The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam
Christopher Goscha
Mar 2022 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Joe Barrett
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17 hr 31 min
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About this audiobook
On May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power and win. After nearly a decade of struggle, a nation forged in the crucible of war had achieved a victory undreamed of by any other national liberation movement. The Road to Dien Bien Phu tells the story of how Ho Chi Minh turned a ragtag guerrilla army into a modern fighting force capable of bringing down the formidable French army. Christopher Goscha shows how Ho transformed Vietnam from a decentralized guerrilla state based in the countryside to a single-party communist state shaped by a specific form of "War Communism." Goscha discusses how the Vietnamese operated both states through economics, trade, policing, information gathering, and communications technology. He challenges the wisdom of counterinsurgency methods developed by the French and still used by the Americans today, and explains why the First Indochina War was arguably the most brutal war of decolonization in the twentieth century, killing a million Vietnamese, most of them civilians. Panoramic in scope, The Road to Dien Bien Phu transforms our understanding of this conflict and the one the United States would later enter, and sheds new light on communist warfare and statecraft in East Asia today.
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4.0
1 review
Bart Lavis
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October 14, 2024
This is a scholastic view or the rise of Communism in Vietnam, resulting in the tactical and strategic victory over the French. It sets the stage for the remainder of the conflict in Vietnam as it tries to unify the country under one nationalistic ideology for the first time in its history.
About the author
Christopher Goscha is an associate professor of history at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The author and editor of numerous books on Vietnam and Southeast Asia in English and French, he lives in Montreal, Canada.
Joe Barrett has been a working stage, screen, and recording booth actor since 1974 and an award-winning and eight-time Audie Award-nominated audiobook narrator since 1999. He also practiced law for five years-but don't hold that against him. Joe is married to actress Andrea Wright, and together they have four children.
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