Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (12 page)

The Dan Van program worked to build the morale and consciousness of the people already under the control of the Vietminh as well as the Vietminh armed forces. Self-criticism meetings and a wide array of cadre-led classes kept alive the flame of revolutionary fervor by drenching the populace with tracts, slogans, demonstrations, and mandatory political education classes. Party members kept a watchful eye on all participants in order to ferret out and correct “deviations” in thought or speech.

The reader will have to judge for himself how much of a factor the political struggle movement played in shaping the course of the two major wars in which Giap commanded the People’s Army of Vietnam. It seems certain, however, that Giap thought it critical: The conflict was carried out, he writes,

by the entire people, a total war.
A revolutionary war, because it was carried out on the basis of mobilization and organization of the masses. . . . The people’s war generally takes place in conditions where our side enjoys absolute political superiority over an enemy materially stronger than we are . . . Our military art has determined the following strategic orientation: to promote a war by the entire people, a total and protracted war. We have to wage a long war in which our political superiority will prevail, and we can gradually increase our strength, change the balance of forces between us and the enemy, and ensure victory for our side.
²⁵

Giap continually sought to exploit a perennial theme of political
dau tranh
: that the Vietnamese people have a unique genius for overcoming adversity in their struggle against foreign domination, that their martial
success against China, the Mongols, and the Cham people who occupied much of Cambodia for centuries was achieved not through innovations in military technology or superior numbers but through patience, resilience, and the mobilization of their mystical moral strength and unity of spirit. The Vietnamese Communists, Pike observes, “were the first [people in modern war] to break with the assumption that the principal and primary test of success must be military combat. They realized, dimly at first and then with increasing clarity, that
it might be possible to achieve a change of war venue and determine its outcome away from the battlefield.”
²⁶

THE EMERGENCE OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

By November 1949, Mao’s People’s Army had thoroughly vanquished Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army and formally established the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The emergence of a Communist state in the world’s most populous country had immense implications for Cold War politics and the War of Resistance in Vietnam, because the war in Vietnam quickly came to be seen in America and France as a Cold War conflict
as well as
an anticolonial struggle. Before the year was out, the PRC sent a number of senior officers into the Viet Bac to discuss the formation of an extensive military assistance program. Giap, of course, played a central role in shaping the program. In mid-January 1950 China formally recognized the DRV. Other socialist states, including the Soviet Union, soon followed suit. This recognition lent the revolutionary administration a degree of legitimacy it had heretofore lacked. The status of Ho Chi Minh, writes one historian, “changed almost overnight from that of a hunted guerrilla leader into a communist statesman struggling to free his country from an imperial power.”
²⁷

In June 1950 Giap traveled to Nanning, where he reached an agreement establishing training camps and a new all-weather road (meaning it was passable in all but the worst of the monsoon season) network between southern China and northern Vietnam, built by more than 100,000 Chinese nationalist prisoners, to facilitate the transport of troops and heavy weapons into Vietminh base camps.

Even before the PRC had achieved complete victory over the American-supported Nationalists, a steady flow of Giap’s regular force noncoms and officers had trekked north to camps in areas of China controlled by the
Communists. There they received intensified political education and instructions. Giap saw to it that they were trained to handle communications equipment and heavy infantry weapons, including recoilless rifles, large-caliber mortars, and machine guns. The PAVN were given tens of thousands of submachine guns and American M-1 semiautomatic rifles—the latter being a first-class modern infantry weapon. Giap knew that for close-in, human-wave assaults, these reliable infantry weapons were essential to success against the FEF. Over the course of the next two years, Chinese weaponry, matériel, and military expertise boosted PAVN’s logistical and combat power astronomically.

Giap and theorist Truong Chinh had long been keenly aware of the potential impact of international developments on the war in Vietnam. They were also well aware that the arrival of Communism on the scene in China could have negative as well as positive ramifications. One such consequence might be an effort by the PLA to dominate Vietminh strategy and training, using their massive material support as leverage. In addition, US foreign policy was anchored in the doctrine of containment of Communism; now that China was indeed Communist and was lining up behind the Revolution in Vietnam, American military intervention became very much a live option. Certainly Washington could be counted on to provide vast material support for the French war effort. As we shall see, it did so.

