The Bloody History Of Guerrilla Warfare

For thousands of years, the fight for land, territory and resources has dominated the history books, as well as those commanders who fought them. But one century stands out as the bloodiest. A period full of conflicts, wars and revolutions. The 20th century. A century which saw momentous military advances in both technology and armaments. In the air, out at sea, and on the field of battle. A century that led to a new generation of leaders, whose ideas, manoeuvres and strategies would earn them their place in history as military masterminds. To surprise the enemy. To attack and disappear without a trace. To harass, sabotage, ambush. Guerrilla warfare is a unique type of confrontation. Guerrilla comes from the Spanish for small war and highlights the David and Goliath conflict between opposing sides. Guerrilla warfare is where conflict takes place by an army who is fighting in dispersed, hidden operations or even by civilian groups who have armed themselves to fight against an enemy. In guerrilla warfare, the objective is to weaken the opponent through sustained attack or pressure until they are defeated. Guerrilla warfare will try to use more devious hit and run, ambushing techniques to throw a larger enemy or a better equipped enemy off guard. Throughout the 20th century, the majority of guerrilla warfare centred around the confrontation between right and left ideologies as communists tried to overthrow capitalists. Guerrilla warfare is linked to communism because guerrilla warfare is the fight of the weak against the strong. Four great communist leaders made guerrilla warfare a systematic and effective form of struggle, becoming symbols of success. All four earned their place among the great military masterminds of history. In October 1911, a military coup by the Chinese Nationalist Party called the Kuomintang or KMT establishes the Republic of China and overthrows the Qing dynasty that had ruled China for more than 200 years. China, prior to its establishment of the Republic of China, is incredibly rural. I mean, there are obviously growing urban areas, but its industrialization has not reached any kind of significant maturity. It's very much still a rural population. Its bulk of its population is still peasantry. But the lives of the Chinese people don't improve under the KMT. The country is in turmoil, beset by rampant poverty and inequality. Warlords start to rule in different regions. Wealth belongs only to a few. A large part of the population are going hungry, and the peasantry believe they have been forgotten by the Republic. In 1921, having seen the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, was formed and began organizing labor unions in the cities. Although initially welcomed into the fold by the nationalist government, eventually they turned against the communists, and the CCP was driven underground. However, there was one man who emerged from the ranks of the CCP to change the face of his country forever. His thinking would influence millions of people around the world and turn guerrilla warfare into an ideological weapon of proven success. Mao Zedong. Mao was born in the south-central Chinese province of Hunan on December the 26th, 1893. Despite being the son of peasants, he went to school where he loved learning about the great warrior emperors of the Chinese past, but also Napoleon I and George Washington. However, at the age of 13, he was forced to finish his studies to work on his family's farm. As soon as he could, with the thirst for knowledge that would characterize him for the rest of his life, Mao traveled to Beijing and worked as an assistant librarian. Inspired by the work of the German philosopher Karl Marx and the Russian visionary Vladimir Lenin, Mao became one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party. In the early 1920s, nationalists and communists coexisted peacefully. But that all changed once a new Chinese leader came to power, Chiang Kai-shek, who set about radicalizing the Kuomintang government. Kai-shek was a deeply conservative nationalist who fiercely opposed communist ideals. Chiang Kai-shek rules very autocratically, but what that really does is it makes it fertile ground for any kind of revolution. The CCP assumed a staunch opposition against the government. Chiang Kai-shek was determined to put an end to the threat. And in 1927, the Chinese civil war exploded. Outgunned, the communists' Red Army were forced to retreat to the countryside to continue the fight. In the late 20s, you start to see the creation of these base areas. And the idea being that through guerrilla warfare, you slowly build up these geographic areas of rural support that give you people, that give you material and give you a place to sort of incubate your forces and make them stronger. So eventually, you can use them to take cities later. And Mao was very big on this approach. Chiang Kai-shek launched a fierce offensive against the communist settlements. But Mao's tactics managed to keep them at bay. Mao's sort of defensively oriented tactics of like, let the enemy come into the area and then ambush them, or bite-sized pieces of the KMT through sort of mobile, regular operations, is very effective. But others in the party disagree with him. They say, look, this is too damaging to the rural populations. We need to go on the offensive