The Briefing Room
General Category => World News => Topic started by: Cincinnatus on October 04, 2013, 08:46:52 pm
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Vo Nguyen Giap, the relentless and charismatic North Vietnamese general whose campaigns drove both France and the United States out of Vietnam, died on Friday in Hanoi. He was believed to be 102.
The death was reported by several Vietnamese news organizations, including the respected Tuoi Tre Online, which said he died in an army hospital.
General Giap was among the last survivors of a generation of Communist revolutionaries who in the postwar decades freed Vietnam of colonial rule and fought a superpower to a stalemate. In his later years, he was a living reminder of a war that was mostly old history to the Vietnamese, many of whom were born after it had ended.
But he had not faded away. He was regarded as an elder statesman whose hard-line views had softened with the cessation of the war that unified Vietnam. He supported economic reform and closer relations with the United States while publicly warning of the spread of Chinese influence and the environmental costs of industrialization.
To his American adversaries, however, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, he was perhaps second only to his mentor, Ho Chi Minh, as the face of an implacable enemy, as ruthless with his own forces as he was with his opponents. To historians, his willingness to sustain staggering losses against superior American firepower was a large reason the war dragged on as long as it did, costing more than 2.5 million lives — 58,000 of them American — sapping the United States treasury and Washington’s political will to fight and bitterly dividing the country in an argument about America’s role in the world that still echoes today.
A teacher and journalist with no formal military training, Vo Nguyen Giap (pronounced vo nwin ZHAP) joined a ragtag Communist insurgency in the 1940s and built it into a highly disciplined force that through 30 years of revolution and civil war ended an empire and united a nation.
He was charming and volatile, an erudite military historian and an intense nationalist who used his personal magnetism to motivate his troops and fire their devotion to their country. His admirers put him in the company of MacArthur, Rommel and other great military leaders of the 20th century.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/world/asia/gen-vo-nguyen-giap-dies.html?_r=1&
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He also credited John Kerry and his Viet Nam Vets against the war for Viet Nam winning. Giap was ready to give in until Kerry turned the tide. Since Lurch has his picture in the Viet Nam War Heroes museum in Hanoi, I wonder if Lurch will attend the funeral? :salute:
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According to "Hanoi's War", Le Duan and his buddies were the hard asses, Giap and Ho not so much.
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Vo Nguyen Giap didn't oust anyone from anywhere but the U.S. Democrat party sure did and then, as if that were not enough, they cut the legs out from under the South Vietnamese government which was holding it's own against the North up to that point!
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As a military historian, I give Giap a lot of credit as a military tactician, especially give his lack of any real training. The man did have a very strategic mind.
That said, he was still a communist barbarian; may he roast in hell.