A history teacher with no military training became Vietnam's great general
Võ Nguyên Giáp studied law, failed a postgraduate exam and ended up teaching history in Hanoi. He had no military training before the Second World War. His first armed unit in 1944 had 34 fighters carrying two revolvers and a handful of antique flintlocks, yet a decade later he won at Dien Bien Phu.
Giáp was born on 25 August 1911 in Quảng Bình province, in French-ruled Annam, to a family that farmed its own land. His father, a minor official and nationalist, was arrested by the colonial authorities in 1919 and died in prison weeks later. A bright pupil, Giáp went at thirteen to the Quốc Học lycée in Huế, a school that also educated Ngô Đình Diệm, later South Vietnam's president, and years earlier the boy who became Ho Chi Minh. Expelled for joining protests, he drifted into an underground party that introduced him to communism and served 13 months in Lao Bảo Prison.
He then earned a law degree in Hanoi, married Nguyen Thi Minh Giang, a fellow activist, and wrote for revolutionary newspapers. Meanwhile he devoured military history: Sun Tzu, Napoleon's campaigns, Clausewitz, and above all T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which showed him how small forces could achieve large effects. When France banned the Indochinese Communist Party in 1939, he fled to China in May 1940, joined Ho Chi Minh and studied Chinese communist tactics. His wife was arrested at home and in 1943 he learned she had died in a Hanoi prison.
In 1942 Giáp and about forty men set up in caves near Vu Nhai in the northern mountains, learning local dialects and drawing pictures to talk with Nùng villagers, and hiding behind a waterfall when patrols came. Ho Chi Minh, who teased him for wordy articles, told him the new propaganda unit needed a victory within a month. On 25 December 1944 it overran two French outposts without losses. By April 1945 the Viet Minh numbered almost five thousand, and in the following months an American team under Major Archimedes Patti trained some 200 of its future leaders.
Giáp went on to lead Vietnam's communist forces until 1972, defeating France in 1954 and later masterminding the Ho Chi Minh trail. He died in 2013, aged 102.
Source: Võ Nguyên Giáp
