

His Chinese advisers told him to strike elite French forces fast and hard, but Giap changed plans at the last minute and ordered his jungle troops, clad in sandals made of old car tires, to besiege the French army. Vo Nguyen Giap is best remembered for leading Vietnamese forces to victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. His plan was to establish a base in the middle of Viet Minh territory and use it as bait to draw the enemy out from their cowardly mountain positions and defeat them with superior Western military tactics. In 1953, the French General Henri Navarre was made commander of the French forces in Indochina and given mission of figuring out a face-saving way to get the French out of Vietnam. The government of Laos was under the control of the French though the Viet Minh had successfully infiltrated much of Laos. Situated in a narrow valley among the jungle hills, Dien Bien Phu was a town in the northwest highlands Vietnam with an isolated air base built and used by the Japanese in World War Two. A great inspiration to the nations of the Third World, the battle at Dien Bien Phu showed that a determined peasant army could bring a major colonial power to its knees. In late 1953, the French established a stronghold here, manned by 13,000 Vietnamese and North African colonial troops as well as the French Army’s top troops and its elite Foreign Legion-all of which were routed by the Viet Minh, sending the French packing from Southeast Asia. Dien Bien Phu, a garrison set up 350 kilometers from Hanoi in a remote valley near Laos border, was the site of one of the most important battles of the 20th century.
