Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (35 page)

THE PARIS PEACE TALKS

In the wake of the offensive and the subsequent withdrawal of all US combat troops, the sense of bitterness and betrayal on the part of South Vietnam toward Nixon and the United States was palpable, and even as the talks marched tortuously to a peace settlement in fall 1972, a sense of foreboding, even doom, pervaded Saigon, and it was clear to everyone but the most naïve optimists that Hanoi had more chips to play at the bargaining table than did Washington. The war by this point was both a cause and a symbol of political divisiveness, racial unrest, and cultural clashes that threatened to tear the country apart at the seams. Vietnam had become the nightmare that would not end.

In early May 1972, Kissinger, in secret talks with long-time Central Committee member and Hanoi’s chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho, dropped the demand for mutual withdrawal of US and PAVN forces from South Vietnam. By fall Tho was in a position to make a concession himself because of the gains of the Nguyen-Hue Offensive. Hanoi would accept the Thieu government into a coalition with the NFL to work out the political future of South Vietnam. Le Duc Tho explained his thinking in doing so in 1985: “Since the military balance of forces had been fundamentally altered, no puppet administration could remain firmly in place” in South Vietnam.”
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In other words, Hanoi was fully confident that Thieu would be marginalized in a coalition government.

It seemed in October that Washington and Hanoi had reached an understanding, with only the details left to be resolved, but Thieu understandably balked at the provision allowing PAVN forces inside the South to remain in place after the Paris Peace Accords were signed, for he understood what Washington knew but could never admit at the time: that this provision all but guaranteed the resumption of conflict under conditions that greatly favored the Revolution. If it did not amount to a death warrant for the Government of Vietnam, it came very close to one. Hanoi, for its part, felt betrayed when Kissinger presented Thieu’s objections and called for the Communists to address them. Its delegation walked out of the negotiations in Paris, claiming, quite rightly, that the United States had already agreed in principle to leave PAVN forces where they were at the effective ceasefire date.

In an effort to bring the North Vietnamese back to the table, Nixon once again unleashed US airpower over North Vietnam in the most destructive
attacks of the entire air war. Operation Linebacker II wreaked havoc on Hanoi’s war-making facilities and transport grid. It depleted its surface-to-air missile (SAM) inventory to the point where the country was rendered almost defenseless against further attacks.

North Vietnam returned to the table, but it refused to agree to Thieu’s demand that PAVN troops return to North Vietnam. Nixon then privately promised Thieu substantial additional aid packages and gave his personal assurance that he would respond with sufficient air power to obliterate future Communist offensives if they posed an imminent threat to Saigon’s survival. But Nixon also issued Thieu an ultimatum: either he could sign the accords as negotiated, or he would have to reach a separate agreement with Hanoi. In other words, he left Thieu no choice but to step in line.

The Paris Peace Accords, signed on January 27, 1973, called on the United States and all other countries to respect the independence, sovereignty, unity, and integrity of Vietnam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam; required the withdrawal of all US forces and an exchange of prisoners within sixty days; and imposed strict limitations on US military assistance to South Vietnam and on infiltration of additional North Vietnamese forces to the South. A toothless international commission was put in place to oversee the ceasefire.

Most importantly, the political future of South Vietnam was left up in the air. Since the adversaries could not even approach a congenial solution or a set of procedures to determine the country’s long-term political identity, the accords merely indicated that its future would be determined by a vaguely defined “national council of reconciliation,” in which the GVN, the NLF, and representatives of neutral parties would “end hatred and enmity, prohibit all acts of reprisal,” and move “step by step” toward reunification by peaceful means. It seemed to assume, as one scholar puts it, that “miracles could be accomplished by decree,” and in fact marked “only a new phase of the war for the Vietnamese.”
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Nixon and Kissinger claimed that they had achieved “peace with honor,” but the claim was groundless in 1973, and is now rightly dismissed out of hand by virtually every serious student of the war, regardless of political persuasion. The Paris Accords ended direct American involvement, but they had failed to obtain even tacit recognition of South Vietnam as an independent entity that could determine its own fate without Communist interference. The agreement provided no enforceable mechanisms to ensure that politics, not military operations, would determine South Vietnam’s
fate. In fact, Nixon had “conceded to the Communists an active political and military role in South Vietnam.”
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In the wake of the Paris Accords, domestic politics in the United States cast grave doubt on the proposition that the United States would come to the rescue of Saigon if Hanoi was able to marshal another major conventional offensive. Indeed, American aid packages to the GVN were predictably slashed from $2 billion in 1973 to $1 billion in 1974. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 all but guaranteed that South Vietnam would have to go it alone if attacked by revolutionary forces. In the end, it is impossible to quarrel with William Duiker’s conclusion that Hanoi had gotten the better part of the deal.
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SOUTH VIETNAM STANDS ALONE

