September 1945, when Ho Chi Minh declared modern Vietnam's birth, and May 1954, Vietnam moved from a decentralized guerilla polity to a single-party militarized state. Goscha illuminates the making of the militarized nervous system that would realize the victory at Dien Bien Phu. But he is also attuned to how society mobilized behind war communism. This mobilization fortified the single-party state and would create modern Vietnam. This book radically changes how we understand both the first Vietnam War and the one the Americans would fight later. Shedding light on a larger arc of communist warfare and statecraft that runs from the former Soviet Union to the communist states of China and North Korea, Goscha tells a global story of how Vietnam came to be"-- Provided by publisher