Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (33 page)

As astute and effective as Abrams’s initiatives were in the short run, Sorley’s book reveals dramatically that they failed to induce the changes in the South Vietnamese regime that would give Saigon a fighting chance if it had to go it alone against an invasion by the People’s Army of Vietnam. Sorley (like virtually every other serious historian) depicts South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu as hopelessly inept and intransigent. Thieu himself remarked well into Abrams’s tenure that the military formed his major political constituency and that it was “the only cohesive force” holding the country together.

Pacification operations
were
more effective than they had ever been in the American War, but that was not saying a great deal. Callousness and indifference on the part of hostile American and Vietnamese troops toward Vietnamese civilians in the countryside persisted. Many so-called secure areas were in fact vast refugee camps populated by thousands of miserable peasants relocated from “free-fire zones” and areas controlled by the Communists. In other words, they were rural slums.

The camps and the relocation operations that precipitated them heightened what Giap so often described as the “contradictions” between the peasantry and the US/GVN administration. In fact, it seems clear that widespread civilian dislocation and despair accompanied the evanescent
gains in the 1969–1970 period. Frances Fitzgerald’s prize-winning 1972 critique of the war,
Fire in the Lake
, contains a devastating critique of the lingering effects of American pacification programs and combat operations.

In the refugee camps and isolated villages people die of malnutrition and the children are deformed. In the cities, where there is no sanitation and rarely any running water, the adults die of cholera, typhoid, smallpox, leprosy . . . and their children die of the common diseases of dirt, such as scabies and sores. . . . The land and the family were the two sources of [Vietnamese] national as well as personal identity. The Americans have destroyed these sources for many Vietnamese, not merely by killing people but by forcibly separating them, by removing the people from the land and depositing them in the vast swamp-cities.
¹⁶

In retrospect—as Sorley and others make clear—it seems that the legions of overly optimistic MACV reports heralding progress in South Vietnam in the war’s last years were tainted by enormous pressure from the White House for good news to discredit its growing number of detractors. The revolutionary forces operating during the Nixon years proved far more resilient than the contemporary reports claimed. Surely this was both a result of the effectiveness of Giap’s indoctrination campaign, which by this point had reached the level of high art, and the toughness of men and women who were unbending in their desire to hang tough and outwait the Americans.

According to one authoritative source, by June 1971 the infrastructure was bouncing back in many provinces. Cadres were conducting mobilization and proselytizing among two-thirds of the population.
¹⁷
Post-1968 GVN gains in the villages began to collapse in late 1970 in more than a few strategically important provinces where the Communist infrastructure had once flourished.

In December 1970 MACV hailed recently completed Operation Washington Green, a clear-and-hold pacification operation in Binh Dinh Province, as a great success, but a senior US adviser in the province remarked a few months after the operation that “as the U.S. forces pull out of areas where they alone are responsible for security, the place reverts to communist control.”
¹⁸
As one American historian observed, Washington Green “offered little reason for optimism” about the pacification program generally.
¹⁹
It was the same story in most of the contested provinces of South Vietnam.

Despite intensified B-52 strikes on the infiltration routes and the employment of recently developed electronic sensors and laser-guided ordnance, the North continued to infiltrate replacements and ample quantities of food and ammunition into the South. Group 559, the organization responsible for managing and defending the Ho Chi Minh Trail, became an independent military command with its own static and mobile forces in 1970. More than 30,000 civilians, soldiers, and engineers built or upgraded six main north-south roads through the mountains and hundreds of kilometers of connecting roads and bypasses at choke points between 1970 and 1971. In March 1971 work commenced on a secret or “green road” from the North Vietnamese panhandle to southern Laos—about 1,000 kilometers in length, replete with fake fortifications and vehicles to draw interdiction fire.
²⁰

Perhaps the most impressive engineering feat on the trail was a fuel and oil pipeline running 1,000 kilometers from the panhandle deep into southern battlefields. These improvements reduced the transport time of the average trip down the trail to only twenty days, and losses along the route dropped from 13.5 percent in 1969 to 2.07 percent in 1971. Between 1970 and 1971, 195,000 troops entered the South.
²¹
During 1969, PAVN sent no fewer than ten sapper battalions and one hundred sapper companies and platoons from North Vietnam to southern battlefields. The sapper units formed the nucleus of the small-unit combat effort between 1969 and early 1971.