to kind of burnish our reputation. And those fail. Having ignored Mao's strategy, the communists were now exposed. The nationalists then launched their fifth encirclement campaign. By October 1934, the communists were in disarray and forced to retreat from their settlements in southern and central China, trekking more than 10,000 kilometers to north-central China. This became known as the Long March. The grueling journey took them more than a year. Besieged by enemy attacks, they crossed rivers, swampy grassland, and steep mountain roads. The strategy was, we win by not losing, right? The Red Army cannot be defeated unless it is completely annihilated. And it's just about getting them up into north-central China, a bit away from the main power bases of the KMT. And ultimately, they get to Shanxi province, and that's where Mao kind of sets up shop. Of the more than 86,000 who began the journey, only about 20,000 survived. But the Long March enabled the CCP to spread the seed of communism wherever they passed. But what happened next would change the course of Mao's life significantly. In 1937, Japan invaded China, initiating the Second Sino-Japanese War. Although fierce opponents, the nationalists and communists put their differences aside and formed the United Front. While the Kuomintang army, larger and better armed, directly confronted the Japanese, behind enemy lines, the communists carried out guerrilla operations to weaken them. With this strategy, Mao was also looking to preserve the communists' strength, as he had another objective in mind. Let the nationalists fight it out with the Japanese. Let the nationalists lose men and equipment and get eroded by that fight. So that way, when the war is over and Japan has been expelled, and the civil war gets back on, the CCP is in a better position to win the civil war. From 1941, the Japanese withdrew a large number of troops from China to confront the Americans in the Pacific War. This strengthened the position of the United Front, and above all, it favoured the communists. Between 1940 and 1945, they've had a lot of time to slowly rebuild their bases of support in the countryside in North China. In August 1945, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese Empire surrendered to the Allies, ending World War II. Soon after, in September, Japan also announced its surrender to China, ending the Sino-Japanese War. Now in China, you have a void that both the Chinese nationalists and the Chinese communists hope to fill. The civil war resumed. Chiang Kai-shek launched an offensive against his old foe, and Mao responded with his much stronger People's Liberation Army, the PLA. For the next few years, the communists took control of many parts of China, including Manchuria, Nanjing, Shanghai and Canton. The nationalist losses are significant enough where they never really recover. And after that moment, momentum is on the communist side, and they are able to use their bigger numbers and their reinvigorated strength and just slowly and steadily eliminate the rest of the areas of KMT resistance until the KMT flees to Taiwan. In Beijing on October 1st, 1949, Mao proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China. Mao had changed the destiny of his country, which led to him being named the Great Helmsman. His brilliant strategy against the nationalists, his intelligence in confronting the Japanese, and his intuition of waiting for the right moment to launch the final offensive that would end up expelling the KMT from China have kept his legacy alive long after his death on September 9th, 1976. Mao is arguably that real visionary who takes both Marxist philosophy, Leninist revolutionary philosophy, and then understands the Chinese context. He's the one who really does apply them to a peasantry. And it's Mao who says, I can still show them that their oppression really is not a natural order, but it is something that can be fought against and can even be revolutionized, and you can succeed against that millennia of oppression. The way that he connected the military aspects of all this to the sort of political revolutionary aspects of it was very unique. This blending of the political and revolutionary objectives with the military objectives was very important. Mao has made a considerable contribution to guerrilla warfare globally. You can see Maoist groups in places like Afghanistan. They're still active in countries like India. Mao is still this uniting figure around the world. Mao turned guerrilla warfare into an ideological tool. His theoretical and practical contributions to this type of tactic undoubtedly place him among the great military masterminds of the 20th century. On March 10th, 1952, on the Caribbean island of Cuba, the population awake to the news that Fulgencio Batista, a former president and a candidate with little hope of victory in an upcoming presidential election, has taken over the government by force. He quickly establishes a military dictatorship. He abolished political parties. He abolished the constitution of 1940, and he threw his opponents in jail. Estimates are that as many as 20,000 people were killed by Batista's police and security forces. Steadily, an uprising begins, with citizens resorting to arms. By the following year, resistance has gained momentum, and with approximately 150 fighters, a plan is hatched by their leader, Fidel