The Road to Dien Bien Phu : : A History of the First War for Vietnam / / Christopher Goscha.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English
• VerfasserIn: Goscha, Christopher,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (568 p.) :; 32 b/w illus. 15 maps.

A multifaceted history of Ho Chi Minh’s climactic victory over French colonial might that foreshadowed America’s experience in VietnamOn 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Word about Words -- Maps -- Introduction: States of War -- 1 The Rise of the Archipelago State -- 2 Building Military Force -- 3 The Asian Routes of War -- 4 The City at War -- 5 Wiring War -- 6 Policing War -- 7 Trickle Economics -- 8 The Levée en masse and War Communism -- 9 Of Rice and War -- 10 The Road to Dien Bien Phu -- 11 Imperial Dust: Ho Chi Minh’s Associated States of Indochina -- 12 Dien Bien Phu: The Changing of Heaven and Earth -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index