Highly regarded as a military strategist,[1][2] Giáp led Vietnamese communist forces to victories in wars against Japan, France, South Vietnam, the United States, and China.

Born in Quảng Bình province to an affluent peasant family,[3] Giáp participated in anti-colonial political activity in his youth, and in 1931 joined the Communist Party of Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh.

[13] A highly-effective logistician,[12] he was the principal architect of the Ho Chi Minh trail, the logistical network between North and South Vietnam which is recognised as one of the 20th century's great feats of military engineering.

[15] Nevertheless, he was crucial to the transformation of the PAVN into "one of the largest, most formidable" mechanised and combined-arms fighting force capable of defeating the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in conventional warfare.

[17] Giáp's father and mother, Võ Quang Nghiêm and Nguyễn Thị Kiên,[18] worked the land, rented some to neighbours, and lived a relatively comfortable life.

His precocious intelligence meant that he was soon transferred to the district school and in 1924, at the age of thirteen, he left home to attend the Quốc Học (also known in English as the "National Academy"), a French-run lycée in Huế,[18] where he studied arithmetic, history, geography, literature, and natural science.

Although he denied it, Giáp was said by the historian Cecil B. Currey[24] to have also spent some time in the prestigious Hanoi Lycée Albert Sarraut, where the local elite was educated to serve the colonial regime.

He was said to have been in the same class as Phạm Văn Đồng, a future Prime Minister, who also denied studying at Albert Sarraut, and Bảo Đại, the last Emperor of Annam.

[31] He also made a particular study of Napoleon's generalship, and greatly admired T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, learning from it practical examples of how to apply minimum military force to maximum effect.

Giáp's wife went to her family home in Vinh, where she was arrested, sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment, and incarcerated in the Hoa Lo Central Prison in Hanoi.

In May 1941 the Eighth Congress of the Indochinese Communist Party decided to form the Viet Minh; Giáp was made responsible for establishing an intelligence network and organising political bases in the far north of the country.

Named the Tran Hung Dao Platoon after the great Vietnamese hero, it was armed with two revolvers, seventeen rifles, one light machine gun, and fourteen breech-loading flintlocks dating from the Russo-Japanese War.

On 9 March the Japanese removed the titular French regime and placed the emperor Bảo Đại at the head of a puppet state, the Empire of Vietnam.

[44] Unbeknownst to the Việt Minh, President Harry S. Truman, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Premier Joseph Stalin had already decided the future of postwar Vietnam at a summit meeting at Potsdam.

Ho Chi Minh and Võ Nguyên Giáp pursued lengthy negotiations with the French, seeking to avoid an all-out war to cement their independence.

Local fighting broke out repeatedly and on 27 November, Ho's government, concluding that it could not hold Hanoi against the French, retreated up into the northern hills where it had been based two years previously.

Võ Nguyên Giáp first saw real fighting at Nha Trang,[56] when he traveled to south-central Vietnam in January–February 1946, to convey the determination of leaders in Hanoi to resist the French.

[57] However, after the Chinese communists reached the northern border of Vietnam in 1949 and the Vietnamese destruction of French posts there, the conflict turned into a conventional war between two armies equipped with modern weapons supplied by the United States and the Soviet Union.

It was called the "dirty war" (la sale guerre) by supporters of the Left in France and intellectuals (including Jean-Paul Sartre) during the Henri Martin affair in 1950.

In December 1953, French military commander General Henri Navarre set up a defensive complex at Ðiện Biên Phủ in the Mường Thanh Valley, disrupting Việt Minh supply lines passing through Laos.

He surmised that in an attempt to reestablish the route, Giáp would be forced to organize a mass attack on Ðiện Biên Phủ, thus fighting a conventional battle, in which Navarre could expect to have the advantage.

Defying standard military practice, he had his twenty-four 105 mm howitzers placed on the forward slopes of the hills around Dien Bien Phu, in deep, mostly hand-dug emplacements protecting them from French aircraft and counter-battery fire.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declined, claiming that he wanted to wait for the outcome of the peace negotiations taking place in Geneva, before becoming involved in escalating the war.

The Party Plenum in 1957 ordered changes to the structure of their units and Giáp was put in charge of implementing them and building their strength to form a solid basis for an insurrection in the South.

[70] The 1959 Plenum decided that the time for escalating the armed struggle in the South was right and in July that year Giáp ordered the opening up of the Ho Chi Minh trail to improve supply lines to Viet Cong units.

[72] The best evidence suggests that when it became obvious that Lê Duẩn and Văn Tiến Dũng were going to conduct it anyway, he left Vietnam for medical treatment in Hungary and did not return until after the offensive had begun.

[73] Although their attempt to spark a general uprising against the southern government failed disastrously, it was a significant political victory through convincing American politicians and the public that their commitment to South Vietnam could not be open-ended.

[75] In an effort to put pressure on both North and South Vietnam during the negotiations, President Nixon ordered a series of air raids on Hanoi and Haiphong, codenamed Operation Linebacker II.

"[87] Compared to other North Vietnamese leaders who favored an all-out quick offensive in the South to bring victory in a short period like Lê Duẩn, Giáp was relatively cautious, and he believed in a more protracted military struggle, which would not be as costly in manpower.

[90] On 4 October 2013, the Communist Party of Vietnam and government officials announced that Võ Nguyên Giáp had died, aged 102, at 18:09 local time, at Central Military Hospital 108 in Hanoi.