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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: 27841
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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
 Good History but still need a definitive work May 9, 2010
James P. Patuto (Wayne, NJ)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an excellent piece of history, Well written , exciting, so why three stars? The book's battle scenes deal almost exclusively from the recollections of French Officers. Many of the French "grunts" were brown skin colonials-Morrocans, Algerians, Sengalese or from Vietnam. What was it like for these soldiers to fight against other colonials trying to free themselves from French rule. And what of the VietMihn troops. While the French describe their admittedly brave exploits defending the Hell Hole of a base, in graphic detail, was there no descriptions left by any Vietnamese soldier who faced tanks, napalm , bombs, mines and barbed wire as well as mounted quad machine guns firing thousands of rounds per minute and charged en mass into this, for what Communism, Nationalism, freedom?? As good as the book is these questions remain unanswered. I hope there is a historian who will finally look at this battle from all sides. Even in this post colonial, post Cold War world this would be instructive for all.
 Really good on the politics, adequate on the battle May 7, 2010
William Pilon (Roswell, GA United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This was a very nice history of Dien Bien Phu. It starts with a brief overview of Vietnam during WWII, from the Japanese coercion of basing rights from the Vichy colonial administration, through their outright seizure of the colony, to Ho Chi Minh's resistance to the Japanese and his post war efforts to gain American recognition.
This is followed by a very concise survey of the post WWII French attempts to regain their former colony. By sketching out the chronology of the French involvement, Morgan provides the context for Navarre's decision to attempt to recreate the French success at Na San by creating another "air land base" to interdict Viet Minh supply lines and prevent their invasion of Laos. The book intersperses a basically "battalion level" account of the operations with the political machinations going on behind the scene. Both stories are told chronologically, with a chapter on the military operations, followed by a chapter on the politics.
Morgan provides a decent, but not exhaustive, level of detail on the military operations. But where the book really shines is in the political realm. It gives a very detailed, sometimes day by day, account of the political maneuverings involving the US, Britain and France, with only a slightly less detailed look at what was going on politically with the Viet Minh leadership and the Peoples Republic of China. Overlaying all the political intrigues is the prospect of the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina which, in some measure motivated both Giap's and Navarre's military operations in the Winter 1953 and Spring 0f 1954.
The book is very well written and engaging. While I don't recommend it for the coverage of the actual battle, which was done better by Fall's Hell In a Very Small Place, Roy's Battle of Dien Bein Phu and perhaps Windrow's The Last Valley (which I `m currently in the middle of and enjoying immensely), I found it invaluable for its coverage of the politics which is sadly lacking in both Fall's and Roy's books.
 HORRIBLE... May 7, 2010
NOTGONNAPAY!!! (USA)
2 out of 19 found this review helpful
$17.33 for the Kindle Edition of this book is OUTRAGEOUS!!!! What are publishers charging so much for? They're not using ink...they're not using paper...there are no man hours involved...it's greed. What happened to the promised $9.99 Kindle books? Amazon, you can't do anything about this?? I realize not every book can be $9.99, but there's a growing trend of e-books being priced higher and higher. You roped me into buying a Kindle with tales of $9.99, now you're raising prices. Classic bait and switch...shame on you and shame on the publishers.
 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
Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu May 2, 2010
Terry A. Estes (SHELBURNE FALLS, MA, US)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Good overview of the entire period in Asia and the political machinations of the big four with China entering the scene at the end. Lot's of the backstage manuevering that I had not read about. The battle itself is a small part in the middle of all this, but well summarized. Bernard Fall and others have covered the actual battle much better but this book is better on the political side than anything I have read.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 12
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