Review

Synopsis
This is an account of the life and "career of General Vo Nguyen Giap, defence minister of the Vietnamese Communists and commander-in-chief of their armies during the Indo-China wars." (Times Lit Suppl) Index.

From The Publisher
Four-star General Vo Nguyen Giap led Vietnam's armies from their inception, in the 1940s, up to the moment of their triumphant entrance into Saigon in 1975. Possessing one of the finest military minds of this century, his strategy for vanquishing superior opponents was not to simply outmaneuver them in the field but to undermine their resolve by inflicting demoralizing political defeats with his bold tactics. This was evidenced as early as 1944, when Giap sent his minuscule force against French outposts in Indochina. The moment he chose to attack was Christmas Eve. More devastatingly, in 1954 at a place called Dien Bien Phu, Giap lured the overconfident French into a turning-point battle and won a stunning victory with brilliant deployments. Always he showed a great talent for approaching his enemy's strengths as if they were exploitable weaknesses. Nearly a quarter of a century later, in 1968, the General launched a major surprise offensive against American and South Vietnamese forces on the eve of lunar New Year celebrations. Province capitals throughout the country were seized, garrisons simultaneously attacked, and perhaps most shockingly, in Saigon the U.S. Embassy was invaded. The cost in North Vietnamese casualties was tremendous but the gambit produced a pivotal media disaster for the White House and the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Giap's strategy toppled the American commander in chief. It turned the tide of the war and sealed the General's fame as the dominant military genius of the 20th Century's second half.

Reviews
From Radhakrishnan Nayar - The Times Literary Supplement  
Colvin, a British diplomat who was the United Kingdom's Consul-General in Hanoi in 1965-7, has produced a useful addition to the small number of Western studies of Giap. It is, however, a very uneven work, of more value for striking details, the occasional flash of perception and vivid descriptions of battles, than for sustained analysis. It teems with judgments that are discordant with facts the author himself cites.
 
From Brian Crozier - National Review  
{This is a} dense but highly readable biography of Giap. . . . Certain omissions are to be expected, since this is not a true biography of its titular character. Giap: Volcano under Snow is really a military history of the two Vietnam wars. . . . John Colvin's detailed description of the two wars is gripping. The reader is there, in the tropical heat, listening to the twitterings of the jungle, sniffing that odoriferous Vietnamese sauce nuoc mam, made of rotting fish and sea water, frustrated by the vanishing Vietcong after each murderous attack.
 
From Publisher's Weekly - Publishers Weekly  
British diplomat Colvin, who served as consul in Hanoi during the 1960s, can't quite keep a focus in this loosely structured biography concerning Vo Nguyen Giap's controversial career as a self-taught general and key figure in the Vietnamese revolution. Instead, he regularly drifts away from Giap to present a highly impressionistic narrative of the First and Second Indochina Wars. Colvin's bibliography lists archival material from France, the U.K. and the U.S. Even casual students, however, may perceive the author's heavy reliance on such standard accounts as Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy and Gunther Levy's America in Vietnam. Colvin's analysis of Giap seems to be similarly derived in large part from Robert O'Neill's General Giap and Peter Macdonald's Giap: Victor in Vietnam. The author's interpretation of Giap as a first-rate practitioner of war as a synthesis of military and political approaches is defensible, albeit conventional. But his insistence that Giap, rather than his Chinese "advisors," planned the Dien Bien Phu campaign of 1953-1954 must be evaluated in the context of Quang Zhai's trailblazing article "Transplanting the Chinese Model" in The Journal of Military History (October 1993). More generally, Colvin's case for the success of Vietnamization after 1969 seems seriously overstated, as does his argument that South Vietnam's collapse in 1975 was in good part the result of abandonment by the U.S. Neither position is sustained by the limited scholarship of a work that is more a personal statement than a serious intellectual contribution. (Aug.)
 
From Kirkus  
Not a biography, but a subjective military history of the 194575 Indochina wars, in which the British author argues that the Vietnamese victories were primarily due to French and American mistakes rather than the superior leadership of the commanding Vietnamese general, Vo Nguyen Giap. Colvin, who was British consul in Hanoi from 1965 to 1967, presents a wealth of battlefield detail about the French and American wars in Vietnam. He describes many battles and skirmishes, and thoroughly examines tactical and strategic details. The military history is generally accurate, although Colvin makes the grossly untrue statement that the US Army and Air Force in Vietnam ``lived in air-conditioned bases.'' Along with the facts, Colvin includes his opinions, arguing, for example, that the US could have stopped a communist victory in Vietnam by mining the northern ports and letting loose an ``aerial interdiction'' on northern borders in 1965 to prevent war materiel from entering North Vietnam. Colvin characterizes Gen. Giap and North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh as ruthless if brilliant men who depended on the calculated use of ``terror and patriotism'' to propel the war effort. Giap, Colvin says, was an overrated commander who was victorious because of his willingness to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives and because of the large-scale support he received from China and the Soviet Union. Colvin criticizes some aspects of French colonialism but credits the French with having ``great virtues'' in colonial Vietnam, such as building ``small but lovely cities.'' Colvin condemns the American war strategies of attrition and Vietnamization. Most startlingly, Colvin attributes the communist victory in part to the actions of some elements of the American antiwar movement. A ``revisionist war crimes tribunal today,'' Colvin says, ``would have no difficulty in naming the accused: Jane Fonda, Eldridge Cleaver, and the rest of them.'' A battlefield history is marred by unsupported historical speculations and opinions.
 

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgements
	Maps
	Prologue	1
I	End of One War	14
II	Formation of a Revolutionary	24
III	From Quiet Homes and Small Beginnings	33
IV	Beginning of the Next War	44
V	Fast Forward: Fifty-seven Years Later	54
VI	The Formation of an Army	60
VII	The French Pacify Cochinchina and the Red River Delta	67
VIII	The Chinese Draw Near	74
IX	The French Lose the Frontier: Hanoi Threatened	81
X	General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny: Giap Goes Too Far	88
XI	De Lattre Dead, Giap Retakes Hoa Binh	98
XII	The Shape of Things to Come	105
XIII	Back to Laos	113
XIV	The Navarre Plan	119
XV	Dien Bien Phu: 20 November 1953-26 April 1954	128
XVI	Dien Bien Phu: 27 April 1954-8 May 1954	139
XVII	Land Reform	147
XVIII	The Rise and Fall of Ngo Dinh Diem	154
XIX	Leadership and Army in the North	162
XX	The Viet Cong	171
XXI	Rolling Thunder	180
XXII	The First Combat Troops Land	190
XXIII	Let Battle Commence	196
XXIV	The Bombing of the North	203
XXV	Giap's Options in 1966	207
XXVI	The Spokesman	211
XXVII	Pacification Versus Attrition	216
XXVIII	'Negotiations'	223
XXIX	Giap's New Strategy	228
XXX	The Battle for Khe Sanh	234
XXXI	The Tet Offensive of 1968	239
XXXII	What Giap Wanted from Tet and What Giap Got	246
XXXIII	General Abrams Takes the Chalice	251
XXXIV	The view from Hanoi in 1970	258
XXXV	Laos and Cambodia: the Trail and the Sanctuaries, 1970-1	261
XXXVI	The North Vietnamese Spring 1972 offensive	267
XXXVII	The Consequences of the Peace Agreement of 1973	274
XXXVIII	Giap's Battering Ram	281
XXXIX	What Might Have Been	292
XL	'Beat Not the Bones of the Buried...'	297
	Appendix A	299
	Appendix B	302
	Appendix C	307
	Appendix D	309
	Select Bibliography	310
	Index	316