Latin American Media: General Vo Nguyen Giap - the conqueror of empires
(Baonghean.vn) - On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the glorious Dien Bien Phu Victory, military experts around the world today reaffirmed that General Vo Nguyen Giap of the Vietnam People's Army is one of the 10 most outstanding military strategists of all time.
Latin American news agency Prensa Latina reported that some military experts called General Vo Nguyen Giap "Red Napoleon". However, Prensa Latina said that this comparison is lame. Because Napoleon was the "conqueror", while General Vo Nguyen Giap was the "liberator". The General's resistance wars against Japanese, French and American imperialism were decisive for the independence of Indochina.
Prensa Latina commented that if President Ho Chi Minh was recognized by the world as a leader with outstanding political ideology, General Vo Nguyen Giap was an outstanding military strategist. The Dien Bien Phu campaign (lasting from March to May 1954) recorded General Vo Nguyen Giap's name in the contemporary military history.
In this campaign, instead of a short-term frontal attack with the motto "fight fast, solve fast", the Vietnamese army commanded by General Giap conducted scattered attacks on the fortified positions of the French army according to the tactic of "fight firmly, advance firmly, only attack when victory is certain". After 55 days of siege and the decision to capture the airport, the French army garrison fell on May 7, 1954 and the entire General Staff was captured by the Vietnamese army.
Prensa Latina believes that the Dien Bien Phu battle not only ended the 9-year resistance war against France, but in many aspects, it was also a solid theoretical and practical foundation for other battles of the Vietnamese army and people.
But more than that, Prensa Latina said, the battle of Dien Bien Phu proved to the colonies that an army "poorly armed, wearing wooden sandals, coming from rural areas living on farming, almost primitive, could defeat a superpower with a high-tech war industry". Moreover, in Dien Bien Phu, France also received support from other Western countries such as England and the United States.
Prensa Latina further assessed that, along with the victory in the war against France, the war against the US was another brilliant page in Vietnam's military history. And in that war, there was the dedication of the illustrious commander - General Vo Nguyen Giap. Prensa Latina said that in war there are winners and losers, but everyone acknowledges that General Vo Nguyen Giap was the "winner".
However, according to Prensa Latina, General Giap did not ask for any glory for himself, but reserved all glory for the nation.
"We must use small weapons against large weapons, outdated weapons against modern weapons. In the end, the human factor determines victory" - Prensa Latina quoted General Vo Nguyen Giap.
According to Prensa Latina, the ideals, dedication, spirit of sacrifice and simple lifestyle of the talented military commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, have inspired many generations of Vietnamese soldiers.
Moreover, this is also "irrefutable evidence" of the military's trust and respect for their general - the one who turned "the guerrilla army into a powerful military force".
Therefore, "it is not without reason that scholars studying the Dien Bien Phu campaign have said that defeating the Vietnamese Army is as impossible as removing blood from stone," commented Prensa Latina.
At the end of the article, Prensa Latina commented that General Vo Nguyen Giap is the "medicine that heals" all painful wounds, which are always deeply engraved in the memory of Vietnamese people.