Download or read book Dien Bien Phu 1954 written by Martin Windrow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A highly illustrated study of the battle at Dien Bien Phu, the 56-day siege that eventually led to the surrender of the remaining French-led forces, this iconic battle provided the climax of the First Indochina War. In late 1953, the seventh year of France's war against the Viet Minh insurgency in its colony of Vietnam, the C-in-C, General Navarre, was encouraged to plant an 'air-ground base' in the Thai Highlands at Dien Bien Phu, to distract General Giap's Vietnamese People's Army from both Annam and the French northern heartland in the Red River Delta, and to protect the Laotian border. Elite French paratroopers captured Dien Bien Phu, which was reinforced between December 1953 and February 1954 with infantry and artillery, a squadron of tanks and one of fighter-bombers, to a strength of 10,000 men. Giap and the VPA General Staff accepted the challenge of a major positional battle; through a total mobilization of national resources, and with Chinese logistical help, they assembled a siege army of 58,000 regular troops, equipped for the first time with 105mm artillery and 37mm AA guns. Here, author Martin Windrow describes how from their first assaults on 13 March 1954, the battle quickly developed into a dramatic 56-day 'Stalingrad in the jungle' that drew the attention of the world.
Download or read book The Angel of Dien Bien Phu written by Genevieve de Heaulme and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geneviève de Galard was a flight nurse for the French Air Force who received the name of the "Angel of Dien Bien Phu" during the French war in Indochina. She volunteered for French Indochina and arrived there in May 1953, in the middle of the war between French forces and the Vietminh. Galard was stationed in Hanoi and flew on casualty evacuation flights from Pleiku. After January 1954 she was on the flights that evacuated casualties from the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Her first patients were mainly soldiers who suffered from diseases but after mid-March most of them were battle casualties. Sometimes Red Cross planes had to land in the midst of Vietminh artillery barrages. On March 27, 1954, when a Red Cross C-47 with Galard aboard tried to land at night on the short runway of Dien Bien Phu, the landing overshot and the plane's left engine was seriously damaged. The mechanics could not repair the plane in the field, so the plane was stranded. At daylight Vietminh artillery destroyed the C-47 and damaged the runway beyond repair. Galard went to a field hospital under command of doctor Paul Grauwin and volunteered her services as a nurse. Although the men of the medical staff were initially apprehensive —she was the only woman in the base —they eventually made accommodations for her. They also arranged a semblance of uniform; camouflage overalls, trousers, basketball shoes, and a t-shirt. Galard did her best in very unsanitary conditions, comforting those about to die and trying to keep up morale in the face of the mounting casualties. Many of the men later complimented her efforts. On the 29th of April 1954 Genevièvee de Galard was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Légion d ́Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. It was presented to her by the commander of Dien Bien Phu, General de Castries. The following day, during the celebration of the French Foreign Legion's annual "Camerone", de Galard was made an honorary "Legionnaire de 1ère classe" alongside Lieutenant Colonel Marcel Bigeard, the commander of the 6th Colonial Parachute Battalion. French troops at Dien Bien Phu finally capitulated on May 7. However, the Vietminh allowed Galard and the medical staff continue to care for their wounded. Galard still refused any kind of cooperation. When some of the Vietminh begun to hoard medical supplies for their own use, she hid some of them under her stretcher bed. On May 24, Gènevieve de Galard was evacuated to French-held Hanoi, partially against her will. The American press gave her the name “Angel of Dien Bien Phu.” She was given a tickertape parade up Broadway, a standing ovation in Congress. On 29 July 1954 President Eisenhower awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. She currently lives in Paris with her husband.