In early February 1950 the Truman administration formally recognized the pro-French government of Bao Dai and allocated $15 million in military aid to that government to conduct the war effort. In fact, Bao Dai’s regime had no leverage, and all US aid was dispersed by the French high command. Bao Dai’s “government” also served to cover and distort the US role, for it allowed the Americans to claim it was not supporting a colonial war, but a war for freedom against the dark forces of world Communism. The Vietminh, so the American rationale went, were seeking to crush democratic government in Indochina at the behest of the Communist Chinese. Given the dynamics of domestic politics in the United States, the Truman administration had little choice but to come to France’s aid in its struggle against Communism in Indochina. Thus, the seeds of another Vietnamese war were planted long before the French demise in the War of Resistance. Soon after Mao’s ascent to power, a formal US military advisory group was established in Saigon.

Giap now had two strong incentives to go on the offensive: looming American intervention, and plentiful Chinese help in prosecuting the war. By this point a major re-evaluation of French strategy by Army Chief of Staff General Georges Revers had leaked to the Vietminh, causing a major scandal in Paris, suggesting, as it did, the dexterity of the Vietminh’s intelligence agencies in both Vietnam and Paris. It also further polarized French politics into those on the left who wished to negotiate a settlement with Ho in an increasingly costly conflict, and those on the right who clung tenaciously to the belief that France’s prestige and national interests were best served by vanquishing its colonial adversaries. The French public’s support for the war, always lukewarm, was beginning to disintegrate.

The Revers Report called for the evacuation of the FEF’s string of forts along the northern border with China. They were simply too vulnerable to attack and difficult to supply. Revers called for the rapid buildup of the Vietnamese national army to free up the FEF for a new offensive and a graduated shift in French policy from military operations to direct negotiations with the great powers and the Vietminh. The French government waffled, as it so often did in a war it never clearly understood, unsure which way to turn. Giap believed his main forces were ready to strike a major blow against France when the rainy season waned in September 1950, and he prepared accordingly. Not yet forty years of age, observes Logevall, “with prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes, he had about him a reserved and unassuming air that masked a steely determination . . . he would become a profoundly important factor in the revolution’s success—a largely self-taught military commander who oversaw the forces that took on first the mighty French and then the even mightier Americans. Only Ho himself was more responsible for the ultimate success of the Revolution.”
²⁸

4

THE BORDER OFFENSIVE OF 1950: GIAP’S FIRST VICTORIES

A
s the French Indochina War entered its fourth year, foreign policy experts in the East and the West eyed the conflict warily as a potential flashpoint for another world war should the Chinese or the Americans enter the fray directly. With the outbreak of conflict in Korea in June 1950, the first “hot” war of the Cold War, and then the direct intervention of the PLA five months later against UN (primarily US) forces, the United States, slowly but surely, began to see Indochina through the prism of the monolithic struggle between Communism and democracy.

Accordingly, the floodgates of American military aid and advice opened wide—ostensibly to the Vietnamese government of Bao Dai, but in reality to Paris and its expeditionary force. The French, for their part, were beginning to realize that substantial US aid was indispensable if they were to win the war against Giap and the Vietminh. But they found the strings attached
to that aid unpalatable, to say the least. Washington exerted increasingly intense pressure for a definitive result: defeat the enemy on the battlefield, or reach a settlement congenial to the West at the negotiating table.

Meanwhile, the American military sought direct access to the FEF’s commanders with a view to convincing the command to adapt American strategies and tactics on the ground. From 1950 forward, the United States exercised more and more influence on the direction of the war, but unlike the Chinese-Vietminh relationship, there was sustained ill will and conflict between the Americans and the French, who saw their US allies as naïve interlopers in their war.

