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Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War |  | Author: Ted Morgan
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 27336
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 752
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.6
Dimensions (in): 10.2 x 6.6 x 1.8
ISBN: 1400066646
Dewey Decimal Number: 959.704142
EAN: 9781400066643
ASIN: 1400066646
Publication Date: February 23, 2010
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Product Description
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ted Morgan has now written a rich and definitive account of the fateful battle that ended French rule in Indochinaâand 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 a crucial 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 of exclusive 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 World War 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 defeatâwhich instead led to the Europeans being encircled in the surrounding hills, besieged by heavy artillery, overrun, and defeated.
   Making expert use of recently unearthed or released information, 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 in that 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 on bicycles, 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. Most devastatingly, Morgan sets the stage for the Vietnam quagmire that was to come.
   Superbly researched and powerfully written, Valley of Death is the crowning achievement of an author whose work has always been as compulsively readable as it is important.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 12
 Excellent and well-written March 1, 2010
D. C. Carrad (Augusta, GA United States)
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
Ted Morgan has written an excellent book about the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Actually, it starts in 1940 and takes about a third of the book just to get to the commencement of the battle because it covers the background on the French and Vietminh sides (and the American involvement too). Morgan is an excellent writer who can shift very easily from conferences at the Presidential/Foreign Ministry level to the viewpoint of troops in the field. The interplay between soldiers and politicians in France is fascinating and sometimes revolting if you believe, as I do, that it is obscene to send young men into battle unless you are serious about the war aims and prepared to see them through to the end. The details of the French involvement before the battle and the consequences of the defeat at DBP and how they played out afterward are thought-provoking and fascinating. The popular view is sometimes that the American vs. NVA/VC Battle of Khe Sanh in 1968 was just Dien Bien Phu Part II with the Americans substituting for the French; this book definitively shows why this was not so. Morgan has written another excellent book called "My Battle of Algiers" about his experience as a conscript in the French army during the equally unpopular Algerian war and his very mixed - to say the least - feelings about his military service there. He is uniquely qualified to write on these topics because he was born French (as Sanche de Gramont) but moved to America when young and has since become very Americanized. Anyone interested in what happened before the US got involved in Vietnam will like this book.
valley of death March 26, 2010
ralph hagler (SEATTLE, WA, US)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
For anyone even remotely interested in how we went to war in South-Vietnam this is a MUST study. This book brilliantly captures the politics,culture and frustrations we faced by a leadership who too willingly committed us to war without exploring the unintended results. As an Infantry Officer who served three tours on the ground in SVN, this book provides a seminal study on how we should NOT be deluded into future conflicts without a national debate.
Ted Morgan has wriiten a perfect History of DBP February 24, 2010
K. Schneider (New Jersey)
15 out of 21 found this review helpful
Valley Of Death, is a well written and striaght shooting book on DBP it fills in so many blanks and answers many questtions that Dr. Bernad Fall asked over 40 years ago. It will become a classic book about early Vietnam and the growth of the Vietminh and the fall of the French.
Ken Schneider
A magnificent history of the defeat of the French in Vietnam May 3, 2010
Jerry Saperstein (Evanston, IL USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Most Americans were not alive in late 1953 through early 1954 when French military forces were defeated in their campaign to retain Indochina (current day Vietnam) as a colony. Considering the deterioration of America's public education system, it is unlikely that more than a handful of younger people know anything about the history of the French, their cowardice in the 1930s and military ineptitude in 1940 resulting in the Germans defeating their vaunted armies in a matter of weeks. In one of Churchill's relatively few strategic miscalculations, he convinced Roosevelt to give France recognition as a "major power", lending it undeserved prestige in postwar histories when in fact, France was an active partner of Germany. French military forces were the first to shoot at American troops in WWII during the Allied invasion of North Africa.
Immediately after World War II ended, France once again seized control of Indochina as a colony, This is in 1945, when colonialism should have been seen as a dead letter, but France far more than the British persisted in its attempts to exploit Asian and Africans. French troops did not resist the Japanese occupiers in WWII: they cooperated with them. Instead, a nationalist movement, the Vietminh, led by the Communist Ho Chi Minh resisted the Japanese and received some American support in that effort.
