Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (26 page)

Stage two of the operational plan consisted of a series of highly mobile “search and destroy” offensives. As Westmoreland saw it, the success of the American ground war was largely contingent on isolating the battlefield, for only then could he hope to destroy Giap’s forces in sufficient numbers. That meant choking off the steadily increasing flow of troops and matériel flowing down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and, to a lesser extent, the influx of
weapons and supplies from the Sihanouk Trail in Cambodia and coastal shipping from North Vietnamese ports to the south.

Westmoreland planned to use a rejuvenated and expanded ARVN in static defense duties of installations and in pacification operations to gain and maintain control over the villages that then formed part of the NLF infrastructure and its varied types of guerrilla forces. The ARVN would work with US military civic action teams as well as NGOs on rural development projects, ranging from medical dispensaries to improved agricultural production programs, schools, and economic reform at the local level. For the American strategy to succeed, the air force and the navy had to break down North Vietnam’s war-making ability—its oil storage, factories, military bases, and communication lines—via Operation Rolling Thunder.

GIAP’S STRATEGIC VIEW OF THE AMERICAN WAR

Even before Westmoreland’s strategy had been formally approved by Johnson, the PAVN commander in chief in Hanoi had worked out a rough blueprint for how he would fight against the Americans, the South Vietnamese, and their allies, including South Korea, Thailand, and Australia. Most probably, Giap surmised the war would steadily escalate in intensity over several years and then plateau. By that point, perhaps three or four years after the beginning of the conflict, US casualties and the indecisiveness of the fighting would lead first to US disillusionment and then to gradual disengagement. Protracted warfare—people’s war—had succeeded against the French. Giap firmly believed it could succeed as well against the Americans, but not without even greater effort and sacrifice on the part of his comrades in the North and the South than the French war had required. The level of combat and the military balance of forces were sure to be protean, and to vary from one region of South Vietnam to another.

In Giap’s public writings and speeches in the early and mid-1960s, we detect the same defiant confidence in Hanoi’s ability to defeat the Americans that he had exhibited toward the French, even granting the frightful cost such a victory would entail. Ultimately, the PAVN would need the capability to initiate larger-scale campaigns of greater duration and complexity than had been in the case in the War of Resistance, and to protect itself
from a military machine whose lethality far exceeded that of France in the 1950s. Pronouncements of great battlefield victories aside, Giap knew full well that the capacity to
survive
sustained combat against the Americans was far more important than defeating them in big-unit battles. A more efficient and elaborate logistical system had to be constructed to feed the battlefield and frustrate American efforts to break that system down. North Vietnam’s entire population had to be efficiently mobilized in the war effort as producers of matériel, as defenders of the homeland, and as participants in a vast and disciplined propaganda apparatus.

As the Politburo weighed its options in early 1965, Giap argued strenuously for caution rather than haste in attempting to challenge the buildup of American ground forces. At least in the first phase of the conflict, it was far more important to expand and intensify PLAF small-unit guerrilla operations and to build up the political infrastructure than to rush insufficiently trained PAVN regular units into the South. As Giap wrote in
The Military Art of People’s War
(1964), “according to our military theory in order to ensure victory for the people’s war when we are stronger politically than the enemy and the enemy is stronger materially, it is necessary to promote an extensive
guerrilla war
which will develop gradually into a
regular war
combined with a guerrilla war. Regular and guerrilla war are closely combined, stimulate each other, deplete and annihilate enemy forces, and bring final victory.”
¹

Yes, regular forces and mobile warfare would ultimately take up a prominent role, but in 1965 and 1966, guerrilla operations and political struggle had to take precedence. Vietnam was a poor agricultural country. The Revolution could not do everything at once. The war would be lost, and fast, unless the North’s production and military establishment was extensively strengthened and protected from destruction. That would take time, and plenty of it. It was vital, at least at first, to exploit the political forces of the masses as shaped by the Party, rather than to challenge the US military head on. As always, the main objective of the political struggle was “to mobilize and organize the people, to guide them in the struggle against the enemy in all ways, and at the same time closely to coordinate with the military struggle and to help it win the greatest victories for the resistance.”
²

And then there was a crucial factor to be addressed far from the battlefields of South Vietnam: obtaining firm commitments from China and the Soviet Union to keep up the massive flow of modern weapons required and
to assist Hanoi in fomenting intensive propaganda efforts aimed at convincing American and world opinion of the injustice and immorality of the United States’ “neocolonial” campaign against a poor Asian nation.