Giap had long viewed the American War as a two-stage process: first, the removal of US military power from South Vietnam; second, the unification of Vietnam through political struggle if possible, and through armed struggle if necessary. But who can believe that he and his comrades in Hanoi had any intention of letting the Paris Accords stand in the way of the prize they had sought for so long? In fact,
neither
North or South Vietnam had any intention of honoring the ceasefire, or even much incentive to do so. Blatant violations on both sides commenced within a few weeks, and the faint hope that Vietnam’s fate would be determined by peaceful means vanished very quickly indeed.

Initially, Communist forces in South Vietnam operated at a disadvantage because they were exhausted and depleted by the Easter Offensive and were heavily outnumbered by Saigon’s armed forces, which numbered about 300,000 ARVNs and 600,000 Regional and Popular Force troops. Yet in the year following the signing of the accords, Giap infiltrated 120,000 regulars into the South, acquired hundreds of replacement tanks and artillery pieces from China and the Soviet Union, and methodically built up the Ho Chi Minh Trail in preparation for another major conventional attack. In 1973 alone, PAVN shipped 27,000 tons of weapons and 6,000 tons of petroleum products to the south. In the first half of 1974, another 80,000 troops made their way into the South. Giap summarized the consensus that emerged from a series of conferences in June 1973 in restating his strategic mantra, his iron law: “The Politburo concluded that a strategic opportunity
would soon present itself. . . . Whatever the developments, we realized that the revolution could win victory only through war.”
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Meanwhile, Thieu had resorted to draconian measures to maintain his personal dominance south of the 17th parallel. All government officials were required to join Thieu’s own political party and pledge their allegiance to the powers that be in Saigon. Thieu reversed land reform measures in the countryside. Peasants and the intelligentsia alike resented Thieu’s repression of political opposition. On the military front, he foolishly spread ARVN units widely across the country instead of developing a coherent plan to repulse the inevitable Communist invasion by deploying his forces in strength in areas of strategic vulnerability. The economy of South Vietnam had long been dependent on American spending and investment, and soon after the accords, it was in dangerous decline, heightening a general sense of malaise and unrest, which prompted additional oppressive measures on the part of Saigon.

By the summer of 1974, Giap joined other senior leaders in Hanoi in believing that its adversary in the South could not survive a major PAVN offensive without massive American aid, and that such aid was unlikely to be forthcoming. The People’s Army was judged capable of executing a “final offensive” to crush the ARVN and the GVN and establishing a revolutionary administration over all Vietnam. This time, at last, the PAVN was going for broke. The balance of forces clearly favored the Revolution.

In March and April 1974, at two top-level conferences in Hanoi, it was concluded that for the first time since the Easter Offensive of 1972, the revolutionary forces had gained the initiative on the battlefield. Giap believed that the time had come to begin planning the final campaign. As he would write after the war’s end, “Confronted with the formidable strength of the people’s war, the other side found itself being pushed with increasing swiftness into a relentlessly downward course. The enemy’s ‘pacification’ and encroachment schemes had been clearly defeated. . . . The ‘leopard-skin’ [“oilslick”] pattern, far from being contained, was growing. The puppet army had been driven to the defensive on numerous battlefields.”
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After reviewing a May 1974 PAVN General Staff study of a plan to win the war, Giap called upon General Hoang Van Thai to develop a detailed campaign plan for total victory by the end of 1976 at the very latest—before the results of the next US presidential election could potentially reverse the American decision to stay clear of Vietnam. It would unfold in two stages:
first, a major attack in the Central Highlands in the spring of 1975, and then, after widespread guerrilla operations to disrupt and further disperse Saigon’s armed forces, a multipronged drive on Saigon in late 1975 or early 1976. Virtually every PAVN division would join in the attack.

