His father, a farmer, had also been involved in the move-
ment for Vietnamese independence, and had taken part
in the uprising of 1888. Giap spent much of his youth
studying and tending to his rice crop to earn enough to
pay for his studies at the University of Hanoi, although
one source indicates that he actually attended the Na-
tional Academy [known as Quoc Hoc] in the southern
imperial capital of Hue. He spent much of his youth
following his father in agitating for independence, join-
ing the political movement known as the Tan Viet (New
Vietnamese Revolutionary Party), which fought for
an end to French colonial rule about 1926. In 1930,
after joining the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP),
he was arrested by the French authorities and sent to
prison for three years. Following his release, he restarted
his campaign for independence and helped to organize
and coordinate student strikes across the country. At the
same time, he continued his studies at the University
of Hanoi, earning a degree in law in 1937. While in
the university he met Dang Xuan Khu, later to become
Trung Chinh, with whom Giap coauthored a book, The
Peasant Question (1939).
In September 1939, hunted by the French, Giap
escaped to China, where he met Nguyen Ai Quoc, a
shadowy nationalist leader who later took the name of
Ho Chi Minh. Ho entered into an alliance with Giap,
Chinh, and Pham Van Dong, and in 1941 the four men
formed the Vietminh or Viet Minh (Vietnamese Inde-
pendence League), a revolutionary party modeled on the
Soviet Communist Party.
The Second World War afforded great opportuni-
ties for the group. The French, fighting off a German
invasion and the establishment of the Vichy govern-
ment in their own country, did not have the resources
to rein in the burgeoning Vietnamese independence
movement. Giap secretly slipped back into northern
Vietnam in 1941, beginning a campaign of dissemi-
nating propaganda and serving as Ho Chi Minh’s chief
lieutenant of the Vietminh movement in northern In-
dochina. In 1944, Giap was named commander of the
Armed Propaganda Brigade, the forerunner of the Viet-
namese Liberation Army, later the North Vietnamese
Army (NVA).
Giap spent much of his time after the end of
the Second World War as a military strategist, utilizing
the tactics and system of fighting that Mao Zedong
used to bring a communist government to China in
- Historian Michael Maclear notes that Giap bom-
barded the French in Vietnam while the United Na-
tions was fighting in Korea, “Giap, equipped with new
heavy mortars from China, targeted a string of French
forts in the far north, and one by one they were over-
whelmed. Giap then switched to a premature general
offensive and sustained several defeats—a setback last-
ing two years—but the French losses that October (6000
troops killed or captured) were described by Bernard
Fall as France’s ‘greatest colonial defeat since Montcalm
died at Quebec.’ ” After the Geneva agreement of 1954,
Giap saw that employing guerilla combat against the
American-backed government in Saigon, South Viet-
nam, would be the best way to overthrow that adminis-
tration and institute an all-communist state to the entire
nation.
Giap rose to become the highest-ranking general in
the Quan Doi Nhan Dan Viet Nam (People’s Army of
Vietnam, or PAVN), in effect in command of all North
Vietnamese forces fighting American and South Viet-
namese forces. With the formation of the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north, Giap was
named minister of defense, but he remained an inte-
gral leader of Ho Chi Minh’s fighting force. Because the
North Vietnamese Army was not organized like other
armies, he did not serve as a field general but rather as a
strategist who commanded his men from afar and also
supported the Vietcong, communist insurgents in South
Vietnam. Ultimately it was his leadership and influence
that led the North Vietnamese and their Soviet and Chi-
nese allies to victory despite the fact that they lost battle
after battle against the American forces. Giap knew that
exerting horrific casualties on the Americans, while at the
same time helping to nurture a growing antiwar move-
ment in the United States and around the world, would
produce not a decisive military victory but a propaganda
triumph that would lead to victory for the North—and
he was right.
In 1968, Giap initiated the Tet Offensive on the
Vietnamese New Year of Tet, and although his forces
were defeated everywhere, the attack served its pur-
posing, creating demoralizing mood against the U.S.
government. As the North Vietnamese government in
Hanoi opened negotiations with the American govern-
ment in Paris, and even North Vietnam was subjected to
massive casualties and bombings, devastating its econ-
omy, Giap continued to carry out regular attacks, which
the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies were
unable to halt. The attacks finally led the United StatesgiAp, vo nguyen