Vo Nguyen Giap

VIETNAMESE GENERAL
WRITTEN BY: Gloria Lotha
 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Vo Nguyen Giap, (born 1912, An Xa, Vietnam—died October 4, 2013,
Hanoi), Vietnamese military and political leader whose perfection of guerrilla
as well as conventional strategy and tactics led to the Viet Minh victory over
the French (and to the end of French colonialism in Southeast Asia) and later
to the North Vietnamese victory over South Vietnam and the United States.
The son of an ardent anticolonialist scholar, Giap as a youth began to work for
Vietnamese autonomy. He attended the same high school as Ho Chi Minh,
the communist leader, and while still a student in 1926 he joined the Tan Viet
Cach Menh Dang, the Revolutionary Party of Young Vietnam. In 1930, as a
supporter of student strikes, he was arrested by the French Sûreté and
sentenced to three years in prison, but he was paroled after serving only a few
months. After studying at the Lycée Albert-Sarraut in Hanoi, he received a law
degree from Hanoi University in the late 1930s. Giap then became a professor
of history at the Lycée Thanh Long in Hanoi, where he converted many of his
fellow teachers and students to his political views. In 1938 he married Minh
Thai, and together they worked for the Indochinese Communist Party. When
in 1939 the party was prohibited, Giap escaped to China, but his wife and
sister-in-law were captured by the French police. His sister-in-law
was guillotined; his wife received a life sentence and died in prison after three
years.
In 1941 Giap formed an alliance with Chu Van Tan, guerrilla leader of the Tho,
a minority tribal group of northeastern Vietnam. Giap hoped to build an army
that would drive out the French and support the goals of the Viet Minh, Ho Chi
Minh’s Vietnamese independence movement. With Ho Chi Minh, Giap
marched his forces into Hanoi in August 1945, and in September Ho
announced the independence of Vietnam, with Giap in command of all police
and internal security forces and commander in chief of the armed forces. Giap
sanctioned the execution of many non-Communist nationalists, and he
censored nationalist newspapers to conform with Communist Party directives.
In the French Indochina War, Giap’s brilliance as a military strategist and