Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (4 page)

Soon after returning to his parents’ home in An Xa, he wrote and published his first piece of journalism in a French-language newspaper in Saigon. “Down with the Tyrant of Quoc Hoc” offered readers an account of the quit-school protest and a critical portrait of his erstwhile headmaster. Against the directive of the colonial authorities, Giap soon returned to Hue, where he made new radical contacts, began to read widely in Communist literature, and worked clandestinely in a prominent secret society called the Tan Viet. The organization contained a wide spectrum of anticolonialist activists. Its chief aim, Giap later wrote, “was to carry out first a national revolution, and then a world revolution.”
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Young Giap almost certainly formed the first Communist cell within the organization; the radical wing of the Tan Viet soon splintered off into an explicitly Communist political party, one of three discrete Communist organizations Ho Chi Minh was to unify in 1930 as the Vietnamese Communist Party.

Back in Hue in the late 1920s, Giap found paying work as a political journalist with a moderate reformist newspaper, writing for the underground radical press under various aliases. He participated in a series of protests that turned into a spontaneous uprising in the Annam provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tin in the spring and summer of 1930. A severe famine,
coupled with the draconian effects of the Great Depression and government lassitude, prompted one prominent nationalist party, the VNQDD, to attack a French army post. Poorly coordinated, the assaulting force was quickly and brutally put down, but the incident sparked a host of spontaneous uprisings in the factories and in the villages of the region.

At least one of his biographers, John Colvin, claims that Giap formally joined Ho’s Revolutionary Youth League (RYL) in 1930, though as with many assertions about Giap’s early life, corroboration is lacking. Certainly he would have been favorably disposed toward any organization founded by Ho. By 1930, the RYL, with 1,000 members and cells in all three regions of Vietnam, had become the chief subversive threat in the eyes of the French intelligence-gathering apparatus. Giap’s meteoric rise within the Communist Party in the 1930s suggests rather strongly that if he was not formally a member of the RYL, he had at least come to the attention of its founder, and had formed ties to its most promising believers.

Communist agents attempted to capitalize on popular discontent and unrest by orchestrating demonstrations and protest marches, many of which quickly degenerated into violent assaults on colonial authority. Government installations in the villages and cities were overrun and burned, and Vietnamese colonial functionaries and landowners were executed by angry mobs. The French authorities referred to the early 1930s as “the Red Terror.” In scores of villages, Communists formed local governing associations, called soviets, to mete out vigilante justice, reduce rents, and redistribute land to the poorest peasants.

The French response was swift and brutal. A march on the city of Vinh by civilians protesting conditions in the countryside was strafed by French fighters, killing about 200 people. Villages and livestock where the Communists had installed soviets were razed by Foreign Legionnaires. Some eighty suspected Communists were executed, and the Central Committee of the Party—its governing body—was captured in Saigon. Vo Nguyen Giap was among the 10,000 radicals picked up by the Sûreté and tried for sedition.

The facts about his imprisonment behind the grim walls of Lao Bao Penitentiary near the Laotian border remain cloudy, as Giap has seldom spoken on record about his time in jail. He was apparently sentenced to two years’ hard labor in early 1931 and served at least three months and perhaps as much as fifteen months.

It was in prison that he met a pretty fifteen-year-old girl with radical inclinations and a hatred of French authority that mirrored his own. Her name was Nguyen Thi Quang Thai. In late 1938, about six years after the two were released from prison, Giap married her. She soon bore him a daughter. Those close to Giap have reported that he was never happier than during the brief period, perhaps three years, that he, Quang Thai, and their daughter lived together as a family.

