Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (17 page)

In early January 1953, Giap opened up yet another offensive, this time deploying two regiments in the highlands of central Annam to threaten the
strategically vital towns of An Khe and Pleiku, as well as Route 1, the main north-south route along the central coast. These attacks were designed to force the French to further disperse an FEF force already stretched tight as a bow and wear down the Mobile Groups who carried out the FEF offensive operations. They succeeded in both objectives. Several FEF mobile groups were dispatched from the Delta to counter the PAVN drive in the waist of the country. Inconclusive fighting continued through February. But according to the doctrine of protracted war, battlefield stalemates always favored the revolutionary forces. Such was the case in central Annam.

By early 1953 the PAVN were operating with a level of skill and boldness that would have been unthinkable in the early days of the war. Moreover, the critical base areas where PAVN troops deployed in between operations—the Viet Bac, the southern Tonkin base area around Thanh Hoa, and a large swath of coastline between Nha Trang and Danang in the middle of the country—were growing daily thanks not so much to regular PAVN regiments engaged in mobile warfare, but to independent PAVN companies and battalions engaged in guerrilla warfare in the enemy’s rear. As the mobile warfare campaigns in the northwest and Laos forced the FEF out of the areas of French control, the guerrillas went to work, securing one village and district after another.

There was a kind of synergy between the fighting methods of guerrilla, mobile, and ultimately pitched battles. This was the very essence of the Giapian strategy for protracted war. His forces were clearly now strong enough to have another go at the De Lattre Line. Most sources have it that this was his initial intention. Not only were his divisions of regulars highly motivated and at peak strength, but he had also developed a robust antiaircraft capability, sure to inflict severe damage on an overstretched FEF air force supporting ground operations. Moreover, his regional and local forces were successfully countering FEF pacification operations in the Red River Delta, using the old “oil slick” strategy of clearing and holding one sector at a time; but the “holders,” largely Vietnamese army troops, were poorly trained and motivated. Generally, operations in the Delta were “like sweeping aside water with a brush; [the water] came rushing back when the [FEF] forces moved on.”
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After the Central Highlands fighting came to an end, Giap consulted General Wei Guoqing, his chief PLA military adviser. Chinese advice had become increasingly important to Giap and his staff because Vietminh mobile operations now involved multiple divisions on the same front and coordination of those “big unit” campaigns with guerrilla warfare
elsewhere. The PAVN was still short of its specialists in communications, antiaircraft, engineers, and artillery. The PLA filled the gap. Wei Guoquing argued persuasively in March 1953 for Giap not to make his main effort in the Red River Delta, but to press deep into Laos—far deeper than his initial foray in December 1952—where French strongpoints could be isolated and defeated in detail. In northern Laos the FEF could muster only limited air support due to the 200-mile distance between the area of operations and its Hanoi airfields.

In early April, the PAVN units that had been in Tai country drove southwest from their bases around Moc Chau in the north and Dien Bien Phu, a deep valley seventy miles northwest of Na San that had been easily secured by the 148th Independent Regiment the previous year. In a remarkably well-coordinated drive, Giap’s forces, three divisions abreast, bottled up the large garrison at Na San with one regiment of the 308th, while the other three regiments bypassed the city, penetrated easily into Laos, and threatened Louang Prabang, forcing the French to mount a frenzied airlift to prevent the Laotian capital from falling. Meanwhile, the 316th Division moved out of Moc Chau on the eastern flank of the attack heading for Sam Neua. Salan wanted to reinforce the three battalion force there, but the air strip proved too short. Confusion and dismay were beginning to permeate FEF headquarters. Salan had fallen into an ominous pattern of responding passively to Communist initiatives. He ordered the three Sam Neua battalions to retreat by foot to a large French camp in the Plain of Jars, about sixty miles to the southwest. The 316th caught up to the rear of the FEF force as it withdrew. On April 15, all three battalions were destroyed in a series of slashing attacks on the column.

