AFTER his great victory at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, which pushed the French colonial power to the peace table in Geneva, Vo Nguyen Giap (above, top left) took a tour of the battlefield. The red earth was dark with enemy blood. Cartridges, barbed wire and fragments of shells lay all over it; unburied corpses were busy with yellow flies. In one of the artillery posts the mess of papers on the floor included a letter from the defending general to his wife. General Giap, once a history teacher, thought it would be worth preserving in the records of a free Vietnam.

This victory had been a long time in the making. The French had fortified the valley, in north-west Tonkin on the border with Laos, so he had taken his troops into the mountains that encircled it. The French thought the hills impassable: craggy, forested, foggy, riddled with caves. General Giap recalled the words of his hero Bonaparte, whose battle plans he was sketching out with chalk when he was still at the Lycée in Hue: “If a goat can get through, so can a man; if a man can get through, so can a battalion.” Slowly, stealthily, in single file, 55,000 men took up positions there, supplied by 260,000 coolies with baskets, 20,000 bicycles and 11,800 bamboo rafts. Artillery was carried up in sections. From this eyrie, trenches and tunnels were dug down until they almost touched the French. The enemy never stood a chance.

Here were Bonaparte’s maxims again: audace, surprise. A dash, too, of Lawrence of Arabia, whose “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” General Giap was seldom without. And plenty of Mao Zedong, whose three-stage doctrine of warfare (guerrilla tactics, stalemate, offensive warfare) he had fully absorbed during his brief exile in China, for communist activity, in the early 1940s.

The key to all his victories, as Mao advised, was his people’s army. The French might be professionals straight out of Saint-Cyr, but they did not know what they were fighting for. The Americans who came in later—when Vietnam had been divided and an anti-communist regime had been set up in the South—might bomb his forces from B-52s and poison them with defoliants, but the GIs did not want to be there. His men, by contrast, were fighting to free their own land. From the start, in 1944, he had drilled his tiny musket-and-flintlock resistance army in the ideology of the struggle, setting up propaganda units to indoctrinate peasants in their villages. The result was a guerrilla force that could live off the land, could disappear into it (as along the labyrinthine Ho Chi Minh trail that supplied, through jungle paths and tunnels, communist fighters in the South from the North) and was prepared, with infinite patience, to distract and harry the enemy until he gave in. This was fighting à la vietnamienne. It took the general 30 years, from Vietnam’s declaration of independence from France in 1945 to the fall of Saigon, the southern capital, in 1975, to make his vision reality.

A volcano under snow

Not that he was a populist, exactly. His father had been a lettré, a local scholar, as well as a farmer; he himself had a law degree. He was dapper, reviewing his troops in a white suit, trilby and club tie; even in a mountain cave, diminutive and smiling, he looked fresh as a flower. He wrote poetry, and his French was impeccable. The French, though, could see through that to the hatred that burned beneath, ever since the deaths of both his father and his first wife, after brutal torture, in French prisons. They called him “a volcano under snow”.

Nonetheless, he made an improbable soldier. He had no training, and would never have become a military commander, he said, if Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietminh forces and later of North Vietnam, had not decided it for him. He first met Ho (above, top right) in China, realised they had been to the same school, and idolised him, from his tufty beard to his white rubber sandals. He called him “Uncle”; Ho called him “beautiful as a girl”.

In government, where he was in charge of “revolutionary order” as well as the troops, the political and military progress of the revolution were strictly co-ordinated. Both Dien Bien Phu and the multi-target Tet offensive of 1968 (which he still masterminded, though he was in eastern Europe at the time) were meant to inflict massive demoralisation on the enemy, and to turn the French and American people against the war itself. In both battles the Vietnamese too took huge casualties, which he did not dwell on. He was proud, hot-tempered, blustered into a number of unnecessary pitched battles—but won his two wars, just the same, demonstrating irresistibly to the rest of the colonised world that a backward peasant country could defeat a great colonial power.

After Ho’s death in 1969 he lost influence, and envious colleagues pushed him aside. Some said he was an indifferent communist; he disliked the hardline clique that ran the country, and in old age publicly attacked the party for corruption and bauxite-mining. He remained a huge hero in Vietnam, whose re-emergence as a united and prospering country gave him great joy. Revolutionary work, he wrote once, was largely foresight: knowing not just what the enemy might do tomorrow but also how, in future, the world was going to change. On the bloody field of Dien Bien Phu, he saw that with absolute clarity.