Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (36 page)

In the highlands, the column of ARVN troops moving east along a secondary road in bad repair toward Nha Trang was repeatedly attacked, causing the column to break up and disintegrate. Perhaps 20,000 of the 60,000 ARVN troops in the retreat reached the comparative safety of Nha Trang, on the South China Sea coast. In the Tri-Thien front, Giap attacked the coastal enclaves with the equivalent of eight divisions on March 19. As they crushed one South Vietnamese line of defense after another, the ARVN corps commander attempted to withdraw all his forces into the three strongest enclaves at Hue, Danang, and Chu Lai.

About the same time, Thieu ordered the withdrawal of his elite ranger and Marine forces deployed in I Corps Tactical Zone south in the hopes of forming a new defensive line extending from the Cambodian border through Cu Chi, Bien Hoa, and Xuan Loc. Terrified civilians and soldiers in the vicinity of Hue now fled south by the thousands along Route 1 toward Danang. There the ARVN commander attempted an evacuation by sea on March 24. That operation, too, turned into a disaster, as the port came under heavy shelling, and all weapons and other military equipment were abandoned to the enemy. On March 29, Danang, flooded with more than one million refugees, fell to the PAVN. All of I Corps was now under Hanoi’s control.

After a week of regrouping and replenishment, the People’s Army began its drive on Saigon. In the final attack on the capital, there would be no logistical breakdowns along the lines of those in the Nguyen-Hue campaign of 1972. Everywhere except at Xuan Loc, thirty-five miles northeast of Saigon, which Giap aptly described as the “iron door” to the massive Bien Hoa airbase and to Saigon itself, South Vietnamese troops folded up. At Xuan Loc the ARVN 18th Division fought with great valor and skill against four PAVN divisions between April 9 and April 23. They gave way only when Communist forces were able to cut off all reinforcements.

After Xuan Loc fell, a force of about thirteen PAVN divisions tightened the noose around Saigon, encountering only desultory resistance. In Hanoi, Giap and the rest of the Politburo and Central Military Committee had spent a sleepless night at the PAVN command center before convening on the morning of April 28. According to Giap’s account, “the atmosphere was one of elation.” A map of Saigon was spread across a large table. “The red arrows on our map were now clustered in the direction of the inner city. Slash-marks indicated successively captured targets. Nearly every hour—at every instant, it seemed—a new report was received. . . . The enemy soldiers were like beheaded snakes. American military and civilian personnel fled by helicopter from the rooftops of high-rise buildings in a ‘whirlwind’ operation.”
⁴⁵

Thieu had resigned on April 21 and fled to Taiwan. On April 29, 1975, the United States began a dramatic evacuation of Americans and a limited number of their South Vietnamese allies, as seventy Marine helicopters flew between landing pads in central Saigon and a fleet of aircraft carriers off the coast. By the early morning of April 30, PAVN columns swept down from Bien Hoa into the heart of the city. A tank squadron made its way
down Hong Thap Tu Street and turned left onto Thong Nhut Boulevard. Around 1100 hours, its lead tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace. Jubilant PAVN soldiers jumped off their tanks and headed through the courtyard into the palace proper.

General Duong Van Minh, who was thought to be a titular head of state acceptable to the Communists, was waiting with his cabinet in a second floor reception room. Colonel Bui Tin, People’s Army of Vietnam, was then serving as a journalist covering the war’s final campaign. As the senior officer attached to the tank squadron, it fell to him to take the surrender. “I have been waiting since early this morning to transfer power to you,” said General Minh. Colonel Tin replied, “There is no question of you transferring power. Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you do not have.”
⁴⁶

Within minutes, the senior comrades at the command post received the news of the surrender. Giap recalled the moment: “Tears of joy filled everyone’s eyes. . . . The Ho Chi Minh Campaign was ended in total victory. Mixed with the sounds of the loudspeaker applause resounded in all the streets. . . . [That night] I took a drive around Hanoi and discovered that the city had been transformed into a sea of flowers and flags. The streets were full of people festively celebrating. That night Hanoi and all of Vietnam rejoiced, together with Saigon and the whole south.”
⁴⁷