Castro. His plan? To take the main provincial garrison of Batista's armed forces, the Moncada Barracks, assume control of the adjacent Palace of Justice, and call for a massive revolt in the country. But outnumbered and facing superior firepower, the rebels stood no chance. Almost everyone was either killed or captured. Some were killed after they were captured, and the rest were put on trial. However, the assault on the Moncada Barracks would be the seed of the armed struggle in Cuba. And although Fidel Castro landed in jail, almost six years later, he would become the leader of Cuba. Son of a Spanish landowner, Fidel Castro Ruz was born in the small village of Biran, located in the south of Cuba, on August the 13th, 1926. Fidel was born out of wedlock. His mother was a maid, and his father didn't marry her, and so had several children out of wedlock, and I think that played some degree of impact on sort of his growing up, and this sort of impact on him psychologically. Fidel Castro grew up in a lower middle class rural area. He saw firsthand the poverty of the rural areas in Cuba. He was smart. He went to Catholic high school and then on to the University of Havana, where he was a law student. Passionate about politics throughout his time as a student, Fidel received his doctorate in law from the University of Havana in 1950, and thereafter became committed to pursuing his political ambitions. Fidel became involved in the revolution as a result of Batista taking power and disrupting his, Fidel's, run for Congress. After the defeat of the Moncada barracks in 1953, Castro and his brother Raul were sentenced to prison. But in 1955, Batista released a lot of political prisoners in an amnesty, and Fidel and Raul went to Mexico to organize a guerrilla army. That's where they met Che Guevara. Che Guevara was an Argentinian theoretician and tactician of guerrilla warfare, whose ideal was to bring about socialism by means of a worldwide revolution. In honor of the anniversary of the attempted assault on the Moncada barracks, Castro founded the 26th of July movement in Mexico, which attracted many supporters, including Che Guevara. Fidel was just very passionate. He loved to fight. At the same time, he was quite ruthless, and he realized the importance of violence as a means of achieving a particular outcome. In the early morning of November the 25th, 1956, 82 revolutionaries set sail for Cuba to instigate the fight against the Batista regime. A week later, they landed on the southern coast of Cuba. But yet again, Castro would find himself outgunned, and after a confrontation with Batista's forces, only 12 men managed to escape into the Sierra Maestra mountain range, including Fidel himself, his brother Raul, and Guevara. Castro, with so few men, had little choice but to start a guerrilla campaign against Batista in the hope that others would join him. It was his strategy to divide up the guerrilla army when it became stronger and deploy some columns to other parts of the country to spread the insurrection across the island. It was his strategy to time the descent from the mountains into the plains to really engage Batista's army in what at the end was more of a conventional kind of conflict with guerrilla units directly engaging with Batista's army, and Batista's army generally melting away in the face of the guerrilla advance. He was incredibly agile, he learned very quickly, and I think he played an important role in the evolution of military strategy, particularly the embracing of guerrilla warfare tactics. From the Sierra Maestra, the revolutionaries started their guerrilla strategy and were able to recruit many more to the fight. And that's where Fidel Castro was able, over the course of two years, to build a force from just around a dozen to nearly 10,000. They attacked the outposts of Batista's army and captured weapons, captured some of the soldiers. Then gradually as they grew, they began to branch out and attack Batista's military patrols. There's no doubt that the ability to have decisive victories against a conventional military force was amazing, not just for the morale of the fighters, but also for the war that was being waged in sort of the public domain. Castro would also lead by example. So he was the one that set strategy. He was out there at the head of the column fighting as well, but his most important role was the strategic one. What to do in what circumstance, what positions to take, what positions to retreat from, when to send other columns to other parts of the country, when to come down out of the mountains. After two years of fighting, the Batista government began a major offensive against the revolutionaries in May 1958. But Castro, now a master in guerrilla warfare, and with many more rebels supporting the cause, managed to put up an impressive resistance. The guerrillas were able to attack Batista's units one by one. And the defeat of that summer offensive really is the beginning of the end for the Batista regime, because at that point, his army begins to crumble. The guerrillas come down out of the mountains and begin to attack towns and cities. In December, Castro decided to begin the final offensive to overthrow the dictator. Fidel's strategy involved two major military campaigns. The western offensive, commanded by Che Guevara, which took action in Camagüey, Las Villas, Matanzas and