listing and correcting his exaggerations and errors (pp.162–163). Morrison also points out the insularity of Irish revisionist debates, citing Ian McBride’s recent criticism of some historians of Irish history for failing to place their work within wider theoretical or com- parative frameworks (p.169). However, a weakness of Morrison’s book is that it too suffers from insularity. The extensive reflections in the last two chapters on the entrenched, sometimes personalised, disputes between historians of Ireland risk losing the interest of the military historian or general reader (especially those coming to the topic for the first time). A promising discussion of Alistair Thomson’s work on the ANZAC myth is not developed, neither is a brief reference to the killing of prisoners during the First World War (pp.170, 127). The reader does not learn how the killing at Kilmichael resembles or deviates from other guerrilla campaigns or close combat experi- ences. The scholarship of Erella Grassiani and Anthony King on combat motivation, cohesion and close combat would have been a good starting point. Retrospective accounts of false surrenders have also characterised controversial killings during the NATO-led campaign in Afghanistan (and many other conflicts). Nonetheless, Morrison has provided an outstanding excavation of one of the most contested days in Ireland’s war for independence. Christopher Goscha, The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2022; vii + 503 pp.: 978-0-691-18016-8, $35.00 boards Reviewed by: Nathaniel L. Moir, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University In People’s Army, People’s War, General Vo Nguyen Giap, North Vietnam’s top military leader, called conflict in Vietnam “the model of the people’s total war.” In an analysis of the National Liberation Front published in 1966, Austrian journalist Kuno Knoebl noted, “Vietnam has become the testing ground for the clash between Peking’s revolutionary Communism and the West’s liberal-democratic philosophy.” Knoebl added, “The people, not soldiers and armies, are the decisive factor in this war…The side that wins the people over – convinces and controls them – will be victorious.” In The Road to Dien Bien Phu, Christopher Goscha, professor of international relations at Université du Québec à Montréal, investigated the phenomenon Giap and Knoebl identified. Goscha demonstrated how war made the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and how the DRV waged war against neocolonialism after the Second World War. From Giap’s and Knoebl’s perspectives, political legitimacy pivoted on a social revo- lution required to counter the superior war armaments French forces deployed in their effort to re-occupy Indochina after the Second World War. The Road to Dien Bien Phu, a compelling and well-written history, centers on describing the Viet Minh’s approach to statecraft and how this was inseparable from its approaches to waging war. Goscha investigates this phenomenon and whether wars of liberation in Southeast Asia provided a model to emulate elsewhere after the Second World War by channeling Frantz Fanon’s analysis of colonial violence found in Fanon’s 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth. Book Reviews 349