By mid-1970, Giap’s elite guerrilla-sapper units, many of which had been formed by breaking down main force PAVN regiments into independent companies and battalions, were inflicting very heavy casualties in the villages against the territorial and popular forces trained for their defense. (After 1968, Saigon’s popular and regional forces suffered more casualties than regular ARVN units.)

THE CAMBODIAN INCURSION AND THE WAR ON THE HO CHI MINH TRAIL

While Giap built up the strength and capabilities of his regular forces, Nixon initiated a dramatic effort to attenuate Communist military power. In April 1970, he ordered a force of 20,000 American and South Vietnamese troops to invade the PAVN’s network of sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia with a view to destroying the considerable threat those forces posed and
seizing COSVN headquarters, which had been located near the Cambodia-Vietnam border. Nixon claimed that the expansion of the ground war was necessary to maintain the security of American forces and to buy time for Vietnamization to work. He also hoped this dramatic and quite unexpected attack might intimidate Hanoi into a more flexible stance in negotiations in Paris. Giap responded to the enemy’s drive into the sanctuaries by ordering his divisions there to withdraw deeper into Cambodia and to buttress the Cambodian Communist movement with his political cadres.

The incursion resulted in the capture of hundreds of tons of PAVN weapons and supplies, but inflicted only marginal damage on PAVN forces, which soon returned to their old sanctuaries and began preparations for a major combined arms offensive slated initially for late 1971. That offensive was ultimately postponed, and some analysts have conjectured that the losses and disruption of the Cambodian incursion were the cause. The evidence of this claim is sketchy at best.

Meanwhile, the incursion into previously off-limits Cambodia set off a firestorm of protest in the United States, resulting in the largest antiwar protests in the United States up to that point. Some 400 colleges and universities were closed as a result of the protests. ROTC buildings were vandalized, and at Kent State University, nervous National Guardsmen opened fire on student protestors, killing four. An outraged Congress passed legislation prohibiting further operations in Cambodia and Laos by American forces. In short, the incursion surely heightened rancor between the US government and the American people and therefore worked in Giap’s favor in the long run.

In mid-November 1970 General Abrams submitted an astute analysis of Giap’s strategy to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president. Hanoi’s war could be broken down into seven interrelated conflicts. Each was important, “but the logistics war of southern Laos and northern Cambodia now stands as the critical conflict for the VC/NVA.”
²²
Because the PAVN supply route called the Sihanouk Trail leading from Laos to South Vietnam had been closed by Laotian General Lon Nol, the Revolution was completely dependent for supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Giap almost certainly concurred with Abrams’s assessment for, as the official history of the PAVN has it, in June 1970 the Central Party Military Committee “laid out many urgent measures aimed at expanding . . . [and] consolidating the strategic supply route.”
²³

We have already described the massive effort to improve the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1970 and 1971. In Hanoi it was universally agreed that whatever reverses Communist forces had to suffer on the ground in South Vietnam, the trail had to be kept open, and the modernization of the army in North Vietnam had to proceed as fast as possible so it could go down the trail in strength to resume big-unit fighting. Giap’s forces had been fighting against an increasingly sophisticated CIA-led effort to use Thai and Laotian troops to interdict the trail in Laos since 1969. By October 1970 Giap had a new asset to throw into this critical struggle—the first truly operational corps-level force in PAVN history, an armored mobile entity consisting of three divisions, including the 320th, with its newly acquired T-54 Soviet tanks.

OPERATION LAM SON

In early 1971, Abrams attempted to cut the trail in Laos with a dramatic ground-air armored operation. Because the 1970 Cooper-Church Amendment forbade the use of US troops in Laos, ARVN ground forces could not be accompanied by US advisers on the ground. Thus, Operation Lam Son would serve as a critical test of the effectiveness of Vietnamization.