Havana. And the eastern attack, commanded by his brother, Raúl Castro, concentrated on Mayari, Guantánamo, San Luis and Santiago de Cuba. But for Castro, there was one element that could derail his entire revolution. Before he launched the offensive, he had to make sure he had the support from the majority of the Cuban people. If you can't win the hearts and minds of the people in the land that you're occupying, you're never going to win on the battlefield. One of the things that's most notable about Fidel is his ability to really win public appeal. Batista's army was so demoralized at that point that people defected in large numbers. The soldiers defected. The units melted away. Some of them surrendered. Some of them even went over to the revolutionary forces. And so on New Year's Eve, Batista and his closest cronies got on a plane and left the country. Fidel successfully entered Santiago de Cuba, the capital of Cuba's southeast province, on January 1st, 1959. The Cuban Revolution had triumphed and Castro assumed the reins of the country. Fidel Castro is always very confident in his own abilities. And I think that comes in part from having won a revolution, having triumphed over extraordinary odds to actually succeed in coming to power. And then to actually survive in the face of decades of hostility on the part of the United States. Fidel Castro went on to become the longest-serving political leader of the 20th century, remaining at the helm of the Cuban government for 57 years. In 2006, he had left the island's power in the hands of his brother, Raul, and 10 years later, at the age of 90, he died on November 26th, 2016. During World War II, in what is now Serbia, another revolutionary would successfully organize a guerrilla war that would lead him to the presidency of his country, a man whom everyone knew as Tito. At the time of the Second World War, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, consisting of what is now Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a monarchy under the rule of Prince Paul. By 1941, Hitler's troops occupy a large part of Europe and are preparing to carry out an invasion of Greece. Yugoslavia was neutral when the Second World War began, but in the end, Hitler needed Yugoslav access in order to be able to invade Greece. And so, the Prince region then signed a deal with Hitler. The public weren't happy with the decision, and demonstrators gathered on the streets of Yugoslav's capital, Belgrade, shouting, better the grave than a slave, better a war than the pact. Two days later, a group of Yugoslav Royal Air Force officers seized control of the government in a military coup. When the Prince was overthrown, and there was a provincial government put in power. Hitler, angered by the coup, ordered that Yugoslavia be crushed without delay. The bombing of Belgrade began on April the 6th, 1941, unleashing an offensive so brutal that 11 days later, the Yugoslav army surrenders, and the Axis forces divide Yugoslavia. One Yugoslav sees an opportunity amongst the chaos. A leader who would command the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia until his death. Josip Broz, better known as Tito. Josip Broz was born northwest of Zagreb on May the 7th, 1892, into a large peasant family with a Croatian father and a Slovenian mother. But he had to abandon his studies to start work and help support his family. As a poor boy growing up in rural surroundings, one of the draws he had was to shine uniforms and good dress. He remembers one of his distant family members arriving in military uniform and all the young kids being mesmerized by it. Tito did military service in a Croatian regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army and participated in the First World War as a sergeant. He was wounded and captured by the Russians on the Russian front and would then spend several years in Russia. And while he was a prisoner, he became convinced of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary cause and came back to Yugoslavia as a communist revolutionary bent on bringing communism to Yugoslavia. After his return to Yugoslavia in 1920, Tito joined the newly founded Communist Party of Yugoslavia, or CPY, which the monarchy declared illegal the next year. But jail and repression did not intimidate the revolutionary who assumed the name Tito in order to hide his identity and persevere with his underground party work. When war broke out in Yugoslavia in 1941, Tito was already the general secretary of the Communist Party. And after more than 20 years in hiding, the communists had become extremely well organized. On June the 22nd, 1941, when the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union began, Tito called on the Yugoslav people to unite against the Axis forces. An incredible task, as although Yugoslavia was one country, it was made up of different republics with differing ethnicities, ideologies and beliefs. Nevertheless, the response was overwhelming. And in only five days, the National Liberation Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, better known as the Partisans, was created under Tito's command. Tito went to Bosnia and organized the Partisans into units to start an effective guerrilla warfare throughout Yugoslavia. They used very successful guerrilla strategies. They went up to the mountains, they went to places where the Germans