Interestingly, it may very well be true that Giap owed his early release from Lao Bao to the intervention of a powerful figure in the Sûreté Generale, Louis Marty. The Sûreté had started a file on Giap during his Quoc Hoc days; Marty apparently attempted to befriend Giap in an effort to turn him from the path of revolution to the path of service on behalf of France. One US intelligence report found in the Indochina Archives now located at Texas Tech University suggests that Marty sought to use Giap as a liaison between the Communists and the Sûreté in the late 1930s, when a Popular Front government in Paris friendly to the French Communist Party permitted the Communists in Indochina to function in the open. As a result of the Party’s expanded activities, the Communists gained a newfound legitimacy in the eyes of the progressive elements in Vietnamese society.

It appears that Marty cleared the way for Giap to resume his formal education. It would have been impossible for a former political prisoner in Indochina with a long record of anticolonial activity to have been admitted to the Lycée Albert Sarraut in Hanoi, the best preparatory school in all Vietnam, and a gateway to graduate study at the University of Hanoi, without an influential sponsor. In 1934, after a year of diligent study, Giap received his baccalaureate from Sarraut, with excellent marks in philosophy. Soon thereafter he was admitted to the school of law at the University of Hanoi to pursue a degree in law and political economy. He obtained the equivalent of a Western master’s degree in 1937.

While at university, Giap displayed the explosive energy and drive that would become his trademark in the long wars against the French and the United States. While pursuing doctoral studies, he worked as a history teacher at Thang Long High School in Hanoi in the morning. According to one of his professors, he was the most brilliant student in political economy in the 1938 academic year. Each year a senior economist from Paris selected a Vietnamese student for a prestigious graduate-level fellowship in Paris. In
1938, that economist was none other than Gaeton Pirou, director of French Prime Minister Paul Daumier’s cabinet. Pirou offered the fellowship to Giap, who promptly turned it down. He would not desert his comrades in the pursuit of national liberation.

Giap plainly viewed his history teaching duties as part of his contribution to the incipient revolution. Among his objectives at Thang Long, where he taught fourteen- to eighteen-year-old boys, was “to imbue my students with patriotism.”
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One of his students, a future ambassador to the United States named Bui Diem, remembered that the future commander in chief was “possessed by the demons of revolution and battle.”
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It was through journalism that Giap met two other future giants in the Communist movement: Pham Van Dong, later prime minister of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and Truong Chinh, the brilliant revolutionary strategist. All three men contributed articles to the French-language newspaper
Le Travail
in 1937. Giap wrote as well for radical newspapers in Hanoi, several of which were shut down for their attacks on the colonial administration.

As his commitment to the Communist Party solidified and his responsibilities increased, Giap abandoned his pursuit of a doctorate at the university. The exact nature of his subversive activities in 1939 and 1940 remains obscure. He wrote prodigiously for radical reformist newspapers. In 1939, he and Truong Chinh published a highly influential book (using pseudonyms) called
The Peasant Problem 1937–1938.
It offered a nuanced discussion of the role of the peasantry in Vietnamese politics.

Giap was no doubt gratified with the growth of the Party’s reputation as an ardent defender of workers’ and peasants’ interests and as the most disciplined and effective proponent of national liberation. According to French statistics, by early 1939, the Party had 2,000 members and 40,000 followers.
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Taking its cue from Stalin, the Party in Vietnam had been playing down class struggle against the Western powers in favor of resisting the evils of world fascism (i.e., Germany and Japan). Now, with France preoccupied with the growing threat of German ascendancy, the Party’s strategy once again placed the highest priority on national liberation from French imperialism.
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Meanwhile, Ho Chi Minh had left Moscow for China in late 1938 and attached himself to Mao’s Eighth Route Army, then united in an uneasy alliance with Chiang Kai-shek in a brutal war against the Japanese Imperial
Army. According to one of his biographers, Ho spent about two years writing articles about Mao’s war against Japan and digesting the tactics of guerrilla fighting.
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Given the formidable military responsibilities assigned to Giap by Ho in the 1940s—he would be asked to oversee the development of the revolutionary armed forces—it seems safe to assume that Giap made an in-depth study of Ho’s articles on war in China, as well as Mao’s brilliant lectures on guerrilla warfare published in 1938, and T. E. Lawrence’s account of his time in World War I as an adviser to the Arab insurgency against the Turks. Just before the outbreak of the War of Resistance in 1946, Giap told French General Raoul Salan, “My fighting gospel is T. E. Lawrence’s
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
I am never without it.”
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Guerrilla war was not, of course, a creation of the Communists or of Lawrence—the Vietnamese people had a long tradition of protracted guerrilla operations in their struggles against China, Champa, and the Mongols. In fact, guerrilla forces (typically small groups of lightly armed, informally trained insurgents) had operated all over the globe for centuries, and guerrilla warfare has played an important role in shaping the outcome of wars within and between nation states since nations as we know them first emerged out of the Middle Ages.

