Celebrating General Võ Nguyên Giáp’s Birthday

TW: War, Western Imperialism, Mention of WWII and Nazis

Commander-in-Chief

We celebrate General Võ Nguyên Giáp’s 110th birthday. Gen. Giáp served as the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for National Defense of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, as well as the Commander-in-Chief of the Việt Nam People’s Army for 44 years.

Gen. Giáp was a very talented and strategic military leader. Over the course of his term, Gen. Giáp successfully led the Vietnamese people to victory against Japanese, French, and American imperialism.

Early Life

Gen. Giáp had been involved in Vietnamese anti-imperialist efforts since high school when he joined the Tân Việt Cách Mệnh Đảng, the Revolutionary Party of Young Vietnam. In 1931, Gen. Giáp joined Hồ Chí Minh who founded the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930.

The Việt Minh

In 1939, the Indochinese Communist Party founded the Việt Nam Độc Lập Đồng Minh (Việt Minh) to resist Japanese imperialist forces.

Japanese Colonialism

Due to Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War, Vietnam became a colony of the Japanese, who collaborated with the Nazis.

Gen. Giáp led the Việt Minh, which was originally a group of only 34 men, using guerilla warfare techniques against Japanese occupiers.

French Colonialism

1945 – After the Nazi forces were defeated, Vietnamese masses joined Gen. Giáp and the Việt Minh in launching the August Revolution and successfully defeated Japanese occupational forces in Vietnam.

Sep 02 – The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) was founded with Hồ Chí Minh as Prime Minister and General Võ Nguyên Giáp as Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister for National Defense.

Sep 23 – Three weeks after the creation of the DRVN, on September 23rd, 1945, a U.S. backed France began its attempt to regain control of its former colony, opening fire in Saigon, today’s Hồ Chí Minh City.

Military Strategy

During the 9 years resistance war against the French, Gen. Giáp developed strategic guerilla warfare techniques to slowly chip away at the French colonial forces as the Vietnamese people could not compete head on against imperial weapons technology at the time.

His main strategy was to focus on organizing and garnering more support for the Việt Minh amongst both the rural peasants and urban working-class. He accredited the Vietnamese people’s success to this peasant working class alliance.

American War Against Vietnam

Shortly after defeating the French in the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, the Vietnamese people had begun a second resistance war in 1955 against American imperialists who were aiming to take control of the former French colony.

Gen. Giáp was diligent with overseeing the development of the war and planned creative battle strategies specific to the geographical, political, and economic conditions at the time.

He recognized the U.S.-backed Saigon puppet regime’s most fatal weakness: that they did not care for their people, making it easy to turn over its soldiers to the NLF’s anti-imperialist cause.

Vietnamese Liberation

With support from those who previously fought for the puppet regime, the NLF was able to launch the Tết Offensive in 1968, where they simultaneously attacked 40 cities that were outposts for the US and the puppet regime.

Gen. Giáp stepped down as general following Hồ Chí Minh’s passing in 1969 and maintained his positions as Minister of National Defense until 1981 and Deputy Prime Minister until his retirement in 1991. In 2013, Võ Nguyên Giáp passed away at 108 Hospital, at age 103.

He is forever cemented in Vietnam’s history as a national hero, as well as in the hearts of millions.

Vietnamese Liberation

When he first joined the anti-imperialist cause, Võ Nguyên Giáp began with a group of less than 40 soldiers.

Fifty years later, Gen. Giáp was commanding an army of millions of resistance fighters against American imperialists. We can learn from Gen. Giáp’s persistence, strategic military planning, and dedication to organizing the Vietnamese working class.

We will always remember his persistence, which ended a century of imperialism in Vietnam, allowing for Vietnamese self-determination.