couldn't find them. They would do hit and run raids. And they specialized in that. The advantage that they had was that the German occupation force was not big enough to garrison the whole country. So they garrisoned the towns and the cities. But the rural areas were largely left to their own devices. And since Yugoslavia is in many parts a very mountainous and heavily wooded country, provided a lot of opportunities for the Partisans to hide and to strike into the towns and cities when they chose. Tito chose tactics which in many ways were similar to those of Mao. What he wanted to create was a mobile army that could go from one side of the country to the other and fight across Yugoslavia. However, Tito's guerrilla campaign, which had started as a slight irritation to the occupying forces, was now becoming a serious problem. And in January 1943, the Axis forces started an operation to encircle the Partisans. It looked like his luck was beginning to run out. Germans launched an attack on the highlands in Bosnia and Croatia. It was a massive surprise attack on areas controlled by the Partisans, which included Wehrmacht and SS troops, as well as Italian troops. And this was aimed to use overwhelming force to destroy and crush the Partisans. However, to avoid defeat, Tito retreated into the mountain ranges of Yugoslavia with his guerrilla army. Tito gave orders and sent out runners, emphasising that they must not try to hold ground, that they must melt away, they must give up ground, and they must reappear where least expected and attack the enemy's rear areas, communication lines, headquarters and so on. And this was effective. The Germans didn't have a target to punch at. Between 1943 and 1944, the Partisans made great advances. Tito had also called for further support from Stalin and the Soviet Red Army to help defeat the occupying Axis forces. Somewhere in Yugoslavia, the famous Partisans of Marshal Tito, who have staggered 19 fully equipped Nazi divisions. The spring of 1944, Tito was in control of much of Yugoslav territory. Parts of Serbia were still under the control of Germany. Tito relied in part on the Red Army to liberate Belgrade in 1944. He had come to an interstate agreement with Stalin that the Red Army would pass through Yugoslavia and liberate the country. The Belgrade Offensive began on September 14, 1944. The Partisans entered from the south, accompanied by some units from the Soviet Red Army, who also attacked from the north, completely encircling the capital. The conflict was fierce. After more than a month of heavy fighting, the last German stronghold retreated on October the 20th, ending the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. Marshal Joseph Tito, head of the Yugoslav government and chief of the liberation armies, welcomes the Russians to the capital. Much more than an army's triumph, however, this is a people's triumph. A people who, during four years of German brutality and terror, did not sit idly by and wait. Like their comrades in arms, they fought back in every way they knew, even under the invaders' heel. For a Balkan victory, their death to Yugoslav guerrilla fighters is a great and lasting one. Russia and the world will not forget. Tito would face a number of challenges in the early years after the war. The first one was keeping his country united. Tito's priority at the end of the Second World War was to keep the country together. And this is where the partisan war was such an asset to him, because really it was three things at once. It was a war of national liberation. It was a communist revolution. And it was the building of a nation. All those three things at the same time. On November the 29th, 1945, the People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was proclaimed. Although Tito led his communist government similar to the Russian system, his other great challenge was to keep the newly formed United Socialist Soviet Republic, the USSR, at arm's length. This caused tension between Tito and Stalin, and it's believed the Soviet leader tried on a number of occasions to have Tito assassinated. Tito's independence and foreign policy initiatives, which Stalin did not like, presented in many ways a challenge to Stalin's authority. So there was, in the middle of 1948, an open split between Yugoslavia and the rest of the Soviet bloc. Marshal Tito would remain in power for 35 years. When Tito died in 1980, his funeral resembled a major international gathering of the United Nations, where a large number of heads of state gathered, including Queen Elizabeth, but also Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Tito managed to lead the most successful European resistance movement of World War II. Moreover, he was able to merge his political ideals with the unification of a nation plagued by multi-ethnic conflicts. With his military strategy, he ensured the future of a communist country independent of Moscow's grasp. Tito's legacy as a military leader, as a guerrilla leader, is assured. He conducted a very effective guerrilla war against the Nazis, which was successful. And in orthodox communist fashion, that combined a revolution with an insurgency and resulted in a communist Yugoslavia. So on that basis, he could hardly have been more successful. In Southeast Asia, another country was also struggling to unify its territory under one single communist