Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (5 page)

The Party in Vietnam had to shift rapidly to clandestine activities in the rural countryside and abandon indoctrination work in the urban centers. By the summer of 1940, Germany had conquered France, and the Vichy regime found itself under pressure from Germany’s ally, Japan, to permit the Japanese to deploy troops and establish bases in Vietnam in order to carry out attacks on the Chinese and, before too long, to wage war against the United States and Great Britain across the Pacific Ocean. In September 1940, the Japanese entered Vietnam in force. They were the new masters of Vietnam, despite a face-saving agreement France had reached with Japan that officially recognized French sovereignty in Indochina and permitted the French colonial administration police to administer day-to-day political and economic affairs. The Vietnamese Communists welcomed these developments, for they sensed greater opportunities than dangers in the days ahead. For Giap, and for the Revolution, World War II would change everything.

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UPHEAVAL AND OPPORTUNITY: WORLD WAR II

W
orld War II dealt a fatal blow to colonialism by awakening passionate nationalist yearnings among the colonized peoples of Asia and Africa. The great powers envisaged their long war against the Axis as a struggle of free men against the forces of tyranny and darkness. According to the landmark Atlantic Charter signed by Britain and the United States in August 1941, the postwar world was to be shaped according to the enlightened principles of self-determination and respect for the human rights of all, and new governments would be constructed along Western democratic lines. Prewar empires would be dismantled, but circumstances dictated that the dismemberment was likely to take place slowly and deliberately by a yet undefined process. Despite their lofty pronouncements of freedom and equality for all peoples, the old empires were not likely to relinquish easily possessions they had exploited for natural resources, cheap labor,
and trade. Their efforts to retain control were bound to clash with the rising tide of nationalism and thirst for unfettered independence that the war had done so much to unleash in the underdeveloped world. In Vietnam, the clash was sure to be particularly complex and stormy, for in very few colonized nations had the war produced an independence movement as resilient, disciplined, or shrewdly led.

As we shall see, by war’s end, the Communists under Ho Chi Minh had unified the country’s nationalist factions in a classic front organization, established themselves as the voice of the Vietnamese people, and even managed to seize temporary control over the country after the French administration was utterly humiliated militarily in a coup d’état by the Japanese army in the spring of 1945. That the Japanese were clearly on the verge of defeat at the hands of the British and the Americans only confirmed France’s weakness in the eyes of Vietnamese patriots of all stripes.

France had been at the outset of the war the second largest empire on earth, covering more than 6 million square miles and containing 80 million souls. Her colonies in Equatorial and West Africa were together as large as the United States. She had important holdings as well in North Africa and the Caribbean, and was a key player in the Middle East. France’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Germany and the loss of Indochina—the jewel in the Empire’s crown—to the Japanese had a devastating effect on its sense of itself as a great power. To a far greater extent than Great Britain, recovering the most important holdings of its pre-war empire came to be seen as essential in restoring France’s honor and its rightful place of influence in international affairs.

The trouble was that with a few exceptions, leading French politicians, especially the imperious General Charles de Gaulle, who emerged from the war as the most powerful figure in France, could not see that, in the words of Fredrik Logevall, the events of World War II had “dealt a blow to [French] imperial authority from which it never would fully recover.”
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As the war approached its dramatic conclusion, “de Gaulle spoke of the cohesion, the unbreakable bond between metropolitan France and her overseas territories. Like so many in the Free French movement, he failed to grasp that the colonial peoples might consider liberation from foreign rule as important as he did.”
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In de Gaulle’s view, a few vague concessions by way of political rights and economic opportunities to the Indochinese were certainly within the realm of possibility—perhaps even a kind of limited independence within a French Union—but true independence for Vietnam
was unthinkable. France had to remain in ultimate control of Vietnam’s economic development and foreign policy and its military.

