VÕ NGUYÊN GIÁP - FAREWELL THE "RED NAPOLEON"

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• published: 05 Oct 2013
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Võ Nguyên Giáp (25 August 1911 -- 4 October 2013) was a General of the Vietnam People's Army and a politician. Giáp was a principal commander in two wars: the First Indochina War (1946--1954) and the Vietnam War (1960--1975). He participated in the following historically significant battles: Lạng Sơn (1950); Hòa Bình (1951--1952); Điện Biên Phủ (1954); the Tết Offensive (1968); the Easter Offensive (1972); and the final Hồ Chí Minh Campaign (1975). Giáp was also a journalist, an interior minister in President Hồ Chí Minh's Việt Minh government, the military commander of the Việt Minh, the commander of the Vietnam People's Army (PAVN), and defense minister. He also served as a member of the Politburo of the Vietnam Workers' Party, which in 1976 became the Communist Party of Vietnam. He was the most prominent military commander, beside Ho Chi Minh, during the Vietnam war and was responsible for major operations and leadership until the war ended. Soon after the fall of Saigon, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was established. In the new government, Giáp maintained his position as Minister of National Defense and he was made Deputy Prime Minister in July 1976. He was removed from this post at the Defense Ministry in 1980 and was also removed from his position in the Politburo in 1982. He remained on the Central Committee and Deputy Prime Minister until 1991. Giáp wrote extensively on military theory and strategy. His works include Big Victory, Great Task; People's Army, People's War; Ðiện Biên Phủ; and We Will Win. In 1995, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara met Giáp to ask what happened on 4 August 1964 in the second Gulf of Tonkin Incident. "Absolutely nothing", Giáp replied.[20] Giáp claimed that the attack on 4 August 1964, had been imaginary,[21] although it did not start out as a deliberate fabrication. In a 1998 interview, William Westmoreland criticized the battlefield prowess of Giáp. "Of course, he [Giap] was a formidable adversary," Westmoreland told correspondent W. Thomas Smith, Jr. "Let me also say that Giap was trained in small-unit, guerrilla tactics, but he persisted in waging a big-unit war with terrible losses to his own men. By his own admission, by early 1969, I think, he had lost, what, a half million soldiers? 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." In 2010, Giáp became a prominent critic of bauxite mining in Vietnam following government plans to open large areas of the Central Highlands to the practice. Giáp indicated that a 1980s study led experts to advise against mining due to severe ecological damage and national security.[22] On 4 October, 2013, a government official announced that Giáp had died at 18:09 hours, local time, at Central Military Hospital 108 in Hanoi, where he had been staying since 2009. He was 102.[23]