Before the end of the 1930s, Giap had begun to apply what he learned from his study to the highly fluid situation in Vietnam. The looming war against France would require guerrilla units trained not only in military tactics, but in revolutionary ideology as well, for guerrillas would be proselytizers as well as soldiers, living among the people and spreading the methods and doctrines of the revolutionary credo. Political cadres operating under guerrilla protection would work to convert the apolitical peasantry to the revolutionary struggle.

So it was that Giap, assigned the role of educating the Party leadership in military matters, pondered the critical questions: How could guerrilla units be raised and best deployed to expand base areas where the Vietnamese people would provide them with sustenance, moral support, and intelligence on French forces? How, in turn, could the guerrillas be protected from the predations of well-armed and technologically sophisticated French troops? How could military power and political agitation work symbiotically in war against colonial domination?

It seems clear from a reading of Giap’s writings and command decisions that, of all the military strategists he encountered before he took up
arms and built an army, Mao Zedong was the most influential. Strangely, Giap seldom mentions Mao in his writings on war even though his debt to the man is universally recognized by all serious students of Vietnam’s wars in the twentieth century. Mao, like Ho, understood that the greatest asset in the struggle to establish a Communist state was the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. Mao, writes Samuel Griffith, a sinologist who served with the US Marines in guerrilla operations in Central America, “has aptly compared guerrillas to fish, and the people to the water in which they swim. If the political temperature is right, the fish, however few in number, will thrive and proliferate. It is therefore the principal concern of all guerrilla leaders to get the water to the right temperature and kept there.”
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Giap took this notion to heart and never let it go. His way of war would, of course, be refined and modified in light of his experiences in thirty years of continuous battle, but several of his core ideas can be apprehended in the first few pages of Mao’s 1938 classic,
On Guerrilla War
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Guerrilla warfare has qualities and objectives peculiar to itself. It is a weapon that a nation inferior in arms and military equipment may employ against a more powerful aggressor nation. When the invader pierces deep into the heart of the weaker country and occupies her territory in a cruel and oppressive manner, there is no doubt that conditions of terrain, climate and society in general offer obstacles to his progress and may be used to advantage by those who oppose him. . . . Because guerrilla warfare basically derives from the masses and is supported by them, it can neither exist nor flourish if it separates itself from their sympathies and cooperation . . . In guerrilla warfare, select the tactic of seeming to come from the east and attacking from the west; avoid the solid, attack the hollow; attack; withdraw; deliver a lightning blow, seek a lightning decision. When guerrillas engage a stronger enemy, they withdraw when he advances; harass him when he stops; strike him when he is weary; pursue him when he withdraws. In guerrilla strategy, the enemy’s rear, flanks, and other vulnerable spots are his vital points, and there he must be harassed, attacked, dispersed, exhausted and annihilated.
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In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. World War II had begun. The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 made it quite clear that Stalin had abandoned his effort to form a united front with the Western democracies against Hitler. Communists in France were transformed from
patriotic allies into enemies of the state. The Communist parties inside France and throughout her colonies were declared illegal; several thousand Communists were picked up by the Sûreté in Vietnam though Giap was able to dodge arrest, and Ho was then out of reach, recruiting and organizing in the Vietnamese exile community in southern China.