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Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War Hardcover – February 23, 2010
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.
- Print length752 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateFebruary 23, 2010
- Dimensions6.46 x 1.91 x 9.68 inches
- ISBN-101400066646
- ISBN-13978-1400066643
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"Ted Morgan brings to life the climactic battle of Dien Bien Phu in a way no English reader has seen in four decades. This was the battle that cast the enduring mold for Southeast Asia. From contextualizing the French war in Vietnam to the desperate efforts of French and Vietnamese soldiers, and from the conference tables in Geneva, Paris, and Washington to the staff map rooms in Hanoi and at Viet Minh headquarters in the bush, Valley of Death tells this important story with verve. This is a gem of a book." —John Prados, author of Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975
"In Valley of Death, Ted Morgan has made a significant contribution to the bookshelf of both history buff and general reader. Done in an easy, readable style, thoroughly researched, it is a story of the incredible blunders made by the French in their effort to maintain their colonial status in Indo-China from 1940 to mid 1954. It stands as a reminder of how easy it is for the Western countries to underestimate the will of "backward" peoples to fight for their freedoms both with self-sacrifice and intelligence. At the same time it is a very human story. It tells of people – of generals, diplomats, and most of all the soldiers and nurses on both sides at Dien Bien Phu who did the fighting and suffering. I was familiar with this story from the days when I assisted my father in writing his memoirs of the White House years. Nevertheless, Valley of Death game me insights and made the grim facts come to life."—John SD Eisenhower
"A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian observes that had Franklin Roosevelt served another few terms, Americans might never have had fought and died in Vietnam ... The author writes of the battle in specific detail rivaling the best of Bernard Fall, Neil Sheehan and other writers on the French and American wars in Indochina, linking it to the eventual immersion of the United States in Vietnam, extending the war another 20 years . A superb portrait of battle and its reverberations beyond the fields of fire."—Kirkus, starred review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The First Partition of Vietnam
Sometime or other, before the day is over, just as a matter of fact in straightening myself out, I’d like to try and find out just what it was, and why it was, that Indochina seemed to move from an idea which President Roosevelt had when he was alive that the French were not going to end up back in Indochina, and then sometime or other in 1945 they ended up. I don’t know how they got there or what happened or what was done.
Dean Acheson, May 15, 1954, at the Princeton seminar he conducted after leaving the State Department
This all began when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt initially decided not to run for a third term in 1940. On May 8, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle wrote in his diary: “It is understood that Roosevelt, unless the situation changes, will wait until the last minute and then issue a statement in favor of Mr. Hull.” FDR was planning to endorse Secretary of State Cordell Hull for the nomination in July at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, before retiring to the life of a country gentleman in Hyde Park.
He had a compelling reason not to run, as he told the Nebraska senator George Norris: “I am tied down to this chair day after day and month after month. I can’t stand it any longer. I can’t go on with it.” He was only fifty-eight, but he was exhausted, imprisoned in his wheelchair, his withered legs the size of the crutches he used to get in and out of cars, and he smoked too many cigarettes. He spoke with enthusiasm about moving his papers to Hyde Park, where he would write twenty-six articles for Collier’s at $75,000 a year. He told his visitors that he’d had enough and Hull was the man.
By mid-May, however, the panzers had crossed the Meuse, demolishing the fortifications that extended the Maginot Line. On May 16, Berle revised his appraisal: “I really think the question of whether Mr. Roosevelt will run or not is being settled somewhere on the banks of the Meuse River. . . . He does not want to run unless circumstances are so grave that he considers it essential for the country’s safety. . . . My private opinion is that circumstances are drafting him. . . . They are very likely to give us another four years for the President,” breaking with the two-term tradition.
In early June, FDR’s outspoken secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, told him that Hull would make a poor candidate and a poor president. FDR said that Hull would be a different kind of president: It should not be forgotten that Woodrow Wilson had known nothing about government prior to his election. Others told FDR that Hull was inept and that his wife, Frances, was Jewish. But at a White House banquet, the president sat next to her and told her to get used to such affairs.
