Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (2 page)

Vo Nguyen Giap (second from left) discusses battle plans in the bush with Ho Chi Minh (second from right) and two senior officers. Early 1954. (Courtesy Vietnam News Agency.)

Giap and Ho Chi Minh discuss plans for Giap’s most celebrated victory at Dien Bien Phu. (Courtesy Vietnam News Agency.)

The PAVN Commander in Chief in the closing days of the War of Resistance. (AP Photo, © Associated Press.)

Two PAVN soldiers, a man and a women, meet on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in May 1970. They had grown up in the same small village in North Vietnam. For the Communists, the American War in Vietnam was everyone’s war. (AP Photo/Vietnam Pictorial/Trong Thanh, © Associated Press.)

General Giap (second from right) leads a discussion of battle plans for the Ho Chi Minh Campaign in 1975. (Courtesy Vietnam New Agency.)

A PAVN tank breaks through the front gate of Saigon’s Presidential Palace, the seat of the government of the Republic of Vietnam, at 11:30 hours on April 30, 1975. (Courtesy Vietnam News Agency.)

General Giap salutes his fallen comrades at a shrine at Dien Bien Phu’s Vietminh cemetery on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle (2004). (AP Photo/Richard Vogel, © Associated Press.)

1

THE VIETNAMESE REVOLUTION AND THE YOUNG REVOLUTIONARY

B
y the time he was admitted to the most prestigious preparatory school in Hue, the old imperial capital city of Vietnam, Vo Nguyen Giap was already an ardent patriot committed to liberating the country from its French colonial masters. He had an excellent command of Vietnam’s 2,000-year history of bold resistance to foreign domination in wars against China and Kublai Khan of the Mongols and a burning desire to make his own contribution. Like other idealistic Vietnamese teenagers at the Lycée National, most of them sons of scholar-mandarins trained in the Confucian tradition who went on to serve as minor functionaries in the colonial government, Giap was well aware of the venalities of French rule, of its crushing and exploitive effects on the lives and institutions of his people. Already he was playing a small part in the burgeoning anticolonial
movement led by a small but growing intelligentsia of journalists, teachers, and minor government functionaries in Vietnam’s urban centers.

The movement had begun in earnest around 1880, just as France was completing its conquest of Indochina. By the mid-1920s, such political activity as the French allowed was carried out by scores of reformist societies and associations, and several fractious political parties. Many of these organizations advocated collaboration with the French in the hope of developing Western-style institutions and gradual emancipation. Others operated clandestinely, advocating the violent overthrow of Vietnam’s colonial administration and the replacement of the country’s traditional Confucian elite with Vietnamese intellectuals schooled in the art of modern politics. The French security service, the dreaded Sûreté Generale, viewed the most radical of these parties as a serious threat to French authority. It kept detailed files on thousands of activists and used its vast police powers to crush virtually all forms of political expression. Vietnamese radicals filled the ghastly prisons of Vietnam, where hundreds died from torture, from starvation, or at the hands of executioners. But those who survived the ordeal emerged with a burning determination to break France’s grip on Indochina by any means necessary.