Supported by armor and artillery, ARVN troops punched into Laos west of Khe Sanh via Route 9. Giap decided to counter the attack by deploying his new corps in support of the 10,000 PAVN troops of Group 559 that were already protecting the trail. The ARVN scheme of maneuver called for a drive on Tchepone along Route 9 in Laos, a broken track of road running through low hills that soon gave way to rugged jungle. Supporting forces would meanwhile march north and south of the main axis of advance, setting up a string of mobile fire-support bases after clearing PAVN forces in a series of search-and-destroy thrusts.

PAVN resistance was light initially. On February 12, the ARVN mobile column bogged down twelve miles inside Laos, apparently because of a secret order from Thieu, who feared that heavy ARVN casualties might further erode support for his regime in Saigon. But Thieu was not the only problem. ARVN senior commanders were simply out of their depth in undertaking such a complex operation, and the deficiencies that plagued the South Vietnamese army throughout the war began to tell, as timid subordinate commanders disobeyed or misconstrued their orders.

As the ARVN bogged down, 60,000 PAVN troops began to converge on the ARVN units from the north, south, and west, attacking ARVN fire-
support bases with 103mm and 122mm artillery fire and well-executed tank-infantry assaults. Whole ARVN companies were annihilated in the ensuing melee. A huge fleet of US helicopters and fighters attempted to relieve the pressure, but PAVN units “hugged the belt” of the ARVN infantry, and antiaircraft fire limited the effectiveness of US air support.

President Thieu soon lost his nerve and countermanded the orders of his senior commanders in the field. He began ordering the withdrawal of his overmatched forces after briefly “taking” Tchepone with a token air assault force that managed to capture a few small caches of weapons and supplies against token Communist resistance. It was a hollow victory, a face-saving measure that fooled no one. The ARVN withdrawal soon turned into a rout;
Life
magazine photographers shot haunting images of terrified ARVN soldiers clinging to the skids of overburdened helicopters.

Lam Son revealed in glaring fashion the deficiencies of the ARVN in combined arms offensive operations without American advisers on the ground. As one seasoned US adviser in the operation observed, ARVN commanders had been ordered “to execute an operations order much of which they did not understand.”
²⁴
Reflecting on Lam Son long after the fact, Henry Kissinger remarked that “the operation, conceived in doubt and assailed by skepticism, proceeded in confusion.”
²⁵

PAVN forces, however, performed very well indeed. Preparation of the battlefield had been first-rate, as Group 559’s battalions organized formidable defense positions; PAVN armored forces deployed after the ARVN had penetrated Laos linked up with Group 559 seamlessly while under ground and air attack, deploying their artillery and antiaircraft capabilities to good effect. As the ARVN units withdrew, PAVN antiaircraft forces downed at least three hundred helicopters—an amazing feat—and severely damaged hundreds of others, while expertly laid ambushes harried ARVN troopers in retreat. The victory in Laos was a decisive event in the history of PAVN. As one PAVN historian put it, the clash along Route 9 “was proof that the PAVN could defeat the best ARVN units.”
²⁶

THE NGUYEN-HUE OFFENSIVE

Giap’s staff studied and refined their doctrine for combined arms operations in light of their experiences during Lam Son as they prepared for their most ambitious operation of the war: a conventional offensive by virtually all the main force units under Giap’s command, supported by guerrilla
action. The broad objective of the new initiative was to achieve “a decisive victory in 1972.”
²⁷
On March 30, 1972, after a massive buildup of forces in the North Vietnamese panhandle and in the sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia, Giap launched the Nguyen-Hue Offensive, a powerful offensive drive along three axes of advance. Several infantry divisions spearheaded by tanks were deployed in each thrust—in South Vietnam’s two northernmost provinces, in the Central Highlands, and out of Cambodia, heading in the direction of Saigon. The strongest attack by far was directed against ARVN defenses in Quang Tri Province. There, three reinforced PAVN divisions slammed into the ARVN Third Division’s string of strongpoints along the DMZ from both the west and the north. Their ultimate objective was to rout ARVN defenses rapidly and seize the lion’s share of South Vietnam’s two northern provinces. The attack up north had long been expected, but the two thrusts farther south came as nasty surprises to General Abrams and the ARVN ground units deployed in both those areas of operations.