The unexpectedly swift fall of France changed Roosevelt’s mind. By mid-June, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain formed a government and asked Hitler for an armistice. If the French had stopped the Huns, the war might have ended, but England was next, which meant the continuation of American involvement. The issue now was democracy against fascism.
As late as June 20, however, FDR assured Hull that he backed him. Finally, on July 3, after the Republican Convention, which nominated Wendell Willkie, FDR told Hull he was running. Hull said he understood. On July 16, at the Democratic Convention, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky read a letter from the president saying he wanted to retire. Cries of “We want Roosevelt” arose, and on July 17, FDR was overwhelmingly nominated. He developed a pronounced animus against France, which he thought did not deserve to keep her colonial empire.
The Commissary Line
Among the war’s unforeseen chain of events, who could have imagined that the fall of France in June 1940 would be one of the decisive factors in the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. By 1938, in its war with China, the Japanese had taken Canton, the major port and trading center of South China, while Chiang Kai-shek had retreated westward to Chungking. Canton was up the Pearl River from Hong Kong, with the Indochina port of Haiphong five hundred miles to the west. It was at Haiphong that the bulk of Chiang’s military supplies arrived. From the port, they were loaded onto the French-built Haiphong railroad, which lumbered northward across the Chinese border to the old walled city of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. It was vital for the Japanese to choke off Chiang’s supply line.
Japan cast an angry eye toward Indochina, which allowed unfettered transit. The French colony was but a minor appendage to the south of the immense Chinese landmass, with a five-hundred-mile border with China and a thousand-mile coastline, seemingly glued as an afterthought to the Southeast Asian subcontinent of Burma and Thailand. To this barbell-shaped tail of China now known as Vietnam (the bells being Tonkin and Cochinchina, with the bar of Annam at one point only thirty-one miles wide), were added Laos and Cambodia: in all, an area about the size of Italy, mostly mountains and jungle, except for two fertile deltas, the Red River in the north and the Mekong in the south. These rice-rich floodplains provided the staple for twenty million natives, known as Annamites, while fifty thousand French colons skimmed the cream off an economy based on rubber, coal, tin, and tungsten.
There is a Japanese saying that crisis and opportunity are a couple. In September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, Japan saw an opportunity. The Japanese complained to the French about the shipment of war material from Haiphong to Kunming to support the Chiang regime. The French replied that since war had not been declared between Japan and China, shipments would not be halted. To show their displeasure, the Japanese bombed the railway line.
By June 1940, when panzer divisions were advancing on Paris, about 10,000 tons of war supplies were being shipped monthly from Haiphong to Kunming, and a backlog of 125,000 tons were piled up in the port’s warehouses. As France collapsed, Marshal Pétain asked for an armistice on June 16. Three days later, the Japanese government presented the French ambassador in Tokyo with a demand that all shipments of war matériel from Haiphong cease and that a Japanese control commission be allowed into the port to ensure compliance.
The governor-general of Indochina, who had to respond to the Japanese demand, was General Georges Catroux, a distinguished officer who had fought in World War I. In 1940, Catroux was anti-German and pro-British, but when he asked for help from the British, the silence was deafening. He had no choice but to submit to the Japanese. Vichy’s puppet government dismissed him in July, not because he had given in but because he was considered disloyal.
Pétain replaced Catroux with an obedient sailor, Admiral Jean Decoux, anti-British with fascist tendencies, who considered the Annamites a subject people. Just as Pétain collaborated with the Nazis in France, Decoux gave in to Japanese demands on Indochina. The Japanese occupation was incremental. On August 1, 1940, they demanded the right of transit for their troops throughout Indochina, the use of airfields, and an economic agreement that turned out to be somewhat one-sided. Each time Vichy submitted to Japanese demands, new ones were made, much like a kidnap-and-ransom scheme. On September 22, 1940, a revised agreement provided for more Japanese airfields in Tonkin; permission to station 6,000 troops; and the right of transit of up to 25,000 troops through Tonkin to China. On September 27, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, which tied its operations in the Pacific with theirs in Europe to form the Axis.
