Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (11 page)

As early as 1941, the senior leadership of the Indochinese Communist Party understood that independence could not be achieved without the creation of a full-time, regular army that was equipped with standardized modern weapons, both infantry and artillery, along with engineers, logistical support, and technical specialists. That army, given the nature of the Vietnamese terrain and economic and social structure, needed the support of militia. The most basic militia unit consisted of untrained peasants, including women. Their role was strictly defensive and informational, i.e., they provided intelligence on government activities and offered very limited resistance against French patrols near their villages. The other type of local militia, often of platoon size, had limited military training and was capable of cooperating with the regional units—the second-tier military forces of the revolutionary armed forces. Regional units were typically companies or battalions, trained well enough to plan and execute sabotage and ambush operations. The PAVN regulars, the full-time fighters, would assume greater and greater importance as the war progressed toward stage three of protracted war, the counteroffensive stage. Their role was to engage big-unit combat operations of significant
complexity, typically of battalion and regimental size and, beginning in late 1950, division level.

As Giap began to plan for regimental-size operations around 1949, it was clear that his regular army had to continue its expansion, its potpourri of out-of-date small arms had to be replaced, and new heavy weapons, especially mortars and recoilless rifles, had to be integrated into their units. Despite the enormity of the challenge, between the outbreak of war in 1946 and mid-1949, Giap transformed a poorly armed, loosely organized regular force that was formed into battalions into a first-class light infantry force of five 10,000-man infantry divisions, each of which had its own small artillery, antiaircraft, engineer, and logistics elements. In 1949, these divisions lacked a full complement of the weapons and specialists they were meant to have on paper, but they were functioning divisions nonetheless. This was a major achievement, considering that it occurred in a time of general war.

This leap in organizational development had implications of enormous importance, as General Phillip Davidson, an American officer who served with distinction in the Vietnam war, explains: “In every modern army, the division is the basic operational formation, the smallest unit to combine all ground arms, to maintain itself, and to fight independently if need be. In the history of every developing army, the advance to the divisional structure is the move from the minor leagues of warfare into the ‘the majors.’ ”
¹⁹
The distinguishing characteristics of the Vietminh’s regular army were its high level of esprit, its extraordinary mobility in jungle and mountainous terrain, and, once it began division-level operations in late 1950, its capacity to endure severe hardship and heavy losses while retaining its effectiveness in combat.

While the senior strategists of France and the US advisers who joined them in 1950 continuously underrated Giap’s strategic acumen and the capabilities of his army, the junior officers and enlisted men who fought against Communist Vietnamese regular troops and guerillas over thirty years did not. The consensus among Western combat infantrymen was that their adversaries were well trained, tenacious, and resourceful. Much of the credit for their excellence surely lay in the intensive indoctrination sessions and ideological education that soldiers underwent throughout their time in service. Few armies in the twentieth century possessed such unity of purpose and commitment as the People’s Army of Vietnam, and certainly no army built on an agrarian peasant base came even close. One of Giap’s
cardinal principles, perhaps his
first
principle, was that military training had to produce soldiers who understood the nature of the war, and the nature of the enemy, with one mind, one type of “political consciousness.” “Correct thinking” was far more important than firepower. Giap was a relentless and passionate advocate of political education within the army. He himself wrote or co-wrote many of the pamphlets and training manuals used by instructors during both wars for independence.

In Giap’s mind, political indoctrination remained the only surefire way to compensate for the inevitable material disadvantages the PAVN fought under when engaging professional Western military establishments. “Profound awareness of the aims of the Party, boundless loyalty to the cause of the nation and the working class, and a spirit of unreserved sacrifice are fundamental questions for the army,” Giap wrote in 1959. “Therefore, the political work in its ranks is of first importance.
It is the soul of the army.
”
²⁰

Studies conducted by the Rand Corporation and the American intelligence establishment during the American War make it clear that the average officer in the PAVN knew little about Marxist Leninism’s vision of a classless society. It is safe to assume this held true for the soldiers who fought in the War of Resistance as well. Political education within the PAVN was far more concerned with instilling a commitment to one’s fellow soldiers, to the army as a whole, and to the Party as a vehicle for national liberation. Giap’s success in building an effective army is all the more remarkable when one considers that the average Vietnamese recruit entered army service with little education, no experience with “team building” activities such as team sports, a distrust of outsiders, particularly strangers who exercised authority, and virtually no experience with the world outside his or her home village.

The main force units consisted mainly of men who had received some military training in the village militia and/or regional forces before they were promoted into the regular army. PAVN training of regular infantry units was similar to that of Western forces. Close-order drill and small-unit tactics took up much of the recruit’s time at first. Later, great emphasis was placed on camouflage and concealment—far more so than in US Army or Marine training during the same era. And unlike regular French and American infantry, the Vietminh soldiers were well trained in night operations.

A unique feature of PAVN’s approach to war concerned its extensive logistical preparation. Western forces on the offensive are typically supplied via motorized vehicles from the rear, or from the air. PAVN supply officers, however, developed ingenious ways of preparing a battlefield and its approaches with supplies and fortifications
before
the arrival of maneuver forces. This required superb planning and highly disciplined bunker and supply depot construction units, often working under sustained time pressure.

Combat operations in Giap’s regular army were exceptionally well rehearsed. Soldiers in tactical units were typically briefed on their mission in detail in classrooms around a sand table. Carefully choreographed “walk throughs” of maneuvers within training camps followed. For major assault operations, the PAVN often built replicas of installations and fortifications they could expect to meet in combat.