Beginning in 1949, a full-scale insurrection against the French by the Vietminh began.
Author Ted Morgan recounts all this and more in the opening pages of his monumental 642 page history. While the subject is supposed to be the battle that led to the end of the war, Morgan wisely includes a detailed history of what led up to the battle of Dien Bien Phu - and the proceedings that resulted in the French defeat.
Morgan, much to his credit, is largely apolitical in his recounting. Fortunately, reviewers don't have to mirror this stance.
What Morgan portrays is France as an arrogant nation, one that lost to the Germans in 1940 without much of a fight, largely cooperated with its German masters, got unmerited credit for its help in "liberating" Europe and promptly set out to once again enslave millions in Africa and Asia.
In Indochina, this effort culminated in a massive display of military ineptitude with two unqualified and disputatious generals in command. The overall chief, Navarre, created a plan to block a Vietminh in Laos, a neighboring nation. His plan established for creating a fortified base in a place called Dien Bien Phu, a valley literally in the middle of nowhere that could be supplied only by air.
Navarre's thinking was predicated on the idea of "little yellow men" not being able to think in modern military terms and incapable of standing up to a polyglot French force of people from other colonies (Algeria, Thailand), native Vietnamese serving a corrupt, incompetent sham government set up by the French, French soldiers and the crème de la crème, the French Foreign Legion, which existed solely to fight to keep French colonies and contained many Germans who only a few years before were fighting Russians or committing war crimes.
The Vietminh forces, led by the brilliant Vo Nguyen Giap, proved Navarre to be an incompetent leader.
Simply stated, through a combination of exploiting genuine nationalism and imposing the draconian discipline typical of Communist regimes (do what you are told or die), Giap did what Navarre said couldn't be done: he brought artillery into the hills surrounding Dien Bien Phu which gave Giap strategic and tactical superiority. The French, in their arrogance, had failed to seize the hills surrounding Dien Bien Phu. The French failed to anticipate China and the Soviet Union providing the Vietminh with anti-aircraft artillery and training Vietnamese crews to use it effectively. As a result, the French though liberally supplied with American aircraft, were unable to gain air superiority.
The French nation was highly unstable in the years after World War II. Much of the population voted for Communists and were against continuing any war against any Communist regimes. Governments fell with astonishing frequency. The French left-wing, as the American left did years later, spit on soldiers and generally did everything it could to derail the war effort.
Morgan relates all this in great detail - detail so thick, in fact, that I fear most readers will simply give up. Morgan is an excellent writer and he explains things in great detail, without becoming boring or confusing, but "Valley Of Death" is a long, long read.
Morgan switches scenes frequently from the increasingly desperate military battle at Dien Bien Phu to the political machinations in Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Bejing, Hanoi and ultimately Geneva.
The book is promoted as describing and explaining how Dien Bien Phu "led America into the Vietnam war". This is not accurate. In fact, although the US did provide considerable financial and military aid to the French, significant American involvement with the commitment of American personnel to Vietnam did not begin until 1961 under President Kennedy.
Morgan, however, does provide accurate and detailed information on the efforts of American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to involve the United States and England in schemes to aid the French military effort to defeat the Communists, while securing true independence for the nations France was repressing.
In the end, parts of the professional French military performed superbly on the ground at Dien Bien Phu until ultimately they were defeated by the "little yellow men", the French government and military leaders looked down upon. A "peace" conference in Geneva led to the surrender of Dien Bien Phu and the imprisonment of thousands of French soldiers as POWS. Thousands of them - far more than those who died in battle - died as a result of their treatment at the hands of Vietnamese Communists.
In all, the word "magnificent" only begins to describe this all-encompassing history of a long ago war and a mismanaged battle that ended any pretense of French military competence against any but unarmed civilians.