The remarkable success of Ho’s Communists between 1940 and 1945 was due in no small measure to their prescience in reading the trajectory of the world war and in developing an ingenious strategy to take advantage of that trajectory. France’s weakness in Indochina was first made clear when she was humiliatingly defeated by Nazi Germany in June 1940 and then, three months later, forced to permit Japan to occupy Vietnam. The Japanese were utterly indifferent to Vietnamese longings for independence—to have granted it would have been a distraction from their overarching plan. They were content to come to an agreement with the French colonial administration, leaving it in charge of governing the country and maintaining law and order outside the main cities, where the Japanese themselves were entrenched.

Ho and his lieutenants early on recognized that these events could lead to a potentially explosive surge of Vietnamese nationalism. That surge would present them with a golden opportunity to establish control over the country’s faction-ridden nationalists, and begin to build an alternative political infrastructure among the peasantry. When the war ended in Allied victory—as Ho and Giap had believed it would—their movement could take advantage of the chaos and dislocation bound to result, march in strength out of the hinterlands, and seize the reins of power in Hanoi and Saigon. They earnestly hoped from the earliest days of the war that they would be able to enlist both material aid and moral support from the United States in the wake of the Japanese surrender and a much-weakened and discredited French empire.

To achieve these ambitious ends, it would be necessary to establish a front organization and to keep control, albeit clandestine control, of the front’s program in the hands of the Communists. That front would soon be known to the world as the Vietminh. The objectives of the front as Ho and Giap conceived them were really quite straightforward and would remain as such throughout the War of Resistance with France (1946–1954): mobilize the peasantry behind the front and use their collective strength and Communist organizational techniques to build up a politico-military apparatus that would be strong enough to wage war against France should it attempt to re-establish its prewar hegemony.

Vo Nguyen Giap played an enormously important role in the revolutionary movement during World War II, for Ho Chi Minh assigned him
primary responsibility for organizing that politico-military apparatus, at first in the jungles and mountains of northern Tonkin—the location of the Communists’ first large-scale base area, or “liberated zone”—and then farther south toward the Red River Delta, with its 7 million inhabitants and vast natural resources.

VIETNAM AND THE OUTBREAK OF WORLD WAR II

France’s declaration of war against Germany forced Paris to redeploy its Indochinese forces to France to buttress her army for the war in Europe. France’s military weakness afforded the well-organized Communists great opportunities. This was not lost on the French commander in Indochina, Admiral Jean Decoux, who called for a “total and rapid” crackdown on the Party. For several months, the Sûreté ruthlessly hunted down its leaders, imprisoning many, and forcing others to go into hiding. Giap himself narrowly escaped imprisonment in the “White Terror.” He went underground in Hanoi, albeit temporarily, while most of the leaders of the Revolution dispersed into the northern mountains of Tonkin or south China to regroup and weigh their options.

The Imperial Empire of Japan quickly capitalized on France’s weakness. Some 6,500 Japanese troops occupied Vietnam in September 1940, just a few months after France surrendered to Hitler. After forcing the Vichy regime to sign an agreement “permitting” the occupation, the Japanese allowed the French to retain titular autonomy in civil matters, as well as responsibility for maintaining law and order in the countryside. But there was no doubt who held the reins of power in Vietnam: Tokyo called the tune, the French did the singing.

The Japanese army confirmed its dominance in Vietnam by attacking French military outposts throughout the north as it crossed over into the country from southern China, routing many of the French garrisons. The French-Japanese clash was quickly resolved by diplomacy, but not before the Vietnamese Communists opted to take advantage of the ensuing chaos in northern Vietnam by launching a series of uncoordinated uprisings against both the French and the Japanese in the name of Vietnamese independence. The Bac Son Rebellion was the most prominent of these uprisings. It was launched in October 1940, as several Vietnamese guerrilla
units attacked retreating French forces in the hopes of gaining a foothold in northern Tonkin. The guerrillas managed to establish some local village and district administrations, but within a matter of a couple of months, the French had crushed most of the guerrilla units or dispersed them deep into the mountains.