Indochina was the first of many colonies occupied by the Japanese in Southeast Asia, as part of a secret program adopted in October 1940 called the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Co-prosperity meant that the Japanese plundered the raw materials of the lands they invaded, among them Malaya, Singapore, British Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Siam, and Indochina. But since Indochina was ruled by the Vichy regime, while the other colonies were governed by the British, the Dutch, or the Americans, the Japanese allowed the French administration to remain in place. France was tractable and saved Japan from employing their already stretched manpower in occupation duties.
The Japanese army called Indochina a “commissary line,” which meant that its troops in China could be supplied from there, and also that the rice from Indochina would be used to feed them, while Japanese vehicles would roll on Indochinese rubber. Thus, in late 1940, the Japanese confiscated facilities necessary for the pursuit of war, from coal mines to rubber plantations to lumber factories. Vichy did not protest, for its aim was to maintain the colonial status quo until the war was over.
We Mustn’t Push Japan Too Much
In Washington, FDR’s cabinet was divided over the president’s Japan policy. His secretaries of war, the interior, and the treasury—respectively Henry Stimson, Harold Ickes, and Henry Morgenthau—were opposed to letting Japan buy U.S. oil, scrap iron, and steel. His secretary of state, Cordell Hull, as well as Hull’s number two, Sumner Welles, were involved in delicate negotiations with the Japanese, which could be disrupted by bans on exports. The other three felt that the president was “coddling the Japs.”
In July 1940, Ickes noted in his diary that the “glacially lofty Sumner Welles objected strenuously to putting petroleum products and scrap iron on the list for licenses.” Ickes was irate. This was a time when oil for Spain was being transshipped to German U-boats right at the Spanish docks, while Japan had contracted for all the airplane gasoline on the Pacific coast for immediate delivery. Stimson warned FDR that the Japanese were trying to corner the aviation-fuel market.
On August 16, FDR told Morgenthau that “we mustn’t push Japan too much or she’ll take the Dutch East Indies,” which had plenty of oil. But Ickes pointed out that if the Japanese came in, the Dutch would blow up their wells and refineries. Morgenthau kept himself informed on Indochina, where the French had caved in by signing a pact on September 22 that allowed Japanese troops to move in. Morgenthau noted in his diary: “Hull is out on a limb. He has twice scolded Japan if she goes into Indochina.”
When the Japanese signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy on September 27, calling it a defensive alliance, Hull said: “That’s like Jesse James and Cole Younger going into an alliance for self-defense.” He seemed to be firming up.
But Hull still held back on interdicting scrap iron to Japan. He said the situation was delicate and the Japanese might take over Indochina at any time. Ickes felt that by selling them oil and scrap “we have made it possible to continue their career of aggression.”
Finally, on September 29, 1940, FDR embargoed shipments of steel and scrap iron. But oil was still flowing. Morgenthau thought it was too little, too late. Ickes was convinced that Hull wouldn’t do anything about oil until his hand was forced. Hull was “useless,” Ickes wrote in his diary.
After FDR’s election to a third term, Ickes was named petroleum coordinator for national defense. He was increasingly incensed that the United States was shipping oil and gasoline to Japan while rationing “our own people.” On June 8, 1941, he told the president that the press was raising hell. FDR said, “Give Cordell a few more days.” Ickes felt that Hull was being gulled by the Japanese.
On June 22, Ickes learned that more than two thousand barrels of lubricating oil were being sent to Japan aboard one of their tankers, which was docked in Philadelphia, at a time when U.S. plants could not meet their own needs. Ickes boiled over, and had the shipment held up. FDR “pinned my ears back,” he wrote in his diary, for not consulting with the State Department. The president told Ickes that the United States and Japan were engaged in delicate negotiations. Furthermore, he saw oil as an integral part of foreign policy, not to be messed with by Ickes.