Three weeks after initiating the drive, the French were in disarray. The PAVN had complete freedom of movement in northern Laos. Political commissars were busy mobilizing a Laotian Communist guerrilla infrastructure. Only the limitations of Giap’s logistical system and the looming monsoon rains prevented the army from pressing on to seize Vientiane and Louang Phrabang.

Salan had been completely outgeneraled. He was increasingly frustrated by the gaping lacunae between Paris’s stated policy objectives and the means it was willing to provide to obtain them. The series of crises precipitated by Giap’s Laotian offensive had drained the Delta of maneuver forces, and the Vietminh regional and guerrilla units had taken advantage
of their deployment, liberating a great many villages from government control. Giap had fought “a war of movement on true protracted warfare principles,” Edgar O’Ballance observes,

and the watching Mao Zedong must have benevolently applauded at such a well-executed campaign. Formations of divisional size had calmly marched into Laos, bypassing serious opposition. Giap had succeeded in drawing off French reinforcements far, far from the Red River Delta, and forced General Salan to employ his entire fleet of transport aircraft to supply them. The whole . . . operation was an object lesson in mobility that had kept the French guessing right until the last minute.
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The Americans, for their part, were increasingly skeptical of France’s half-hearted prosecution of the war. Until the invasion of Laos in April 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had believed that the French would ultimately prevail—albeit with a great deal of American advice and expertise. Now Eisenhower feared the worst, evoking a variant of the domino theory that would later form the primary justification for the American War. “If Laos were lost,” he told the National Security Council, the West “would likely lose the rest of Southeast Asia and Indonesia. The gateway to India, Burma and Thailand would be open.”
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Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke for American policymakers in claiming that “Salan was overcautious and defense-minded.” He was fighting the war with a World War I “barbed-wire” strategy.
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President Eisenhower and his staunchly anti-Communist secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, placed considerable pressure on Paris to grant the US military advisory group in Saigon more power, and most importantly, to promise the Associated States of Indochina real independence as a way of energizing their commitment to the fight against the Vietminh.

For the French, real independence remained unthinkable; at the very least, Paris envisaged the conflict ending in negotiations and partition of the country into a French state in the south and a Vietminh state in Tonkin. Giap’s strategy was making progress in a sphere removed from the combat of the battlefield. It was causing dissension and disagreement among his chief adversaries.

Time was running out for the French in Indochina. France’s political willpower was faltering and could not be sustained without a resounding
victory on the battlefield, and soon. Could a new commander, General Henri Navarre, a distinguished staff officer with a special interest in military intelligence and avoidance of the press, take the initiative away from Giap and save the day? That was the critical question in Paris. Within a year, the answer would be clear.

6

DIEN BIEN PHU, AND VICTORY

The fortunes of the Revolution looked very bright indeed in spring 1953, as Giap’s last campaign had succeeded admirably in dispersing the FEF widely throughout Vietnam and Laos, sapping the strength of its mobile units, and wearing down public support for the war in France. As a military commander and strategist, Giap had shown audacity and flexibility, as well as the acute sense of timing that figures so prominently in Vietnamese military thought. Since the battle of Hoa Binh, in fact, the Vietminh commander in chief had demonstrated a striking ability to control the momentum and direction of the War of Resistance. For two years he had stymied the FEF with a lethal blend of tireless mobilization, small-unit guerrilla combat, and mobile warfare campaigns. In the northwest, as well as in the Red River Delta, Giap had shown a knack for deciding when and where to strike—and equally important—when and where to pull his punches and wait out the French.