Still, the premature uprisings were useful to the Party. Giap took away a valuable lesson from the failed Bac Son uprising: military action without proper political and military preparation was doomed to failure. From the earliest days of World War II until the Communists’ seizure of Saigon in 1975, Giap often exhorted local Communist leaders and their restive forces to resist the temptation to pick up arms and launch offensive operations before they were sure that local conditions in the countryside favored success. In fact, during the early years of the war against France, Giap joined Ho in discouraging military adventurism because it threatened the expansion of the movement’s political and military forces.

The rebellions of fall 1940 also provided the Revolution with a vital asset: a nucleus of combat-tested guerrilla fighters with a sound grounding in small unit tactics. The most powerful of these were the men of some twenty platoons commanded by a Nung, Chu Van Tan. (The Nungs are non-ethnic Vietnamese who live in the hills of northern Vietnam and practice slash-and-burn agriculture.) Giap, who was at this time just beginning to familiarize himself with the language and culture of the Nung (among other mountain, or Montagnard, peoples), would quickly befriend Tan, already a member of the Communist Party, and rely on his military wisdom and experience to develop the earliest Vietminh guerrilla units. This tough Nung warrior played an indispensable role in helping Giap carve out a remote base area in the contiguous provinces of Cao Bang, Langson, and Bac Kan—all lightly populated, mountainous provinces bordering on China. That base, called the Viet Bac, would by war’s end encompass much of the territory of northern Tonkin.

GIAP’S RISE TO POWER

Vo Nguyen Giap’s rise to the senior leadership of the Revolution, and to the awesome responsibilities that came with his appointment as commander and chief of the Vietnam People’s Army (VPA), really began in May 1940,
when he and Pham Van Dong were ordered by Ho to journey via railway and truck from Hanoi into southern China. Their mission: make contact with Ho Chi Minh and help him work out a strategy for the Party to achieve dominance of the independence movement that was sure to emerge once the world war could be brought to an end with Japan’s defeat—a development Ho and the other senior leaders believed to be inevitable.

Giap’s journey to Kunming was a harried one. At several junctures he and Dong had to jump off trains to escape capture and certain imprisonment, or even execution, by the Sûreté. Sometime in June, the two budding young Communist leaders were taken to the banks of the Tsuy-Hu River in Kunming just as Ho approached the river bank—in disguise, as he almost always was in the days before 1943. The three men spent several days in earnest conversation about the Revolution’s prospects, as well as the role the two younger men were to play in the impending drama.

Ho had just returned to Kunming in southern China after a long absence in the Soviet Union and northern China. He could sense that France’s position in Vietnam was increasingly tenuous. Ever the political bridge builder and shrewd operator, Ho had just begun in April 1940 to organize a new front among at least four discrete parties of Vietnamese nationalists in exile in southern China. It seems that while in northern China the previous year, Ho had received a first-class tutorial in guerrilla warfare while serving with Mao’s Eighth Route Army. Beginning with the first meeting along the Tsuy-Hu River Ho passed on what he had learned to Giap, who for all intents and purposes would remain among Ho’s favorite colleagues for the rest of Ho’s long life.

Giap was deeply impressed by Ho’s simplicity of manner and quiet charisma. “I found him immediately close to me, as if we were old acquaintances.”
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By all accounts, Ho was deeply impressed by Giap’s intelligence and commitment. Taking note of the former school teacher’s keen interest in the martial history of Vietnam and his fascination with Napoleon’s campaigns, he suggested that the young revolutionary journey to Yenan to study Communist organizational techniques as well as military strategy and tactics at a Chinese Communist Party school. Giap was joined once more by Dong, and the two men traveled to Kweiyang, where they waited for transport to the school for some time, perhaps as long as two months.

By his own account, Giap used the time well.
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Like Ho, he attached himself to the Eighth Route Army, and spent a great deal of time devouring
Mao’s seminal works on guerrilla warfare and people’s war, of which guerrilla fighting is but one part. At least one source has it that Giap met Mao himself, but this remains a matter of conjecture. One thing is certain: Giap began his thirty-year practice of adapting Mao’s ideas on people’s war to the protean, highly volatile situation in Vietnam very early in the 1940s. Many of his instructors were surely officers in Mao’s army, schooled in both organizational doctrine and tactics, and were most likely combat veterans.