Võ Nguyên Giáp (chữ Hán: 武元甲, Vietnamese pronunciation: [vɔ̌ˀ ŋʷīən jǎːp]; 25 August 1911 – 4 October 2013) was a Vietnamese general, communist revolutionary and politician. Highly regarded as a military strategist, Giáp led Vietnamese communist military forces to victory in the decades-long Indochina wars. Giáp was the military commander of the Việt Minh and the People's Army from 1941 to 1972, minister of defense of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1946–1947 and from 1948 to 1980, and deputy prime minister from 1955 to 1991. He was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
Born in Quảng Bình province to an affluent peasant family, Giáp began participating in anti-colonial political activity in 1925. Sources conflict as to whether he joined the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930, or not until 1940. Giáp rose to prominence during World War II as the military leader of the Việt Minh resistance against the Japanese occupation, and after the war led anti-colonial forces in the First Indochina War against the French. He won a decisive victory at the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which ended the war. In the Vietnam War, Giáp led the PAVN against South Vietnam and the United States. Giáp was commander of the army during the 1968 Tet Offensive and 1972 Easter Offensive, after which he was succeeded by Văn Tiến Dũng, but remained defense minister through the U.S. withdrawal and final victory against South Vietnam in 1975. Giáp oversaw his final campaigns in the successful Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. He resigned as defense minister in 1980 and left the Politburo in 1982. Giáp remained on the Central Committee and as deputy prime minister until 1991, and died in 2013 at age 102.
Giáp is regarded as a great military leader. During the First Indochina War, he transformed a disorganized band of rebels to a "fine light-infantry army" fielding cryptography, artillery and advanced logistics capable of challenging the larger, modernised French Far East Expeditionary Corps and Vietnamese National Army. Giáp, who in the 1930s had studied law and worked as a history teacher, had never received any military training prior to World War II. A highly effective logistician, he was the principal architect of the Ho Chi Minh trail, the logistical network from North to South Vietnam, through the kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia, which is recognised as one of the 20th century's great feats of military engineering.
Giáp is often credited with North Vietnam's military victory over the United States and South Vietnam. Recent scholarship cites other leaders as more prominent, with former subordinates and later rivals Dũng and Hoàng Văn Thái later having a more direct military responsibility. Nevertheless, he was crucial to the transformation of the PAVN into "one of the largest, most formidable" mechanised and combined-arms fighting force capable of defeating the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in conventional warfare.
Võ Nguyên Giáp was born on 25 August 1911 (or 1912 according to some sources) in Quảng Bình province, Annam, French Indochina. Giáp's father and mother, Võ Quang Nghiêm and Nguyễn Thị Kiên, worked the land, rented some to neighbours, and lived a relatively comfortable life.
Giáp's father was both a minor official and a committed Vietnamese nationalist, having participated in the Cần Vương movement in the 1880s. He was arrested for subversive activities by the French colonial authorities in 1919 and died in prison a few weeks later. Giáp had two sisters and one brother, and soon after his father's incarceration, one of his sisters was also arrested. Although she was not held for long, the privations of prison life made her ill and she too died a few weeks after being released.
Giáp was taught at home by his father before going to the village school. His precocious intelligence meant that he was soon transferred to the district school and in 1924, at the age of thirteen, he left home to attend the Quốc Học (also known in English as the "National Academy"), a French-run lycée in Huế, where he studied arithmetic, history, geography, literature, and natural science. This school had been founded by a Catholic official named Ngo Dinh Kha, and his son, Ngô Đình Diệm also attended it. Diem later became President of South Vietnam (1955–63). Years earlier the same school had educated another boy, Nguyễn Sinh Cung, also the son of an official. In 1943 Cung adopted the name Ho Chi Minh.
At age 14, Giáp became a messenger for the Haiphong Power Company. He was expelled from the school after two years for taking part in protests, and went home to his village for a while. While there, he joined the Tân Việt Revolutionary Party, an underground group founded in 1924, which introduced him to communism. He returned to Hue and continued his political activities. He was arrested in 1930 for taking part in student protests and served 13 months of a two-year sentence at Lao Bảo Prison. By Giáp's own account the reason for his release was lack of evidence against him. He joined the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1931 and took part in several demonstrations against French rule in Indochina as well as assisting in founding the Democratic Front in 1933.
Although he denied it, Giáp was said by the historian Cecil B. Currey to have also spent some time in the prestigious Hanoi Lycée Albert Sarraut, where the local elite was educated to serve the colonial regime. He was said to have been in the same class as Phạm Văn Đồng, a future Prime Minister, who also denied studying at Albert Sarraut, and Bảo Đại, the last Emperor of Annam. From 1933 to 1938, Giáp studied at the Indochinese University in Hanoi where he earned a bachelor's degree in law with a major in political economy.
While a student, Giáp had taken lodgings with Professor Dang Thai Minh, whose daughter, Nguyen Thi Minh Giang (also cited as Nguyễn Thị Quang Thái; 1915–1944), he had first met at school in Hue. She too had learned nationalism from her father and had joined the revolutionary activities with which Giáp was involved. In June 1938 (or, according to some sources, April 1939) they were married and in May 1939 they had a daughter, Hong Anh (Red Queen of Flowers). Giáp's busy political activities took a toll on his postgraduate studies, and he failed to pass the examinations for the Certificate of Administrative Law. Unable therefore to practice as a lawyer, he took a job as a history teacher at the Thăng Long School in Hanoi.
As well as teaching in school, Giáp was busy producing and writing articles for Tiếng Dân (Voice of the People) founded by Huỳnh Thúc Kháng and many other revolutionary newspapers, while actively participating in various revolutionary movements. All the while, Giáp was a dedicated reader of military history and philosophy, revering Sun Tzu. He also made a particular study of Napoleon's generalship, and greatly admired T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, learning from it practical examples of how to apply minimum military force to maximum effect. He also read and was influenced by historical figures including Carl von Clausewitz, George Washington, and Vladimir Lenin. During the Popular Front years in France, he founded Hồn Trẻ tập mới (Soul of Youth), an underground socialist newspaper. He also founded the French-language paper Le Travail (on which Phạm Văn Đồng also worked).
After the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the French authorities outlawed the Indochinese Communist Party. Its leaders decided that Giáp should leave Vietnam and go into exile in China. On 3 May 1940 he said farewell to his wife, left Hanoi and crossed the border into China. Giáp's wife went to her family home in Vinh, where she was arrested, sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment, and incarcerated in the Hoa Lo Central Prison in Hanoi. In China, Giáp joined up with Ho Chi Minh, then an adviser to the People's Liberation Army. Giáp adopted the alias Duong Huai-nan, learned to speak and write Chinese, and studied the strategy and tactics of the Chinese Communist Party.