As the French and the Americans bickered and much of the new American military matériel throughout 1950 was siphoned off by corrupt colonial functionaries or lay unused in French bases, tons of Chinese advisers flooded into the Viet Bac. As the year progressed, the Vietminh inventory of artillery grew steadily: scores of American 75mm howitzers and a handful of highly effective 105mm guns and antiaircraft weapons were captured from the Chinese Nationalists’ stockpiles of deserted military stores. Heavy weapons captured from the Americans in Korea made their way into PAVN artillery units as well. Every bit as important as these modern weapons were PLA-supplied field radios and signal equipment that Giap needed to carry the fight to the enemy on a larger scale. Without them, it would be nearly impossible to effectively coordinate operations involving regiments and divisions.

Giap’s PAVN was growing in numbers and power up in the Viet Bac. China supplied each of Giap’s divisions with 40,000 porters, greatly enhancing the mobility and range of his regulars. An untold number of military advisory teams made their way to Giap’s headquarters to aid in planning and executing large-scale operations as well as training.
¹
Between 1950 and the end of the war, it has been estimated that Mao’s China provided the Vietminh with 40,000 tons of weapons and military supplies.

In early 1950 Giap’s critical opportunity appeared to be at hand. “Now,” he wrote, “we are going to pass from the defensive to the offensive by means of a war of movement. In the impending counteroffensive our troops will have to surround the enemy, strike right home to the vital center. . . . It is essential that within a few months, the last bases of colonialist resistance [in northern Tonkin] should be liquidated.”
²

Giap and the other senior leaders of the Vietminh clearly saw that they were on the verge of a critical shift in the nature of the conflict.
After a few preliminary operations to test its mettle before the monsoon season arrived in May, the PAVN would engage in a sustained offensive against an eighty-mile string of remote FEF bases strung out along Route Coloniale 4 (RC4), close to the Chinese border, between Cao Bang in the north and Langson to the south. The FEF had only 10,000 troops between Cao Bang and Langson. Whole Vietminh regiments would be deployed along this ribbon of poorly maintained road. The Vietminh commander in chief hoped he could not only take the bases in lightning-fast mass attacks, but also rip into the FEF’s rescue convoys to the forts, for there was no other quick way to get additional boots on the ground but up RC4. His troops were sufficiently trained by this point to attack hard and fast and then disperse into the jungle-covered mountain ridges above the road.

Later on in his career, Giap spoke of this kind of fighting as “mobile war,” operations “retaining certain characteristics of guerrilla warfare . . . involving regular campaigns with greater attacks on fortified positions.”
³
The transition to mobile warfare, Giap argued, did not lead to the abandonment of guerrilla fighting. On the contrary,

there must be close and correct co-ordination between these forms of fighting to be able to step up the Resistance War, wear out and annihilate bigger enemy forces, and win even greater victories. This is another general law in the conduct of [protracted] war . . . . The conduct of the war must maintain a correct ratio between the fighting forms. At the beginning, we had to stick to guerrilla warfare and extend it [throughout the country]. Passing on to a new stage, as mobile warfare made its appearance, we had to hold firm the co-ordination between the two forms, the chief one being guerrilla warfare; mobile warfare was of lesser importance but was on the upgrade. Then came a new and higher stage, [in which] mobile warfare moved to the main position, at first only on one battlefield—the local counteroffensive came into being—then on an ever wider scope.
⁴

In practice, along RC4 Giap would execute his first “local counteroffensive.” Meanwhile, he would also begin to deploy steadily increasing numbers of independent regiments inside the Red River Delta, for it was clear to all by this point that the people inside the Delta were the ultimate prize in the War of Resistance. How many units he could deploy there, and
how fast he could deploy them, depended on a number of factors: his ability to inflict devastating losses along RC4; the FEF command’s reaction to that disaster; French exhaustion in Indochina and at home; improvement of his own lines of communication; and perhaps most important, strengthening his logistical capabilities to conduct big-unit operations far afield from the comparative safety of the Viet Bac.