By this time, Hitler had invaded Russia, forcing Japan to make a difficult decision. Should they also attack Russia, from the Siberian side, or should they prepare to invade the colonies of Southeast Asia, using Indochina as an advance base, so they could assure their supply of raw materials in case of war with Britain and the United States? In his ongoing talks FDR was aware of the disconnect between the Japanese government, still working through diplomacy, and the Imperial Army, which was preparing for war. On July 1, 1941, he informed Ickes that “the Japs are having a real drag-down and knock-out fight among themselves . . . trying to decide which way they are going to jump—attack Russia, attack the South Seas . . . or whether they will sit on the fence and be more friendly with us. . . . It is terribly important for the control of the Atlantic for us to help keep the peace in the Pacific. I simply have not got enough Navy to go around—and every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.” At this point, FDR was still trying to avoid war with Japan. But in July the situation changed dramatically.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; 1st edition (February 23, 2010)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 752 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1400066646
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400066643
- Item Weight : 2.55 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.46 x 1.91 x 9.68 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #435,037 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #177 in Southeast Asia History
- #479 in Vietnam War History (Books)
- #548 in French History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Ted Morgan is the author of more than fifteen books, including FDR: A Biography and Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America. As Sanche de Gramont, he was the only French citizen to win the Pulitzer Prize (for journalism). He lives in New York City.
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Customers find this book to be an excellent review of history, providing detailed background on the politics of the Indochina War. The writing is well summarized and amazingly detailed, with one customer noting it's filled with quotes. They appreciate its realism, with one comparing it favorably to the Illiad.
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Customers appreciate the book's historical content, particularly its detailed background of the politics, and one customer notes it provides a comprehensive overview of the entire period in Asia.
"...at DBP and how they played out afterward are thought-provoking and fascinating...." Read more
"...The book, superbly researched, portrays the history of Indochina from WWII, when the fall of France relaxed the often brutal control they had been..." Read more
"Extremely well researched...." Read more
"Good overview of the entire period in Asia and the political machinations of the big four with China entering the scene at the end...." Read more
Customers praise the writing quality of the book, finding it well summarized and amazingly detailed, with one customer noting it is filled with quotes.
"...Morgan is an excellent writer who can shift very easily from conferences at the Presidential/Foreign Ministry level to the viewpoint of troops in..." Read more
"...The book is well written and detailed...." Read more
"...The battle itself is a small part in the middle of all this, but well summarized...." Read more
"...Describes in great detail the Viet Minh insurgency and the French response to that insurgency, as well as American military aid to the French...." Read more
Customers find the book readable, with one noting it provides a valuable look at Vietnam.
"...Morgan has written another excellent book called "My Battle of Algiers" about his experience as a conscript in the French army during the equally..." Read more
"...Otherwise, it is a worthy addition to any library on the history of the Vietnam conflict." Read more
"...So while I would say that this is a good addition to the books on this battle it is not the best and not, in my opinion, a definitive account as the..." Read more
"Great book on several fronts - it covers the history of French Indochina and the political background of the Indochina War all with a focus on the..." Read more
Customers appreciate the realism of the book, with one comparing it favorably to the Illiad, and another noting its graphic nature.
"...of Dien Bien Phu and the run-up to it, in amazingly detailed, graphic and sympathetic terms. There are many helpful maps and photos." Read more
"...Even thought I fought in a later war it was uncanny the resemblance. I’m going back after 50 years with my son to visit DBP" Read more
"More realistic than the Illiad, more detail, more about the political forces dooming men to die for nothing. Douglas Makepeace, New York" Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2010Ted Morgan has written an excellent book about the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Actually, it starts in 1940 and takes about a third of the book just to get to the commencement of the battle because it covers the background on the French and Vietminh sides (and the American involvement too). Morgan is an excellent writer who can shift very easily from conferences at the Presidential/Foreign Ministry level to the viewpoint of troops in the field. The interplay between soldiers and politicians in France is fascinating and sometimes revolting if you believe, as I do, that it is obscene to send young men into battle unless you are serious about the war aims and prepared to see them through to the end. The details of the French involvement before the battle and the consequences of the defeat at DBP and how they played out afterward are thought-provoking and fascinating. The popular view is sometimes that the American vs. NVA/VC Battle of Khe Sanh in 1968 was just Dien Bien Phu Part II with the Americans substituting for the French; this book definitively shows why this was not so. Morgan has written another excellent book called "My Battle of Algiers" about his experience as a conscript in the French army during the equally unpopular Algerian war and his very mixed - to say the least - feelings about his military service there. He is uniquely qualified to write on these topics because he was born French (as Sanche de Gramont) but moved to America when young and has since become very Americanized. Anyone interested in what happened before the US got involved in Vietnam will like this book.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2013Author Ted Morgan begins with a description of his 2008 tour of the Dien Bien Phu battlefield. The site, 20 miles from the Laotian border and almost 200 miles northwest of Hanoi was a plain ten miles long by five miles wide. It was the site of a battle that changed history, and for that reason alone, it must be studied.
