Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. xi, 568 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper; US$35.00, cloth; US$28.00, ebook. ISBN 9780691228648.
A well-known scholar of Vietnam, Christopher Goscha’s latest book, The Road to Dien Bien Phu, is a tour de force dealing with the lead-up to the decisive battle of Điện Biên Phủ. Broad and ambitious in scope, the book focuses on the challenges faced by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to survive in the early phases of the First Indochina War, followed by the huge effort it took to face down and defeat French colonialism in a major set-piece battle. Goscha proves to be up to the task of writing a book of this monumental scope.
The Road to Dien Bien Phu revolves around two interlinked arguments. First, Goscha argues that there was a long phase during the Indochina War in which the DRV and the French-aligned Associated State of Vietnam constituted “archipelagic states”—that is, neither state truly controlled a single continuous swath of territory over which they held uncontested sovereignty. Instead, they were composed of discontinuous “islands” (which oftentimes featured large amounts of autonomy) between which were significant amounts of contested spaces in which sovereignty might be shared or switched each day/night cycle. Much of Goscha’s focus is on the DRV’s archipelagic state and how, despite its fragmentation, it could be held together not only by a groundswell of nationalism, but by modern technologies such as radio and more archaic methods such as the courier. These fragments could be supplied by the village economy and a cottage industry of armaments, as its fighting forces were for the most part constituted by smaller, local guerrilla forces. This archipelagic state, while unable to overthrow French colonialism, was able to do just enough to still be a growing concern by the time Mao Zedong’s forces in mainland China defeated Jiang Jieshi’s and started to provide massive amounts of military aid to the DRV.
The second argument is that this archipelagic state evolved into a single-party state through the implementation of “Vietnamese War Communism,” which enabled it to build the bureaucratic and logistical infrastructure to make the most of the aid delivered by the People’s Republic of China. According to Goscha, the adoption (and adaptation) of methods used previously during the Russian and Chinese revolutions were key elements that allowed the DRV to draft very large amounts of men—and huge amounts of civilians—to field and supply a large conventional army with the capability to defeat the French in a set-piece battle like Điện Biên Phủ. These forces enabled the DRV to link up the islands of the archipelagic state into a more contiguous territorial formation (except in the south) and expand its reach deep into the highlands. Furthermore, the strengthening of the state necessary for the expansion of its military also gave the communists the tools they needed to dispense with their earlier dependence on a coalition effort alongside noncommunist Vietnamese nationalists. The larger numbers of cadres produced by state institutions and processes were able to capture the state bureaucracy and eventually push through radical policies, particularly land reform, precisely when the battle of Điện Bien Phủ was being fought. The build-up of military power and the formation of a single-party communist state were co-constitutive processes, Goscha argues.
Goscha makes a good case for his main arguments, backed up with an impressive array of sources in French and Vietnamese. Of course, working with archival sources in Vietnamese and French is a given in a book such as this one, but Goscha’s engagement with scholarship written in these languages (even including MA theses!) is especially praiseworthy. In a certain way, Goscha’s engagement with scholarship in several languages is reminiscent of the DRV’s multilingual corps of “Asia hands” who successfully wove alliances in neighbouring countries to procure supplies, weapons, and expertise for the war effort. The result is a nuanced work with a great amount of texture that gives the reader much detail on multiple aspects of the war, such as the building of the DRV military, the flow of supplies from abroad (the dependence on trade with the French-sponsored Associated State of Vietnam is particularly interesting), the role of cities in the DRV war effort, the formation of security services, the economy and logistics behind the war effort (as well as the economic warfare by both sides), the mass mobilization of humanpower and resources, and how this all came together at the decisive battle at Điện Biên Phủ.
One of the most interesting parts of the book may be Goscha’s focus on the dynamics of Vietnamese empire and state-building among its neighbours in Indochina. As pointed out by Goscha, Vietnamese communist construction of their own “associated states” in Laos and Cambodia to counterbalance those created by the French became a taboo topic due to the later emergence of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (347–348). Goscha deals with how the DRV tackled the troublesome matter of trying to overthrow French colonialism in Indochina by setting up allied governments among its Indochinese neighbours, all while trying not to become over-reliant on ethnic Vietnamese administrators and officers (whose presence in Laos and Cambodia was precisely the result of the French colonialism they were trying to overthrow) who might alienate the very Laotians and Cambodians they were trying to woo to their camp. This chapter sheds new light on the complex interactions between the different communities that the French had tried to weld together into a federated Indochina, and the continuing frictions between them, even several decades after the war.
Overall, The Road to Dien Bien Phu is a thorough, enlightening piece of scholarship. As an argument-driven text with meticulous archival work and engagement with French- and Vietnamese-language scholarship, it will hold the interest of Vietnam experts. As a single-volume text on the First Indochina War, it may appeal to non-Vietnam specialists who seek a non-Western-centric overview of the war. While it is a sizable book, clocking in at over 500 pages, university instructors may still find that a careful selection of chapters could be of use for undergraduate courses too.
Jorge Bayona
El Colegio de México, Mexico City