Many Western historians describe the Ho Chi Minh offensive as a conventional invasion in which the PLAF guerrillas played only a marginal role, the implication being that Giap’s people’s war strategy had been effectively defeated, leaving him no option but to resort to a conventional invasion aimed at the conquest of a hostile nation. In fact, PLAF regional and local guerrilla forces performed a number of critical roles, seizing many objectives that had been bypassed in the attacks in the Tri-Thier Front and the Central Highlands. They protected the rear as PAVN forces drove southward on Saigon, tying down ARVN units and preventing GVN forces, including the regional and popular force units that remained in strength, from cutting PAVN lines of communication. Moreover, local guerrilla forces had prepared clandestine supply depots along the lines of advance into Saigon for several months before the drive commenced. Finally, Tran Van Tra had directed an impressive guerrilla campaign in the densely populated Mekong Delta in 1973 and 1974, resulting in substantial territorial gains in that region. In March and early April 1975, the intensity of guerrilla activity in the Mekong Delta was so great that Thieu ordered
reinforcements of the three divisions then deployed in the region. As historian Rod Paschall points out, had these divisions been able to redeploy to the defensive line north of Saigon, the battle for the city might well have been a much more costly and time-consuming event than it was.
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In the end, the victory of the Revolution was achieved not by the abandonment of Vo Nguyen Giap’s protracted war strategy in favor of conventional warfare, but by the methodical and imaginative application of that strategy, and by the resilience and resolve of millions of Vietnamese—soldiers and citizens alike—who believed the Revolution offered them the only path to freedom and to a brighter future in a postcolonial world.

11

REFLECTIONS

After the Communists’ great victory in 1975, Senior General Giap’s influence in national policy and military affairs gradually diminished. In April 1973 he had relinquished his title as commander in chief of the People’s Army to his protege, Van Tien Dung. Dung also succeeded him as minister of defense in 1980. In March 1982, Giap’s tenure as a member of the Politburo came to an end. Most accounts have it that the “architect of victory” over France and the United States was forced to resign from these posts, or was at best strongly pressured. Yet it wouldn’t be unreasonable to surmise that Giap may have welcomed a diminished role in Vietnamese affairs after more than thirty years of service in the revolutionary struggle.

Since his departure from the Politburo, government officials have referred to Giap as a “national treasure.” Certainly most Vietnamese would agree. This designation makes his mysterious absence from public events marking the anniversaries of Vietnam’s crucial battles with France and the United States all the stranger. His absence might be explained as the result of prohibitions issued by the leadership intended to prevent
the emergence of a “personality cult” that might challenge the collective leadership paradigm that worked so effectively during the war years. The health problems that have dogged the general on and off since the late 1960s may also have contributed to his low profile in public life. We can only speculate on these questions. We do know that at the time of the publication of this book, Giap is more than a century old. He is the last of Hanoi’s founding leaders, and his passing will mark the end of a pivotal era for the Vietnamese people.

This book has presented an account of Vo Nguyen Giap’s campaigns, an exploration of his unique way of war, and his contribution to the Vietnamese Communists’ long struggle to establish a society and government congenial to their own ideas and values. It is appropriate here to close with some reflections on Giap’s place among the great commanders of history, as well as the relevance of his experience to contemporary military affairs. These issues have been much on my mind as I wrote about the man over the last three years, and I expect that they have emerged in the minds of many of the book’s readers as well.

On the first issue, Giap’s career in large measure speaks for itself. He defeated two major Western powers in anticolonial wars. It is indisputable that colonialism and the struggles against it have been seminal forces in shaping the modern world. These subjects remain an abiding preoccupation for serious students of politics and military history today, and will surely remain so for some time. So the Vietnamese and their revolution matter, and Giap and his ideas matter as a part of this global story.

“Over the years, Giap would make his share of mistakes on the battlefield,” observes Professor Logevall, “but his record as a logistician, strategist, and organizer is nevertheless extraordinary and ranks him with the finest military leaders of modern history—with Wellington, Grant, Lee and Rommel. He proved spectacularly adept, in particular, at using the often-limited means at his disposal as well as the terrain, which he knew better than his adversaries because it was his own.”
¹
I cannot quarrel with a single word of that assessment, but in my estimation it does not go far enough. Giap’s achievements are more dazzling in scope than those of most of the other great captains of modern war, few of whom, it seems to me at least, fought against such great odds and prevailed.

