Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam

GIAP

GIAP

THE GENERAL WHO DEFEATED AMERICA IN VIETNAM

James A. Warren

GIAP

Copyright © James A. Warren, 2013.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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ISBN: 978–0–230–10712–0

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Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: September 2013

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Printed in the United States of America.

To Lynn Ho, for unstinting support on the firing line

and

in memory of Major General Fred Haynes, USMC friend, colleague, and worthy adversary of Vo Nguyen Giap

CONTENTS

Introduction

Images and Maps

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

W
hen the Communists finally celebrated their conquest of South Vietnam in April 1975 after thirty years of unceasing conflict, Premier Pham Van Dong pointed to a senior general, a short, slight man with darting eyes, a high forehead, and an air of energetic intelligence, and said, “There is the architect of our victory.” The general, Vo Nguyen Giap, wore a simple officer’s uniform bearing none of the scores of medals and ribbons earned over more than thirty-four years of war against his French, Japanese, South Vietnamese, and American adversaries. Giap, then the minister of defense and a senior Party Politburo member, had been the commander in chief of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) between 1944 and 1973. The PAVN was the institution that did more than any other to defeat two great Western powers and secure the political and military goals of the Revolution—a feat as remarkable as it was unprecedented. Giap, though, was far more than a field general commanding an entire army. He built the Communist armed forces from a single platoon in 1944 to a twenty-plus-division force, indisputably one of the most formidable armies of the twentieth century.

Giap was not a soldier who suffered fools gladly. Most of the other senior leaders of the Party found him abrasive, overbearing, egotistical, and a tenacious infighter, traits that served him very well throughout his war years. His French and American adversaries characterized him as a ruthless fanatic, a butcher who time and again refused to quit the battlefield after taking losses no twentieth-century Western army commander could have suffered and retained command. A kind of steely defiance and confidence utterly lacking in ambivalence seemed to shape Giap’s decisions. As he remarked just before the outbreak of war against the French, “If France is
so shortsighted as to unleash conflict, let it be known that we shall struggle until death, without permitting ourselves to stop for any consideration of persons of any struggle.” This was not mere rhetoric. In the wars against France and the United States, 1,100,000 Communist soldiers perished.

There was no quit in General Giap, or the army he created. Driven by personal tragedy—his beloved first wife, a sister-in-law who was an ardent Communist in her own right, and several other close family members died at the hands of French jailers during World War II. He made no secret of his opinions of his adversaries: they were barbaric exploiters of the downtrodden masses, manipulators, imperialistic double-talkers whose self-righteous rhetoric of freedom and democracy belied their goal of conquest.

As both theoretician and practitioner, Giap’s primary concern was with protracted, or people’s war, a doctrine developed by Mao Zedong designed to marshal the human and material resources of a revolutionary movement against an oppressive government that, at least initially, possessed far greater military assets than those of the Revolution. As Giap would write in the most important of his many books, “Only a long-term war could enable us to utilize to the maximum our political trump cards, to overcome our material handicap and to transform our weakness into strength.”

Over thirty years of continuous conflict against nations far stronger materially and militarily than his own, Giap refined and adapted Mao’s ideas to fit the particular conditions of Vietnam. He brilliantly applied what historian Douglas Pike calls the “two pincers” of revolutionary power, political struggle and armed struggle, placing greater emphasis on one form over the other at various stages of the Revolution.

Perhaps Giap’s most important contributions to protracted warfare were his flexible integration of three types of forces (local militia in the villages, regional forces, and full-time main force units), and his creative use of various “fighting forms”—guerrilla warfare, mobile independent operations by battalions, conventional set-piece battles, and political mobilization.

Almost forty years after the war, we still have a great deal to learn about Giap’s day-to-day decisions and his exact place within the senior leadership. The Vietnamese Communists assiduously maintained a policy of collective decision making during their conflicts. Documents and recollections of Giap’s comrades in arms do not agree on whether the general was the most influential among the half-dozen men who formulated Communist
strategy in the period covered in this book. Nor is there a clear consensus on the extent of his responsibilities as commander in chief. Remarkably, the Vietnamese themselves have not yet produced an authoritative biography of the man who clearly played a critical role in the unification of all Vietnam under Communist leadership.

Thus, let the reader beware: in describing Giap’s decisions and strategy, I am to a certain degree describing the decisions and strategy of the entire senior leadership in Hanoi. Giap, at least in this book, figures as the embodiment of the Vietnamese Communist way of war in the twentieth century. A biography of Senior General Giap, in the sense that that word is used in the West, is quite frankly impossible. A blow-by-blow of Giap’s life and career is beyond our reach, at least for now.

In this book, I make no attempt to address in depth the scholarly debates swirling around the political maneuvering among the senior leadership. I do point out their existence, albeit selectively. To attempt to do more would be to go beyond the central purpose of the book. Claims and counterclaims concerning the power base and influence of one key figure or another at a given time, even among scholars with access to all available Vietnamese language sources, seem to me very sketchy, at times appearing to reflect more of the bias of the researcher than a judicious reading of the historical record. I can only add that after having studied the wars in Vietnam for twenty-odd years and read much of the authoritative scholarship, I have come to the conclusion that Vo Nguyen Giap was almost certainly the most important strategist of the Revolution next to Ho Chi Minh. He was without question the primary architect of the Communist military machine.

This book might best be described as an interpretive history of Giap as a strategist and commander. Because of the formidable limitations of the sources, the reader is advised that many of the “facts” about the trajectory of battles and the units involved are disputed, and any analysis of Giap’s decision making—of his thinking about strategy in general—must be somewhat speculative. This is why at certain junctures, my method has been akin to that of a literary critic attempting to interpret a story line through close reading of texts written by Giap, his contemporaries, and scores of historians who have charted the complex history of the wars in Vietnam.

More than in other historical fields, the work of military historians tends to reflect a cultural and nationalist bias. This is understandable. Wars
are violent contests of national will, involving moral matters of courage, endurance, and honor. The temptation to favor one’s own side in telling the story is very difficult to resist. Thousands of good books have been written about the wars in Vietnam by American and French historians. In the vast majority of these, the writers devote far more attention to their own forces and strategies and to diagnoses of how they lost. This book will have served a useful purpose if it counteracts that bias, showing how the Communists fought and won
.

Ho Chi Minh was, of course, the spiritual father and living symbol of independence to the Vietnamese people. His asceticism, charisma, and patient dedication to a unified Vietnam inspired a nation of more than 25 million exploited peasants—rice farmers, fisherman, factory workers, and coal miners. But Giap bore the primary responsibility for meshing Communist organizational techniques with the explosive yearnings of a colonized people for independence, and for forging the primary weapon of the Revolution. Giap defeated the world’s supreme military power despite losing almost every multi-battalion battle he fought against the United States between 1965 and 1973. But as a PAVN colonel famously pointed out to US Army Major Harry G. Summers Jr., just before Saigon fell in 1975: while it was true that the Americans had won all the major battles, it was “also irrelevant.”