The French built the base to protect Laos and to draw the forces of General Vo Nguyen Giap into a pitched battle, one that the French expected to win. In addition to the problem of being dominated by the surrounding high ground, the valley could only be supplied by air.
Logistics then, became the problem facing both armies. The Viet Minh had to move an army of 35,000 soldiers over 300 miles from their supply bases along the Chinese border. More importantly, they had to man-handle heavy artillery pieces, disassembling them before moving them by brigades of coolies over mountains, across rivers, and through thick jungle. And they had to do this without being discovered by the French.
All the French supplies and manpower had to be dropped by air. Weather, distance, lack of resources, and enemy anti aircraft fire all impacted their ability to accomplish this mission.
Neither side had any shortage of courage and both were subjected to horrendous conditions. In the end, the Viet Minh prevailed. The French left Vietnam for good, we entered the fray, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The book is well written and detailed. I would have liked to see more maps (there are only three in the front of the book), and more photos of some of the combatants who so bravely fought there. Otherwise, it is a worthy addition to any library on the history of the Vietnam conflict.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2012Henri Navarre, then French military commander in Indochina, took by the end of 1953 the decision to occupy Dien Bien Phu, a 10 by 5-mile unnacesssible valley in NW Vietnam, aiming to protect the Laotian border from the Vietminh guerrillas, in war with the French colonial forces. The place was taken with paratroopers and fortified with a 12,000-strong force. Two airstrips provided the only supply links.
It would prove a tragic decision. Still thinking the movement headed by Ho Chi Minh as a band of guerrillas, Navarre didn't realize that Chinese support had transformed the Vietminh forces in a proper army. The French were soon entrapped - general Giap, the Vietminh commander, had decided the time was ripe for a battle in a fixed area.
The French base, consisting of several strongpoints scattered around a central command post, soon lost its airstrips and became a hell from which the wounded could not be evacuated. A brutal three-month trench fight ensued, in which the French were squeezed into an ever smaller perimeter. As airdrops turned out almost impossible, the situation became unsustainable. Upon surrender almost 11,000 prisoners were taken, most of them foreigners - German Legionnaires, Morrocans and Vietnamese - since the French could not send conscripts abroad. Less than a third survived the forced marchs and POW camps.
Ted Morgan, née Sanche de Gramont, is a veteran of the French army, having fought in Algery in the 1950's. The book, superbly researched, portrays the history of Indochina from WWII, when the fall of France relaxed the often brutal control they had been enforcing over the region for a century and allowed the Vietminh nationalist movement to set foot. Initially occupied during the war by the Japanese, a French administration sent by Vichy was allowed to keep nominal control. By the end of the war, fearing an American invasion, the Japanese took control back and jailed the French troops. The vaccum created by Japan's surrender allowed the Vietminh to take power, though the country ended up divided and occupied by the Chinese on the north and the British on the south. Roosevelt, a stark anti-colonialist, didn't want to hand power back to the French. His death in 1945 and the reality of cold war in Europe allowed the French to regain their colony. The forceful cohabitation between the French and the Vietminh soon deteriorated towards a war.
The conflict extended from 1947 to 1954, when the defeat at Dien Bien Phu led to the partition of Vietnam in a conference in Geneva. The French had finally lost their Asian colony, while US involvement - they supplied the French with matériel all over the war - would soon result in their own tragedy in the region.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2025for students of the conflict in Indochiana this is one of the best.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2024Extremely well researched. The author is highly experienced journalist who is an American Citizen of French birth who as a young man served in the French Army in Algeria. He brings a soldiers knowledge with a journalist eye & ear for a story.
As a Vietnam Combat Veteran I like understand the long tail of historical actions & motives that resulted in both my father & myself separately serving in this 30 year conflict.