While many Western accounts have it that Giap played little or no role in the formation of the plan for the Ho Chi Minh Campaign as a result of illness and the loss of his position as commander in chief to Senior General Van Tien Dung in 1973—Giap remained minister of defense—the most reliable sources we have make it clear that Giap was “very much involved in the planning and overall command of the offensive from its inception through its final victorious conclusion.”
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The General Staff then refined the plan several times before it was fully approved by the Politburo sometime in October 1974. By that point, Giap had also developed a contingency plan for a truncated campaign ending in 1975 should the opportunity present itself.

In December, the plan for the Ho Chi Minh Campaign was once again revised after General Tran Van Tra, the COSVN military commander, made a successful pitch for wresting all of Phuoc Long Province from the ARVN as a stepping-stone to a rapid drive on Saigon in the spring of 1975. In early January 1975, Tra’s forces crashed through the ARVN’s defenses along the Cambodian border into Phuoc Long. ARVN forces bent and then broke. Within a few days the PAVN had succeeded in gaining control of the entire province. Much to Giap’s relief, the administration of President Gerald Ford rebuffed frantic requests from Saigon for direct intervention. It was then clear that, for all intents and purposes, South Vietnam had been abandoned by its superpower ally.

According to General Hoang Van Thai, a key member of the planning staff, Tran’s success prompted the senior command to approve the truncated campaign plan with the objective of taking Saigon by the early summer of 1975.
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While the battle of Phuoc Long (December 1974–January 1975) marked a critical turning point in the war “by demonstrating the impotence of both the ARVN and the United States,” observes Phillip Davidson, “it was the ARVN’s loss of Ban Me Thuot which marked the beginning of the end for the RVN.”
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On March 10, twelve regiments of the PAVN converged on Ban Me Thuot, a target of critical strategic and psychological significance in the Central Highlands. In attacking this lightly defended city, as historian
Merle Pribbenow points out, Giap employed B.H. Lidell Hart’s strategy of the “indirect approach.” PAVN’s main attack was “directed not at the enemy’s main army deployed in the Tri-Thien front and around Saigon and the Mekong Delta, but instead at a weakly defended strategic point which the enemy could not afford to lose.”
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Giap hoped to deceive Saigon into thinking he planned to move on Pleiku and Kontum to the north, when in fact his objective was to seize Ban Me Thuot, lure substantial ARVN forces into a counterattack, and destroy them in detail. Within two days, the PAVN took the town and its environs after heavy fighting. Meanwhile, a massive PAVN force of more than 70,000 troops with ample armor and artillery began to close off the road net within the highlands. Thieu fell into the trap, ordering that Ban Me Thout be retaken at all costs, and airlifted several regiments into jumping-off points for a counterattack.

Launched on March 15, the attack quickly broke down and turned into a South Vietnamese rout. The ARVN was outnumbered, outgunned, and outfought. As it happened, thousands of families of the ARVN troops who were slated for the counterattack lived in the vicinity of Ban Me Thuot; rather than forming up for the drive on the city, the troops scattered in a frantic rush to their families, threw away their weapons, and began to move en masse to the east toward Nha Trang and the coast.

Now desperate, Thieu decided to exchange territory for time to regroup. He ordered a withdrawal of all forces in the Central Highlands behind a straight horizontal line running from the Cambodian border to Tuy Hoa on the coast, about sixty miles south of Qui Nhon. Meanwhile, in the Tri-Thien front, all ARVN forces were ordered to withdraw eastward to coastal enclaves around Hue and Danang, surrendering vast swaths of territory to PAVN units pressing in on them from the north and west.