In the North, an air defense system had to be built with the steadily growing assistance of the Soviet Union’s weapons and its expertise. Without such a system, it would be impossible to prevent the outright destruction of North Vietnam’s war-making assets by the US Air Force and Navy. The creation of this system alone would prove to be a massive undertaking, ultimately requiring the efforts of hundreds of thousands of specialists, soldiers, and civilians to construct and repair bridges, roads, and fuel lines.

As the size and scope of the war escalated, Giap anticipated using his main-force units more frequently, preferably at the time and place of his choosing. Geography would dictate the location of those operations to a large degree. The area around the DMZ, where short lines of communication would permit his divisions to be readily resupplied from North Vietnam’s panhandle, seemed a promising locale. The Central Highlands also held great promise because it afforded the PAVN the sanctuaries of the mountains and of bases in Cambodia.

STRATEGIC DEBATES AND EARLY OPERATIONS

The senior leadership in Hanoi was by no means of one mind about how to conduct the first phase of a war of escalation against the greatest military power in the world. We know little of the details of these senior-level debates. What evidence we have suggests strongly that Giap, Ho, and Truong Chinh appear to have been the leading figures of the “North-first” school strategy outlined above, while Le Duan and Nguyen Chi Thanh spearheaded the “South-first” school. What did this mean in practice? Le Duan and Thanh, both southerners with extensive experience in the South since the 1950s, strenuously disagreed with Giap’s priorities, arguing for rapid infiltration of regular PAVN units in 1965 and big-unit operations in order to crush Saigon and seize power before the Americans had built up enough combat power to stanch the Communist onslaught.
³
Scholar Robert Brigham has aptly described Thanh’s approach as Clausewitzian in its tight focus on rapid annihilation of the enemy’s armed forces. “Thanh advocated a land-based offensive strategy by large units as the only way to
defeat the Americans. . . . Thanh claimed southern cadres would make up in spirit what they lacked in material goods.”
⁴

Apparently the Politburo initially rejected Giap’s approach in favor of Thanh’s. Thanh had been sent south in mid-1964 and given direct command over both military and political operations in all of South Vietnam save the northernmost fourteen provinces, which remained under the direct control of Giap as commander in chief of the PAVN. It appears that by mid-1965, a Politburo increasingly dominated by Le Duan as Ho Chi Minh’s health declined ordered Thanh to direct operations in the South, while Giap was tasked with the responsibility of building up and modernizing the army, establishing a fledgling air force and navy, creating embarkation and special training areas, and organizing the expansion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

General Thanh’s offensive main-force operations throughout 1965 and early 1966 continued to be highly effective against ARVN troops. With some 47,000 main-force PLAF troops organized into about 60 battalions, he was able to seize several provincial capitals, including Song Be, just 70 miles north of Saigon, and hold them temporarily. But it was a different story in the early battles with the Americans. In August 1965, the PLAF First Regiment engaged Americans in the vicinity of the Communists’ fortified hamlet complex about ten miles south of Chu Lai. Thanh’s regiment was in the process of planning an attack on the Marine air base there. The Third Marine Regiment conducted an amphibious assault to the south of the base, while two of its battalions landed by helicopter to the west. In five days of sustained combat, the Marines destroyed at least one PLAF battalion entirely, and killed 600 Communist troops while losing 45 Marines killed and 200 wounded.

