"On May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power-and win. After nearly a decade of war, the country that had been forged in the crucible of the Indochina War had achieved a victory unseen in any other movement for national liberation. In The Road to Dien Bien Phu, historian Christopher Goscha explains the making of this extraordinary battle, telling the first comprehensive history of how Vietnam brought down the French in the Indochina War. Between September 1945, when Ho Chi Minh declared modern Vietnam's birth, and May 1954, Vietnam moved from a decentralized guerilla polity to a single-party militarized state. Goscha illuminates the making of the militarized nervous system that would realize the victory at Dien Bien Phu. But he is also attuned to how society mobilized behind war communism. This mobilization fortified the single-party state and would create modern Vietnam. This book radically changes how we understand both the first Vietnam War and the one the Americans would fight later. Shedding light on a larger arc of communist warfare and statecraft that runs from the former Soviet Union to the communist states of China and North Korea, Goscha tells a global story of how Vietnam came to be"--