Download or read book The Road to Dien Bien Phu written by Christopher Goscha and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Valley of Death written by Ted Morgan and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-02-23 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ted Morgan has now written a rich and definitive account of the fateful battle that ended French rule in Indochina—and led inexorably to America’s Vietnam War. Dien Bien Phu was a remote valley on the border of Laos along a simple rural trade route. But it would also be where a great European power fell to an underestimated insurgent army and lost control of a crucial colony. Valley of Death is the untold story of the 1954 battle that, in six weeks, changed the course of history. A veteran of the French Army, Ted Morgan has made use of exclusive firsthand reports to create the most complete and dramatic telling of the conflict ever written. Here is the history of the Vietminh liberation movement’s rebellion against French occupation after World War II and its growth as an adversary, eventually backed by Communist China. Here too is the ill-fated French plan to build a base in Dien Bien Phu and draw the Vietminh into a debilitating defeat—which instead led to the Europeans being encircled in the surrounding hills, besieged by heavy artillery, overrun, and defeated. Making expert use of recently unearthed or released information, Morgan reveals the inner workings of the American effort to aid France, with Eisenhower secretly disdainful of the French effort and prophetically worried that “no military victory was possible in that type of theater.” Morgan paints indelible portraits of all the major players, from Henri Navarre, head of the French Union forces, a rigid professional unprepared for an enemy fortified by rice carried on bicycles, to his commander, General Christian de Castries, a privileged, miscast cavalry officer, and General Vo Nguyen Giap, a master of guerrilla warfare working out of a one-room hut on the side of a hill. Most devastatingly, Morgan sets the stage for the Vietnam quagmire that was to come. Superbly researched and powerfully written, Valley of Death is the crowning achievement of an author whose work has always been as compulsively readable as it is important.
Download or read book Dien Bien Phu written by Anthony Tucker-Jones and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2017-08-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the world held its breath It is 25 years since the end of the Cold War, now a generation old. It began over 75 years ago, in 1944long before the last shots of the Second World War had echoed across the wastelands of Eastern Europewith the brutal Greek Civil War. The battle lines are no longer drawn, but they linger on, unwittingly or not, in conflict zones such as Iraq, Somalia and Ukraine. In an era of mass-produced AK-47s and ICBMs, one such flashpoint was French Indochina At the end of the Second World War France sought to reassert its military prestige, but instead suffered humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in French colonial Indochina. The First Indochina war became a textbook example of how not to conduct counterinsurgency warfare against nationalist guerrillas. Anthony Tucker-Jones guides the reader through this decisive conflict with a concise text and contemporary photographs, providing critical insight into the conduct of the war by both sides and its wider ramifications.The Viet Minh, after resisting the Japanese in Indochina, sought independence for Vietnam from France. The French, with limited military resources, moved swiftly to reassert control in 1945, sparking a decade-long conflict. French defense of Hanoi rested on holding the Red River Delta, making it a key battleground. When the Viet Minh invaded neighboring Laos the French deployed to fight a set-piece battle at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, but instead were trapped. All relief attempts failed and French defenses were slowly overwhelmed. America considered coming to the garrisons rescue using nuclear weapons, but instead left it to its fate, which set the scene for the Algerian and the Vietnam conflicts.
Download or read book Doctor At Dien Bien Phu written by Major Paul Grauwin and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes 34 illustrations. The searing firsthand account of the horrors suffered by the French paratroops and soldiers during the siege of Dien Bien Phu at the hands of the Viet Minh. During the course of the First Indochina War, the French had established a base at Dien Bien Phu in late 1953. Dr. Grauwin, holding the rank of major, arrived in February 1954 to take charge of the 42-bed hospital unit there, conducting triage for evacuation and operating when necessary. By the end of the battle in May, Grauwin had more than 1,300 wounded in the makeshift wards of his hospital, and deprived by the shelling of electricity, was forced to operate by candlelight. With the fall of the base on May 7, he was taken into captivity by the Viet Minh. Grauwin remained in captivity until June 1, when he and other French medical officers were exchanged for several hundred Vietnamese prisoners.
Download or read book Dien Bien Phu written by David J. A. Stone and published by Brassey's (UK) Limited. This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between November 1953 and May 1954, Dien Bien Phu was the scene of fierce struggles between Vietnamese fighters and the colonial French forces. This conflict led to the French withdrawal from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and the author here leads readers through the action.