government. Besieged by great superpowers, first the French and then the Americans, after decades of armed clashes, Vietnam finally managed to unify thanks to the strategy of a man who never had any formal military training, Vo Nguyen Giang. By 1926, composed of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, Indochina is a French colony. For decades, especially in the 20th century, with the rise of nationalism around the time of World War I, you had Indochinese, as they were called, increasingly asserting rights relative to the French. And the Indochinese communists who gained inspiration and some financial support from the communists based in the Soviet Union increasingly tried to lead this nationalist resistance. The communists were led by a former schoolmaster, Ho Chi Minh. They defied French authority, and in 1939, the Communist Party of Indochina, or ICP, was declared illegal, brutally oppressed, and from fear of being assassinated, many of its militants went into exile. Vo Nguyen Giang had attended the same high school as Ho Chi Minh and from then on was committed to the communist cause. When the French began their brutal persecution of the Vietnamese militants, Giap managed to escape to China, but his wife and sister-in-law were captured by the authorities. His sister-in-law was executed by guillotine, and his wife died after three years in prison. Marked for life, the revolution and Vietnam's independence would become a personal challenge for Giap. He would come to be seen as a hero by communists around the world, inspired by a man who had defeated two great superpowers with a popular movement. Vo Nguyen Giap was born into a peasant family in Quang Minh province in north-central Vietnam on August the 25th, 1911. His father passed his anti-colonialist sentiment onto his son from an early age. Giap also became enthralled by the work of T.E. Lawrence and Napoleon Bonaparte, whose work had a deep influence on his inspiration for military strategy. It should be said that Giap was influenced a lot by T.E. Lawrence, by Lawrence of Arabia. He used to say he carried around the seven pillars of wisdom, which was Lawrence's famous book, in his knapsack. In the late 1930s, inspired by Ho Chi Minh, Giap joined the ICP, and by 1937, after graduating in law in Hanoi, began teaching history in high school. A year later, he married Minh Thai, also a communist militant. Giap's wife would die in a French imperial prison in the early 1940s, while he was exiled in China due to the French persecution of communists. In 1939, World War II broke out, and it would have a profound effect on Indochina. First, you had the German defeat of the French, which weakened France's hold on French Indochina. The Japanese, as a member of the Axis with Germany and Italy, came in to assert privileges in terms of resources they needed from Indochina. And then in March 1945, directly took over rule of French Indochina from the French. Giap returned to Vietnam and joined the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh, founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1941 with the support of Vietnamese nationalist groups also fighting for their country's independence. After its devastating defeat in World War II, the Japanese left Vietnam in August 1945. Ho Chi Minh, aided by Minh Giap, his military commander, rushed to Hanoi and declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. However, after the Second World War, France reclaimed control of Indochina. On December 19th, 1946, the First Indochina War broke out. For eight years, the French tried unsuccessfully to put an end to the Viet Minh, led by Giap and Ho Chi Minh. The guerrilla warfare the group was pursuing was putting up a strong resistance. The French were stronger in the south than they were in the north. They tried to use local forces to do the fight, but they didn't have quite the same loyalty. Over the course of the war, the Viet Minh grew stronger, gained widespread popular support, and achieved significant victories under the orders of its commander-in-chief, General Giap. Giap had other advantages. He could speak some of the languages of ethnic minority groups of Indochina and understood the cultures and customs of different people, which made it easier to persuade them to join the revolutionary forces. He, for the most part, used guerrilla warfare. The French might control the cities or the towns or checkpoints in the daytime, but at night, the countryside would belong to the guerrillas. By the end of 1953, the French were losing more and more territory. They decided to concentrate their forces in Dien Bien Phu, a city near the border with Laos. The French were desperate to tempt Giap out of guerrilla warfare and organize the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in northwestern, northern Vietnam. And Giap decided to play the French's game and surrounded Dien Bien Phu, and that led to the siege of Dien Bien Phu. Giap shifted his strategy from quick fight, quick victory, to steady fight and advance. And managed to lock the French in their own base. There was no way in or out. The French could not even access their own supplies. Dien Bien Phu was intended to support offensive operations, but also potentially entice the communists to attack on the assumption that they wouldn't be able to overrun it. And this depended largely on the assumption that French artillery was going to be stronger than communist artillery did. They didn't expect communist artillery at all. But to the surprise of the French, Giap arrived with heavy weaponry, which had been provided by the Chinese. The Indochinese guerrillas haul massive amounts of artillery through dense, dense juggle and set up against Dien Bien Phu and lay siege to what the French thought was going to be an impregnable position. This confrontation went on for weeks. It was incredibly dramatic. There were attempts to airlift supplies to the forces, but increasingly Giap's forces closed in and the result was that Giap's forces were able to take over Dien Bien Phu and that basically shut the door on French colonialism. With the victory at Dien Bien Phu, Giap had defeated the first great power he'd come up against. His historic battle that demonstrated his military prowess. The French defeat in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu was sealed on May the 7th, 1954. The following day, talks on Indochina began at the Geneva Conference in Switzerland. There, the independence of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam was agreed upon. But given the ideological differences, Vietnam was split in two. The communist in the north and an American-backed government in the south. By July 1956, there were supposed to be elections to nationalize, to unify Vietnam under one government. However, with US support, the southern part of the country refused to take part in the elections. And of course, this all laid the groundwork for what would become, to Americans, the Vietnam War and to the Vietnamese, the American War or the Second Indochinese War. In North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh headed the communist government and Giap took over as commander-in-chief of the Vietnam People's Army. Tensions between north and south increased. However, with support from Giap's forces in the north, communist supporters in the south formed a resistance group called the National Liberation Front, widely known as the Viet Cong. It took a while before the communists organized themselves in the south and gradually a guerrilla campaign began. And in the early 60s, it was starting to get quite serious. On March the 8th, 1965, US President Lyndon Johnson decided to become more actively involved in the conflict between north and south Vietnam. He began sending US troops into the country. Over many years, we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence. And I intend to keep that promise. The North Vietnamese, although outgunned in terms of military technology, turned out to be incredibly effective at fighting non-traditional guerrilla warfare battles and also to be shockingly willing to take massive casualties because the US dropped more bombs on North Vietnam and on communist-controlled territories of South Vietnam and Laos, far more than all the bombs dropped on all the countries in World War II. And yet, the fight went on, the stalemate went on. By 1968, the Americans had more than half a million troops in Vietnam. However, they were never able to defeat the communists. GIAP's strategies had proved to be highly effective. He was pragmatic enough to recognize that in certain situations, the US had an advantage and therefore he preferred to rely on guerrilla attacks, ambushes, using intelligence effectively. GIAP was ready to wage warfare where the idea was to create mystery, suspicion, paranoia on the part of the American forces where they wouldn't even know where the enemy was. After more than five years of active US involvement in Vietnam, the idea that the war could not be won began to take hold in the White House. On January 27, 1973, in Paris, peace agreements were signed. South Vietnam, now without American support, failed to contain the communists. Ho Chi Minh's forces took Saigon in 1975 and a year later, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam reunifying the country was proclaimed. Vo Nguyen GIAP, nicknamed the Red Napoleon, was a military genius who masterfully developed both guerrilla warfare and more conventional war strategies. Through meticulous organization and logistical planning, GIAP had successfully defeated two major superpowers. His success against the French, which was apparent by 1954, really inspired other anti-colonial movements and uprisings to believe that it was not hopeless to fight the Europeans. GIAP was an extremely successful general and he's normally credited with taking the sort of people's army of the Vietnamese communists and turning it into quite a formidable force. Mao, Tito, Fidel and GIAP had all faced down armies more powerful than their own. You can compare it to a heavyweight boxer against a lightweight. The heavyweight boxer can punch these big blows, but that's only effective if they can hit the lightweight, whereas the lightweight can keep running around the wing and taking these smaller shots hitting every single time and in the end, they'll be effective and that's what guerrillas do. They can sustain it for longer and that's how they overcome their enemy. Against the odds, Mao, Tito, Fidel and GIAP managed to emerge victorious and create legacies that have lived and continue to live long after their death. Immortalized as communist icons, they have also earned their place in the history of warfare as military masterminds.