Top reviews from other countries
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Frank HuebnerReviewed in Germany on March 9, 2012
5.0 out of 5 stars Schwpunkt auf HIntergründe und Politik
Das Buch von ted Morgan kommt sehr fett daher: Über 700 Seiten auf dünnem Papier, gute Druck- und Herstellungsqualität und seeeehr viel Text.
Neben den beiden bisherigen Schwerpunktbüchern zu Dien Bien Phu (The last Valley von Martin Windrow und Hell in a very small Place von Bernard B. Fall) ist dieses Buch sicher kein Ersatz für die beiden, aber eine wertvolle Ergänzung. Anders als Windrwo und Fall konzentriert sich Morgan mehr auf die Hintergründe, die Politik und das Verhältnis der Kommandeure untereinander. Ich selbst dachte beim Anfang des Lesens, dass so viele Neuigkeiten mich nicht mehr überraschen könnten. Weit gefehlt, hier bekommt man zusätzliche Sichtweisen, die die anderen Bücher bisher nicht gaben.
Klar, Morgan's Buch ist Stand 2010, Windrow von etwa 2000 und Fall von 1963. So ist es nur verständlich, dass wieder neue Informationen ausgegraben werden.
Die Schlacht selbst wird dabei eher verworren und bruchstückhaft beschrieben, eher als Situationsbeschreibung. Was sehr fehlt sind Karten und Übersichten, aber darauf lag, wie schon erwähnt, wohl nicht der Schwerpunkt.
Trotzdem 5 Sterne, weil auch die Hintergründe sehr interessant sind.
Wer sich für die Schlacht und für Indochina an sich interessiert ist mit Windrows The last Valley am Besten bedient, Fall ist dazu eher eine Ergänzung. Wer sich auch für die ganzen politischen Ränkespielchen interessiert muss dieses Buch einmal lesen. Wer sich für Indochina und den ganzen Konflikt interessiert...sollte alle 3 Bücher lesen, und Bernard Falls Streets without Joy dazu!
- RandhirReviewed in India on January 6, 2017
5.0 out of 5 stars The ramifications of the Battle had great impact on SE Asia but the steadfastness of the ...
This may be perhaps the last word on the Battle of Dien Bien Phu which spelt the doom of French colonial ambitions in SE Asia. The Author has taken a wider geo-political canvas and describes what went on in the corridors of power as the Battle builds up to its tragic climax. The courage of the defending troops, especially the paras, volunteering and dropping through a hailstorm of lead is breathtaking. Courage of the Viet Minh is no less remarkable. The generalship of Giap is obvious and requires a separate book of its own. The French underestimated the ability of Giap to bring his guns across trackless wastes and effectively invest the French, eating relentlessly into their defences until they have no option but to surrender. What is tragic is that the people of France showed scant support to the heroism unfolding. the Americans knowing fully well that Eisenhower will not put boots on the ground still kept French hopes alive. The British refused to ally with the Americans, in sharp contrast to later years, while the Russians stonewalled all attempts at resolution. The Chinese remained steadfast in their support to Ho Chi Minh who stands out as a remarkably determined and patient leader. The French higher leadership remained wanting. The ramifications of the Battle had great impact on SE Asia but the steadfastness of the Vietnamese was clearly not understood by America as it too later drowned in the mire. There are several lessons which can be drawn, the primary one being that America refuses to learn from its experiences, especially in fighting insurgencies. A book worth reading, maybe twice at least.
- J AndersonReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 4, 2018
3.0 out of 5 stars Not the best
Found this book a bit hit and miss to be honest. This is the fourth book i have read on the subject and must say it is the worst one of the bunch. The first part was excellent dealing with the politics and how the french and the americans were at odds over colonialism but it went down hill after that. The book continues to perpetuate the myth of the legion being virtually german to a man and giving units the wrong size and titles. I must admit i am a die hard reader of this battle and I'm being a little bit pedantic. It was ok but not the best.
Jim
- PHILIPPOS VOIDOMATISReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
item arrived in excellent condition
- Mrs P LynchReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 4, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Excellent and frightening book!