Dien Bien Phu

by Anthony Tucker-Jones

ISBN: 9781526707987

Published: 2017

It is 25 years since the end of the Cold War, now a generation old. It began over 75 years ago, in 1944 - long before the last shots of the Second World War had echoed across the wastelands of Eastern Europe - with the brutal Greek Civil War. The battle lines are no longer drawn, but they linger on. In an era of mass-produced AK-47s and ICBMs, one such flashpoint was French Indochina. At the end of the Second World War France sought to reassert its military prestige, but instead suffered humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in French colonial Indochina. The First Indochina war became a textbook example of how not to conduct counter-insurgency warfare against nationalist guerrillas. Anthony Tucker-Jones guides the reader through this decisive conflict with a concise text and contemporary photographs, providing critical insight into the conduct of the war by both sides and its wider ramifications.