Download or read book Dien Bien Phu written by Howard R. Simpson and published by History of War. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A military classic. Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Valley of the Shadow written by Kevin Boylan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the end of World War II, France attempted to reassert control over its colonies in Indochina. In Vietnam, this was resisted by the Viet Minh leading to the First Indochina War. By 1954, the French army was on the defensive and determined to force the Viet Minh into a decisive set-piece battle at Dien Bien Phu. Over the past five decades, Western authors have generally followed a standard narrative of the siege of Dien Bien Phu, depicting the Viet Minh besiegers as a faceless horde which overwhelmed the intrepid garrison by sheer weight of numbers, superior firepower, and logistics. However, a wealth of new Vietnamese-language sources tell a very different story, revealing for the first time the true Viet Minh order of battle and the details of the severe logistical constraints within which the besiegers had to operate. Using these sources, complemented by interviews with French veterans and research in the French Army and French Foreign Legion archives, this book, now publishing in paperback, provides a new telling of the climactic battle in the Indochina War, the conflict that set the stage for the Vietnam War a decade later.
Download or read book Contested Territory written by Christian C. Lentz and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive account of one of the most important battles of the twentieth century, and the Black River borderlands’ transformation into Northwest Vietnam This new work of historical and political geography ventures beyond the conventional framing of the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, the 1954 conflict that toppled the French empire in Indochina. Tracking a longer period of anticolonial revolution and nation-state formation from 1945 to 1960, Christian Lentz argues that a Vietnamese elite constructed territory as a strategic form of rule. Engaging newly available archival sources, Lentz offers a novel conception of territory as a contingent outcome of spatial contests.
Download or read book Hell in a Very Small Place written by Bernard B. Fall and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu ranks with Stalingrad and Tet for what it ended (imperial ambitions), what it foretold (American involvement), and what it symbolized: A guerrilla force of Viet Minh destroyed a technologically superior French army, convincing the Viet Minh that similar tactics might prevail in battle with the U.S.
Download or read book A Companion to Dwight D Eisenhower written by Chester J. Pach and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 755 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Dwight D. Eisenhower brings new depth to the historiography of this significant and complex figure, providing a comprehensive and up-to-date depiction of both the man and era. Thoughtfully incorporates new and significant literature on Dwight D. Eisenhower Thoroughly examines both the Eisenhower era and the man himself, broadening the historical scope by which Eisenhower is understood and interpreted Presents a complete picture of Eisenhower’s many roles in historical context: the individual, general, president, politician, and citizen This Companion is the ideal starting point for anyone researching America during the Eisenhower years and an invaluable guide for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in history, political science, and policy studies Meticulously edited by a leading authority on the Eisenhower presidency with chapters by international experts on political, international, social, and cultural history
Download or read book Hanoi s Road to the Vietnam War 1954 1965 written by Pierre Asselin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Using new and largely inaccessible Vietnamese sources as well as French, British, Canadian and American archives, Pierre Asselin sheds valuable light on Hanoi's path to war. Step by step the narrative makes Hanoi's revolutionary strategy from the end of the French Indochina War to the start of the Anti-American Resistance Struggle for Reunification and National Salvation (the Vietnam War) transparent. The book reveals how North Vietnamese leaders moved from a cautious policy emphasizing nonviolent political and diplomatic struggle to a far riskier pursuit of military victory"--
Download or read book Eisenhower and American Public Opinion on China written by Mara Oliva and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1950s, most of the American public opposed diplomatic and trade relations with Communist China; traditional historiography blames this widespread hostility for the tensions between China and the United States during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency. In this book, Mara Oliva reconsiders the influence of U.S. public opinion on Sino-American relations, arguing that it is understudied and often misinterpreted. She shows how the Eisenhower administration’s hard line policy towards Beijing had been formulated in line with U.S. national security interests, not as a result of public pressure. However, the public did play a significant role in shaping the implementation, timing and political communication of Washington’s strategy, ultimately hampering relations with the Communist giant and seriously heightening the risk of nuclear conflict. Drawing together an extensive array of published and unpublished sources, this book offers a new prism for understanding one of the most difficult decades in the history of both countries.
Download or read book The Battle of Dienbienphu written by Jules Roy and published by New York, Harper. This book was released on 1965 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Full account of the French disaster in Vietnam in 1954, brought about by a peasant army of communist Viet Cong guerrilas. Based on interviews with participants on both sides.
Download or read book Approaching Vietnam written by Lloyd C. Gardner and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1989 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The diplomatic origins of the Vietnam conflict are traced from World War II to the final surrender of French forces to Ho Chi Minh's army in 1954
Download or read book Dien Bien Phu and the Crisis of Franco American Relations 1954 1955 written by Lawrence S. Kaplan and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 1990 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: