How We Won the War [Paperback]

Vo Nguyen Giap (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0916894010 | ISBN-13: 978-0916894016 | Publication Date: October 1976 | Edition: 1ST

Vietnam's top military strategist tells the secrets of their victory in May 1975. Published on the first anniversary of the Vietnamese victory over the most powerful nation on Earth, this book is now in it's eighth printing. It has been used as a text by professors at 30 colleges and universities.

Editorial Reviews

Review

. . . should be studied by every left-activist ... to learn to apply the same kind of creative revolutionary and military art -- Sanity Now! June 1977

Behind its jargon, this little book by the winning team in Vietnam gives some beginning clues. -- RAIN, March 1978

About the Author

The author has described the founding of the Vietnam People's Army on December 22, 1944, in these terms: "We forgot that we were only 34 human beings equipped with rudimentary weapons. We imagined ourselves to be an army of steel, not to be defeated by any force, ready to destroy the enemy." For more than 30 years, General Giap was the key organizer of the Vietnamese armed forces and its main strategic thinker. At the time he wrote these reflections on the War with the U. S., he was a member of the political bureau of the Vietnam Workers' Party and vice-premier and minister of defense of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Recon Pubns; 1ST edition (October 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0916894010
• ISBN-13: 978-0916894016
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #303,694 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars General strategies, few specifics, in the 1975 campaign, March 20, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: How We Won the War (Paperback)

Generals Dung and Giap, the two great military strategists of North Vietnam, describe the methods they used in the Ho Chi Minh Campaign. This was the 1975 offensive that culminated in the fall of Saigon and ended the Vietnam War.

Written in Party Speak, this short volume is a lengthy read. Buried within the patriotic prose are the important strategic decisions that allowed the communists to complete in five months what they originally planned to accomplish in two years. Credit for these decisions - blanketing all geographic areas of the South, utilizing the regular army along with local insurgents, establishing good roads for rapid deployment of regular troops, maintaining flexibility and rapidly following up on enemy errors - is always given to the Party. There is no personalization either of friend or foe. The United States is named "the U.S." throughout the essay, and the South Vietnamese army and government institutions are called "the enemy" or "the puppet."

The objective of this book was the description, in broad terms, of the strategies employed by North Vietnam in 1975 well after withdrawal of U.S. troops. If you are looking for details in tactics employed throughout the campaign, you will not find them here. Nor is this the book in which Gen. Giap supposedly stated that groups such at the Vietnam Veterans Against the War gave the North the resolve to carry on. This book is for the reader already familiar with the course of the war after the Paris Agreement, who is interested in hearing in the words of the victors how they envisioned the means of bringing down the South Vietnamese government.

24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Minimal Value as a Curiosity Only, June 24, 2005

By 

Mike (San Antonio, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How We Won the War (Paperback)

I have read General Giap's work both in the original Vietnamese and in English. There is little to no valuable insight contained within the political dogma and Party rhetoric that fills this puffed-up praise of General Giap. The reader should keep in mind this work was not originally published to discuss the strategy and tactics of the final push to capture the Republic of Vietnam. Instead, it was published to praise General Giap and portray him to the Vietnamese people as a hero of the Communist Party who outwitted and defeated the foreign invaders, thus placing Giap in a class with other heroes of Vietnamese history such as Le Loi and the 2 Trung Sisters. This is NOT a serious analysis of the final events of the Vietnam war, and offers little promise other than to satisfy a curiosity for how the Communist Party interprets history for the people of Vietnam.

23 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars More of a pep-talk than a serious military treatise, September 22, 2004

By 

Robert McDaniels - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How We Won the War (Paperback)

This book is mostly filled with self-congratulatory propaganda. It is written for an audience that is decidedly non-military, and it is therefore very light on substance that is useful to professional warfighters. Although it does have a few useful nuggets, Che Gueverra's book is much more enlightening if you want to learn about guerilla warfare. The title is even misleading. "How we Won the War" implies a discussion of the entire conlfict, but this book only deals with the final 1975 offensive. The two commentaries in the front are both by unabashed communist sympathizers who don't even understand the book well enough to see it for what it is, a 25 page pep-talk, and see it instead as a "how to" guide for revolutions everywhere, which it is not. It is on the Commandant's reading list, so every Marine should read it, but don't expect to get too much out of it. Of the 20-odd books I have read from the reading list, this is by far the most disappointing, and least useful.