Over the thirty years of his career as commander in chief, Giap not only frustrated the designs of two nations far stronger than his own both
militarily and technologically, but also continuously built up the strength and capabilities of his own military forces, seamlessly integrating them into a resilient political infrastructure that he himself had no small hand in creating. Few generals in history have been able to integrate so many different forms of warfare—guerrilla insurgency, guerrilla-style war waged by independent regular companies and battalions, mobile operations, sieges, and conventional offensives—to forward their broad strategic objectives.

As for the second issue, Giap’s relevance to contemporary warfare and military strategy is profound, but it cannot be easily summarized into a neat set of maxims and precepts. He did not develop an original theory of guerrilla war or protracted war. Rather, he deftly synthesized a number of classic strategies to the varied circumstances he faced in Vietnam. So varied were those circumstances, so great the challenges, and so eclectic Giap’s responses to them, that it is no exaggeration to say that his career is worthy of study by all serious students and practitioners of warfare today. What follows below is a modest attempt to summarize elements of his approach particularly relevant to contemporary conflict.

Like Mao, Giap was intensely concerned with the role of experience and knowledge in strategic decision making. Again and again in his writings, Giap called attention to the importance of continually re-examining what could be learned from the ever-expanding reservoir of one’s political and military experience, and how these experiences could inform future decisions. Only when such re-examination became a deeply ingrained habit of mind could one arrive at what Giap and the other Communists refer to as “correct thinking.” War, according to Giap, is a protean thing, and those who seek success must constantly examine their own actions and attitudes with unflinching honesty, as well as those of their adversaries, in an effort to improve performance in the present and the future.

One wellspring of Giap’s unshakeable confidence was his conviction that, while the military capabilities of his adversaries were qualitatively superior to his own, their
assessments
of the broad strategic realities on the ground were precisely the opposite. “The Communist Party’s leadership ability to analyze and adapt, to relate its resources to reality, and to avoid a sense of omnipotence as well as excessive caution was the link between its existing and potential forces and the future,” Gabriel Kolko wisely observes.
²
“The Communist Party’s genius was its ability to survive and adapt and to fulfill the [social and political] vacuum the United States and its dependents created.”
³
This, too, was part of Giap’s genius. As Giap saw
it, the French and the Americans were bound to fail in the long run because they did not engage in rigorous re-examination of their experiences, or those of their adversary. Thus, they failed to grasp the true nature of the balance of forces—military, political, social, psychological—that prevailed on the battlefield.

The power of the US military machine posed immense challenges to Giap as a commander. He knew that the conflict would result in horrific losses, but he also realized that those casualties were the inevitable cost of victory, and neither the reality of those casualties, as regrettable as they were, nor the destructive capacity of American forces, would prove to be decisive factors in the war’s outcome. The Americans came to the opposite conclusion. They were sublimely confident that the immense capabilities of their armed forces, coupled with Giap’s mediocrity—he was seen more as a stubborn butcher than a competent commander—would lead Communist forces first to despair and then to collapse. Yet, in the end, the Americans failed in Vietnam because proper understanding of the balance of forces proved more important than military capability.

Giap was first and foremost a
revolutionary war
strategist, which is to say he conceived of war primarily as a social struggle by people committed to breaking down the status quo and replacing it with a new set of power relationships and institutions, not as a strictly military activity carried out by full-time soldiers and guerrillas. Of course, the struggle had a very prominent military component. The military aspect of the conflicts with France and the United States was at times the most important, but the Communists never lost sight of the fact that their wars were political struggles for control of the energies and allegiance of the Vietnamese people as a whole. Such a conflict required a flexible and disciplined
social
strategy that could mobilize large numbers of highly motivated individuals committed to breaking down the old order and constructing a new one. As such, the work of building a powerful political infrastructure that could challenge French and American efforts was far more important than achieving victory in a series of conventional military battles and campaigns.