Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ted Morgan has now written a rich and definitive account of the fateful battle that ended French rule in Indochina--and led inexorably to America's
Vietnam War.
Dien Bien Phu was a remote valley on the border of Laos along a simple rural trade route. But it would also be where a great European power fell to an underestimated insurgent army and lost control of acrucial colony.
Valley of Death is the untold story of the 1954 battle that, in six weeks, changed the course of history. A veteran of the French Army, Ted Morgan has made use ofexclusive firsthand reports to create the most complete and dramatic telling of the conflict ever written. Here is the history of the Vietminh liberation movement's rebellion against French occupation after WorldWar II and its growth as an adversary, eventually backed by Communist China. Here too is the ill-fated French plan to build a base in Dien Bien Phu and draw the Vietminh into a debilitating defeat--which insteadled to the Europeans being encircled in the surrounding hills, besieged by heavy artillery, overrun, and defeated. Making expert use of recently unearthed or releasedinformation, Morgan reveals the inner workings of the American effort to aid France, with
Eisenhower secretly disdainful of the French effort and prophetically worried that "no military victory was possible inthat type of theater." Morgan paints indelible portraits of all the major players, from Henri Navarre, head of the French Union forces, a rigid professional unprepared for an enemy fortified by rice carried onbicycles, to his commander, General Christian de Castries, a privileged, miscast cavalry officer, and General Vo Nguyen Giap, a master of guerrilla warfare working out of a one-room hut on the side of a hill. Mostdevastatingly, Morgan sets the stage for the Vietnam quagmire that was to come. Superbly researched and powerfully written,
Valley of Death is thecrowning achievement of an author whose work has always been as compulsively readable as it is important."From the Hardcover edition."
Click for the original review.
Background Information
Dwight D. Eisenhower rose above many more senior American officers to become Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe and later President of the United States. The United States slid slowly into the position previously held by France in Indochina and became engulfed in a long war in Vietnam.