Statistics concerning the size and makeup of the PAVN in the early years of the War of Resistance are scarce and remain rough estimates. Australian historian Robert O’Neill offers a reasonable estimate that the main forces expanded from 32 battalions of about 600 men each in 1947, to 117 battalions in 1951.
²¹
Most of those battalions were, of course, composed of infantryman. Perhaps 15 percent were light artillery, combat engineer, and supply units. More specialized units were formed toward the end of the conflict.

The PAVN lacked standardized small arms at the beginning of the French Indochina War, possessing a motley assortment of French, Japanese, American, and Chinese weapons secured during and after World War II. Until the People’s Liberation Army of Communist China (the PLA) began to supply weapons and war matériel in limited quantities in 1949, the PAVN had to make do with a handful of 37mm antiaircraft guns and 75mm field howitzers as heavy weapons, but they were able to produce primitive mortars, hand grenades, and small arms ammunition in makeshift armories within the Viet Bac from around 1947 on. No Western army could function with such a limited supply of heavy weapons and no aircraft support whatsoever. No responsible Western commander would have initiated operations with such limited assets.

Everyone within Vietminh-controlled territory was part of Giap’s resistance machine. The entire country was divided during the war into approximately a dozen military zones—their boundaries and number
changed over time—each of which had its own command group, as well as sub-commands at the provincial and district levels. Giap, of course, had final authority over major combat operations in all the military zones, but his subordinates in the field had the authority to revise and reverse plans depending on the ebb and flow of battle.

Giap’s general staff was initially organized on the American model, with four core functional divisions: personnel, intelligence, operations, and logistics. In the latter stages of the war, it was reorganized along the more byzantine and redundant lines of Mao’s PLA, where Party and military responsibilities overlapped in a way that is difficult for an outsider to decipher. As in many Communist armies, each echelon from division down to company level had a political officer, or commissar, who looked after morale and political training, in addition to a military commander who was responsible for operations and the combat readiness of his troops.

At the beginning of 1947, 50,000 political cadres were actively working within towns and villages throughout the country with a heavy concentration in Tonkin and Annam. A year later that number had risen to over 100,000.
²²
How they fit into the army scheme of organization is unclear. They might have worked in close cooperation with the army commissars, or they might have been formally attached and under the command of those commissars.

Specialist and technical officers were in desperately short supply during the first half of the War of Resistance. Giap’s first officers had received limited staff training with either the Nationalist Chinese army—which was at various junctures friendly to the Vietminh during World War II—or the PLA.

Until late in 1950, the PAVN had little in the way of motor transport. The logistical system depended on the resources Giap had in hand: people, reinforced bicycles, and pack animals. Porters were conscripted from the civilian population to ferry food, ammunition, and heavy weapons from one battlefield to another. It took anywhere from two to four porters to transport food, heavy weapons, and other supplies for one infantryman.
²³
By the time Giap launched his first major military offensive in the fall of 1950, he had expanded Vietminh regular and regional forces to 250,000 soldiers, not including porters.

With the sage guidance of Ho Chi Minh and Truong Chinh, Giap developed a highly nuanced and sophisticated understanding of how to use
socio-political activity—organization, mobilization, and thought control or “consciousness raising”—to focus the energies of the entire population under Vietminh control on achieving the Revolution’s objectives. Taken together, these techniques of political
dau tranh
allowed Giap to mobilize an astonishing amount of on-going human activity, choreographed in minute detail, toward (1) building an alternative society and government, marked by revolutionary fervor, high morale, and unity of purpose as defined by the senior leadership; and (2) the breakdown of the legitimacy of the colonial puppet government in the eyes of the entire country. Thus, political
dau tranh
was at once a constructive and a corrosive activity. In the apt words of Douglas Pike, the essential concept of
dau tranh
is

people as an instrument of a war. The mystique surrounding it involved the organization, mobilization and motivation of people. . . . Violence is necessary to it but is not its essence. The goal is to seize power by disabling the society, using special means [i.e., assassination, propaganda campaigns, sabotage], chiefly organizational. In fact, organization is the great god of
dau tranh
strategy and counts for more than ideology or military tactics. The basic instrument is a united front [the Vietminh, that is], an organization of organizations, casting a vast web over the people, enmeshing them.
²⁴

By around 1950, the Party had organized the “struggle movement” at various levels of development in virtually every province and city in Vietnam. It was strongest in northern Tonkin, along the coast of Annam, and northwest of Saigon. The movement exerted great psychological and social pressure on the entire population in Vietnam—including French civilians and soldiers, colonial troops of African origin, and those Vietnamese who supported the French—to accept the Party’s perceptions of “reality,” especially its assertion that protracted war would inevitably lead to discouragement and disillusionment of the French Expeditionary Force (FEF) and the collapse of its malevolent designs of re-conquest.

According to Pike, the expansion of the Vietminh, and later the Vietcong infrastructure in the American War, was accomplished through three “action programs.” The Binh Van program was directed at the colonial government’s officials and soldiers, particularly the Vietnamese, Algerians, and Moroccans who fought in the FEF. The areas under colonial control were flooded with printed propaganda, radio broadcasts, and literally
millions of face-to-face clandestine meetings by Vietminh political cadres with those in the enemy camp, or the families of those individuals. Many colonial agencies and military units were penetrated by Vietminh agents who engaged in sabotage and disinformation. The goal: induce defection or at least desertion. Armed propaganda units reinforced these efforts with selective assassinations and threats of terror.

Dich Van was directed not only at ordinary villagers under colonial control, but also at the people of France and the rest of the world following the events in Vietnam. Here newspapers and government-issued communiqués tried to sell the war as a “David versus Goliath” struggle for self-determination and independence. Emissaries were sent abroad to speak on behalf of the Revolution and gain notable allies in the West.