As noted, Morgan stays almost entirely apolitical, but on page 631, Morgan remarks that "Eisenhower remains America's wisest post-World War II president because he understood that there were limits to the deployment of U.S. power". The assertion that Eisenhower was the "wisest" postwar president is arguable. Truman kept Communists from conquering all of Europe and Asia by actively assisting the legitimate Greek government against Communist insurrection, risking general war to keep Berlin open to the Allies and resisting Communist aggression in Korea. Was he any less wise than Eisenhower? I don't think so. Eisenhower refused to become involved with French efforts in Indochina unless the French agreed to independence for all the nations under its heel, creation of an alliance of US, British, French and Asian interests and the raising of an effective Vietnamese army. If those conditions had been fulfilled, Eisenhower would have committed further US resources to Indochina. As it was, Eisenhower was fine with authorizing billions of dollars in military aid to the French. As I said, Morgan's assertion is arguable and, I think, wrong. Debating it would make for an interesting argument.
For students of 20th Century history, for military buffs and others interested in a definitive understanding of how the French lost against an irregular army, Morgan's book is highly recommended.
Jerry
 A good retelling, but misses the larger picture February 24, 2010
Todd Bartholomew (Atlanta, GA USA)
43 out of 47 found this review helpful
For a pivotal battle that marked the end of France's colonial ambitions in Indochina and America's increasing involvement there, there's been surprisingly few books that focus on it exclusively. Most of the historiography on Dien Bien Phu has incorporated it into the larger framework of the overall efforts at Vietnamese liberation from even before the Second World War to the collapse of Saigon in 1975. Earlier books such as Henri Navarre's "Agonie de l'Indochine" (1958), Bernard Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (1985), Jules Roy's The Battle of Dienbienphu (2002), David Stone's DIEN BIEN PHU: (Battles in Focus) (2004) and Martin Windrow's The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam (also 2004) covered this pivotal battle to varying degrees of success, and each with their own particular perspective on it. While it would appear Morgan could have little to add, the reality is there is much that has been recently declassified or overlooked by previous researchers, especially within the French archives. As a veteran of the French army, Morgan has the potential to show bias, but adeptly avoids that. Morgan also debunks the theory that the French arrogantly blundered into selecting Dien Bien Phu as a defensive stand, leaving the hilly terrain around the area for the Vietminh to capture, reconstructing how implausible it was that the Vietminh could do what they did and how theoretically easy it should have been to supply the base via air support. Of course this was proven fatally wrong by the Vietminh, who disassembled and dragged artillery pieces into the mountains surrounding the area and then reassembled them, despite no roads in the area and with them being covered by dense jungle foliage. What emerges instead is a story of grim determination by both sides to hold on in the face of daunting challenges, dispelling the belief it was a mistake by the French, who were instead undone by the undaunted courage and willpower of the Vietminh.
Morgan captures the unfolding drama as though we don't already know the outcome of events in a prose that is very engaging. The French quite simply could not have seen things unfolding the way they did; no one expected what happened, as the Vietminh accomplished the seemingly impossible. My major quibble is that Morgan's book is a bit Amero-centric, as it seeks more to explain how the U.S. was drawn into the Vietnamese conflict, rather than what it meant to the French. Morgan explores the pleas of the French for U.S. intervention and the discussion of possibly using atomic weaponry, which was ultimately rejected for obvious reasons. The debacle at Dien Bien Phu was followed two years later by the British and French intervention in the Suez Crisis, which effectively marked the end of both as Great Powers. It could be argued that Dien Bien Phu was the initial rupture or breaking point for Eisenhower's tolerance of continued European colonialism, yet Morgan doesn't make that point here. Suez is frequently pointed to as that break point along with increasing U.S. intervention in the late 1950s, displacing European powers. For the French, Dien Bien Phu was the beginning of the end of their empire, followed by decolonization and the war in Algeria. I would have liked "Valley of Death" had it given more of the "big picture" relevancy to France and global relations. While Morgan seeks to explain how the U.S. wound up in Vietnam, the result is too narrowly tailored when it could be used to explain things more broadly. As a result "Valley of Death" is micro-history, not macro-history. Enjoyable indeed, but it could have been so much more.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 12
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