Overview

Struggling to reassert control over their Indochinese colonies after World War II, the French established a huge air-land base in the valley of Dien Bien Phu. But when the opposing Vietnamese People's Army (VPA) began massing its forces against the base in late 1953, French commanders seized the opportunity to draw their elusive enemy into a decisive set-piece battle. Defending a series of fortified positions which were reliant upon a single airstrip--and later, risky and inaccurate airdrops--for reinforcement and resupply, the French troops quickly discovered that they had underestimated their enemy. In fifty-six days of costly close-quarters fighting, the VPA slowly dislodged the French from one strongpoint after another by developing novel tactics and accomplishing incredible feats of engineering. Drawing upon Vietnamese-language sources never previously employed in Western accounts of the siege, Valley of the Shadow is a dramatic re-telling of the climactic battle of the First Indochina War, the conflict that saw the French expelled from their former colony and set the stage for the American War in Vietnam.

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Joe Barrett, an actor and Audie Award and Earphones Award-winning narrator, has appeared both on and off Broadway as well as in hundreds of radio and television commercials. Kevin Boylan teaches history at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his BA in history from Rutgers University, and his PhD from Temple University. From 1995 to 2005, he was employed by the Pentagon as a defense analyst for the U.S. Defense Department and the U.S. Army Staff. Dr. Boylan returned to academe in 2005, teaching first at the University of Maine, Augusta, and then at a variety of colleges and universities in Connecticut and Wisconsin before moving to Boston. In October 2014, his groundbreaking article on the topic of Viet Minh artillery at Dien Bien Phu was published in the Journal of Military History, and won the Society of Military History's Moncado Prize in 2015. He lives in Medford, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Luc Olivier earned his master's degree in geography at the CESA in the University of Tours, and served in the French Army as a second lieutenant and platoon commander. He also has an extensive background in IT consulting and is presently the managing director of a French-Hungarian IT company. He has designed a dozen commercial wargames-including two on Dien Bien Phu-which have been published in magazines including Vae Victis and Battles Magazine. He has also written and published many articles on historical military topics over the last twenty years. He lives in Paris, France.

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