As Giap and the rest of the Central Committee planned the campaign for winter 1953 through spring 1954, they had little incentive to revise the core strategy that had paid such handsome dividends. The French were on the horns of a dilemma. As Giap wrote about the situation at the conclusion of the spring 1953 campaign season:

The enemy found himself face to face with a contradiction: Without scattering his forces it was impossible for him to occupy the invaded territory; in scattering his forces he puts himself in difficulties. His scattered units would fall easy prey to our troops, his mobile forces would be more and more reduced and the shortage of troops would be all the more acute. On the other hand if he concentrated his forces to move from the defensive position [to an offensive one], the occupation forces would be weakened and it would be difficult for him to hold the invaded territory. Now, if the enemy gives up the occupied territory, the very aim of the war of re-conquest is defeated.
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The critical issue was to determine where to launch the major offensive and how best to support it with more limited operations—guerrilla actions, secondary offensives, and, of course, political and diplomatic agitation. No matter which theater was selected for the major offensive in the fall of 1953, Giap hoped to keep his regular forces in the Viet Bac and the northwest out of major combat until well after the first rains subsided in September.

Success in the upcoming campaign required improvement and further expansion of the PAVN. Yet more heavy weapons from the Chinese had to be integrated; complex command and control issues involved in multi-division operations had to be worked out through trial and error in classrooms and training grounds. Giap now had around 300,000 well-trained soldiers between the regulars and the regional forces, and at least 200,000 local militia to support the regulars and provide intelligence. In the Delta the Armed Propaganda units and political operatives worked assiduously, conducting an increasingly effective subversion campaign against the Vietnam National Army and the villagers who were still under control of the government.

Giap had more highly motivated recruits than his training camps could handle. Most importantly, Giap had time on his side. It was no exaggeration to say that the Vietminh could prevail in the conflict simply by
continuing to engage in a series of inconclusive battles and campaigns. The French were under increasing pressure to reverse the revolution’s gains of the past two years before the public and politicians lost the will to carry on with the “dirty war.” Giap enjoyed the advantages of operating within a unified and totalitarian political system. Only the Central Committee could call an end to the war before it had achieved its ends, and this seemed inconceivable in 1953, just as it would in 1963. Communist propaganda could mask defeats in specific engagements from the population. Indeed, there were no acknowledged defeats at all—at least no defeats in the public record.

THE FRENCH

We turn now to French prospects and plans. General Henri Navarre had never served a day in Indochina before assuming command of all French forces there in May 1953. He claimed no particular expertise in matters of Communist war strategy or doctrine, and we have little evidence that he gained much during the year he spent there. Indeed, in retrospect it appears that he left Indochina somewhat more baffled than he had been upon his arrival.

Navarre was not particularly well liked by his FEF comrades, for he cultivated an air of mystery and detachment. Nonetheless, after a tour of French installations throughout Vietnam, he arrived at an astute diagnosis of what ailed the FEF effort. Even elite mobile units seemed in the grips of a defensive mentality. The De Lattre Line had 1,200 outposts ringing the Red River Delta, where five French divisions were deployed, yet the Vietminh had been able to infiltrate 60,000 troops into the Delta and extend its control over half of its 7,000 villages. The Vietminh were highly motivated, fought to a common plan, lived a spartan existence, and were growing stronger every day. FEF operations under Salan had worked toward no common objective, and, as noted by American combat photographer David D. Duncan, the French fought a “languid” war on “banker’s hours.”
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What could be done to remedy the situation? Navarre had a plan, and a good one, considering the conditions on the ground and the tendentious politics swirling around the war effort in Paris. Well aware that he needed more troops, Navarre requested an increase from 165,000 to 217,000 by early 1954. From the summer of 1953 through the autumn of 1954, Navarre proposed to focus on pacification operations that would
sweep Communist guerrillas and the shadow government from the Delta. In the northwest, he proposed to remain on the defensive, seeking only to disrupt and harass Vietminh forces. With funding from the United States, Navarre planned to accelerate the expansion and training of the Vietnamese National Army.

The Navarre plan, however, did call for one major offensive in the upcoming 1954 campaign season. He called it Operation Atlante, and it was to be a powerful drive against Giap’s forces in Interzone V, along the highly populous coast between Danang and Nha Trang. The PAVN already had twelve regular battalions and substantial regional units there, and more troops were trickling in every day. Atlante’s objective was to decimate those forces and close the door on further penetration by revolutionary forces.