In November, a PLAF ambush of a US Army battalion northwest of Saigon was transformed by heavy American fire support into a rout: 200 PLAF bodies littered the field while the US battalion suffered 20 fatalities in battle. A month earlier, Thanh had prepared almost an entire division of PAVN troops in and around the Ia Drang Valley, excellent terrain for moving troops and supplies from Cambodia into a major supply depot in the Central Highlands. It seems likely that Thanh planned a drive eastward to the coast, thereby cutting South Vietnam in half. If such an operation had been successful, it might very well have caused panic in Saigon and a fatal collapse of ARVN morale.

The Americans discovered large concentrations of PAVN troops in the Ia Drang Valley in early November. There they launched a devastating attack, evading the PAVN concentrations by deploying elements of the innovative First Cavalry Division, whose 400-plus helicopters were used to maneuver entire battalions of infantry around the battlefield. A ferocious battle ensued in the valley, as one US battalion landed in the midst of the PAVN’s Sixty-sixth Regiment and was almost overrun in a bitter, close-in fight including hand-to-hand combat. Quick reinforcements, as well as B-52 tactical airstrikes, inflicted devastating casualties on the PAVN troops, who were forced to retreat into Cambodia or into the jungle surrounding the valley. Estimated losses for the PAVN were 2,000 men killed or wounded; Hanoi’s plan to split South Vietnam in the Central Highlands had been foiled.

But a day after the main battle ended came an engagement that foreshadowed many others to follow over the next few years: about 600 PAVN troops caught the 400-man Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry in a perfectly executed ambush as they marched in a column away from the battlefield toward a landing zone. More than 150 US soldiers were killed. The PAVN battalion commander ordered his troops to close in tight on the American column, grabbing the Americans “by the belt.”
⁵
But it should be noted that the success of the revolutionary forces at Ia Drang was in a large, guerrilla-style ambush, not a major multi-battalion battle.

Big-unit engagements in the dry season of 1966 (January to May) appear to have had unhappy results for Communist forces, especially those in Binh Dinh Province on the coast in II Corps, where PAVN units held their ground for as long as four days against a powerful American infantry force. Giap’s unit sustained horrendous casualties in the process. In another operation in the strongly defended Iron Triangle PLAF base area northwest of Saigon, American units inflicted heavy casualties on revolutionary forces, in addition to uncovering vast quantities of weapons and explosives. This pattern of ground combat—the inability to defeat US forces in battalion and larger-size operations, and the ability to get the better of US forces frequently in small-unit actions—persisted for the first three years of the American conflict.

It was against this background that Thanh was recalled to Hanoi in the spring of 1966 to defend his strategy. According to scholars William Duiker and Patrick McGarvey, Giap was the most prominent critic of Thanh’s
performance as a commander. A secret August 1966 CIA memorandum goes far in confirming their assertion.
⁶
In Hanoi during the spring of 1966, wrote the CIA analyst, there was “considerable opposition to the way the war was being fought” in Hanoi, and Giap was the leading advocate of shifting over to a protracted war, with its greater emphasis on small-unit guerrilla action to disrupt pacification operations, provide solid intelligence on major US operations in advance of their execution, and extend the clandestine NLF infrastructure into areas currently under GVN control.

Giap clearly felt that by the end of the 1965–1966 campaign season in May 1966, the South’s underground political infrastructure and its guerrilla forces were insufficiently developed to sustain the momentum of a growing war. In the great tradition of protracted warfare, Giap wanted to reallocate military resources to small unit attacks of a battalion or less. The American troops fighting the guerrillas fought under disadvantages. They were unaccustomed to tropical heat, jungle combat, and, more generally, fighting guerillas who were indistinguishable from the civilian population. They did not know the local terrain. The most striking evidence of this shift in strategy is in basic engagement statistics: Small-unit actions grew exponentially from 612 in 1965, to 894 in 1966, to 2,422 in 1967. Big-unit attacks went in the other direction: from 73, to 44, to 54 during the same time period.

By late 1966, the shift to political and guerrilla struggle from big-unit actions appeared to be producing good results in the villages, frustrating the US-Saigon pacification programs. In a confidential memo to President Johnson at the end of 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wrote,