Lecture 36: Recent & Not-So-Decisive Decisive Battles
left Southeast Asia for good, signing the Geneva Accords and
dividing the remainder of their former colony along the 17th parallel
into independent North and South Vietnams.x Dien Bien Phu was a decisive battle for several reasons. First, it
ended the Indochina War and symbolically closed the door on the
era of western colonialism in Asia. Second, it directly led to the
Vietnam War, because the United States unsuccessfully stepped in
and attempted to oppose further Viet Minh expansion into the newly
created South Vietnam. Finally, it set the blueprint for many of the
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major Western power with a high-tech army faced a non-Western,
low-tech army that frequently employed guerilla warfare.The Teutoburg Forest (9 A.D.)
x Among the battles often considered decisive but perhaps not so is
the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which some have argued was the
reason the Romans never conquered Germany as they had Gaul.x Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul in the 50s B.C. established
the Rhine River as the frontier between Roman territory and the
Germania. In the later years of the reign of the emperor Augustus,
the Romans began to probe into Germania and form diplomatic ties
with some of the seminomadic Germanic tribes.x The Romans had always pursued a policy of incorporating warlike
locals into their own auxiliary forces and granting local elites Roman
privileges. Thus, the Roman governor of the region, Quinctilius
Varus, had on his staff a young nobleman of the Cherusci tribe who
had been given the Roman name Arminius, along with equestrian
rank and citizenship.x But Arminius was only feigning cooperation with the Romans. In 9
A.D., Arminius persuaded Varus to move his three legions to winter
quarters by a route that would lead them through dense German
forests and swampland. On the march through the forests, the
18,000 men of Varus’s command were strung out and vulnerable.