Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (14 page)

Now, Colonel Charton, who was meant to be rescued by LePage, tried in vain to rescue the remnants of LePage’s unit. Charton’s native guides slashed through dense jungle trails toward Cox Xa gorge and LePage’s doomed force. By October 7—four days after Charton left Cao Bang—LePage’s First Para Legionnaires, his only jungle-savvy unit, broke through the Vietminh lines to connect with Charton’s forces. Most of the rest of both French columns—LePage’s and Charton’s—were captured, killed, or left wandering aimlessly in the bush.

Giap now had all the French forces along RC4 in near panic and disarray. His French counterpart, Carpentier, seemed immobilized and detached from the rush of events. Rather than organize a defense of some sort, he lost his nerve and ordered a retreat of all remaining forces that had stumbled south into the fort at That Khe to evacuate that base and head for the strongest of the French forts on RC4, Langson. On October 10, 1950, the beleaguered FEF forces headed south, along with That Khe’s civilians. Giap’s regulars, smelling blood and victory, ambushed the column, cutting it up into small groups of desperate, confused soldiers.

In the end, only a few hundred troops stumbled into Langson, deeply shaken by the power and skill of Giap’s peasant army. The rest were killed or captured. Among those who fell into the tender hands of the PAVN was Colonel Charton himself. He would later suffer through the rigors of long Communist interrogations, re-education camps, and brainwashing sessions.

Of the French bases along RC4, only Langson remained in French hands. Rather than do the tactically sound thing and organize a powerful mobile
defense force to punch up Rte. 1A, unthreatened by Vietminh forces, and reinforce Langson with its immense stores of weapons and equipment, the baffled Carpentier ordered its evacuation on October 17. It was a shameful act, for Giap’s troops were days away from closing in on the fort there. The garrison of 4,000, mostly support troops, left in a panic without bothering to destroy its vast stores of weapons and more than one hundred tons of ammunition, much of it for 75mm field howitzers that Giap would put to good use later. The cache included 450 trucks, greatly enhancing Vietminh mobility, which up until then had been on foot and bicycle, 900 machine guns, 450 submachine guns, 8,000 rifles, and vast quantities of food, clothing, and medical supplies. Abandoning Langson long before it was under attack by Vietminh guns, Carpentier confirmed the adage of US Marine General Alexander Vandegrift: “Positions are seldom lost because they have been destroyed, but almost invariably because the leader has decided in his own mind that the position cannot be held.”
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Carpentier now spoke openly to staffers of looming disaster and even had plans drawn up for the evacuation of all women and children from Hanoi. “When the smoke cleared,” writes historian Bernard Fall,

the French had suffered their greatest colonial defeat since Montcalm had died at Quebec. . . . By January 1, 1951, the French had lost control of all of North Viet-Nam to the north of the Red River and were now desperately digging to hold on to the key pawn of the whole Indochina war—The Red River delta.
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The war, as historian Fredrik Logevall observes, “had entered a new, intensive, deadly phase, as the Cold War not only internationalized the diplomatic nature of the conflict, but militarized it in unprecedented ways.”
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Giap, for his part, celebrated his dramatic victory in the way soldiers all over the world have done for centuries: he joined his comrades in a big party and got himself drunk, reportedly for the first time in his life.

As the new year began, Giap, unopposed in the field, positioned three full divisions around the perimeter of the Red River Delta. His acquisition of tons of military stores and ammunition at Langson no doubt built great confidence among the Vietminh regulars.

In a presentation to the political commissars of the 316th Division after the taking of Langson, Giap stated his vision of the trajectory of the war
now that the Revolution controlled all of Tonkin north of the Red River Delta, and many districts within that delta:

The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: he has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long drawn-out war.
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In other words, the conflict appeared to be entering the third stage of protracted war: Giap would seek to liquidate the French military threat before the Americans became directly involved or before French morale could recover from the shock of its series of defeats along Route Coloniale 4. Giap continued:

Our strategy early in the course of the third stage is that of a general counteroffensive. We shall attack without cease until final victory, until we have swept the enemy forces from Indochina. During the first and second stage, we have gnawed away at the enemy forces; now we must destroy them. All military activities of the third stage must tend to that simple aim—the total destruction of French forces.
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5

1951–1953

T
he defeat of the FEF in the border campaign quite naturally brought the military’s Indochina strategy into question in Paris. Either France had to escalate sharply its commitment to defeat the insurgency militarily, or it should reopen negotiations with Ho Chi Minh. French politicians were profoundly ambivalent. Domestic support was clearly crumbling, yet for a variety of reasons, many influential figures in French political and military life believed the honor of France demanded that she prevail against the Communist upstarts. For these men, negotiations were distinctly unpalatable, and in some cases, unthinkable.

The response of the government in Paris to this dilemma was to send additional troops to Vietnam in small increments and authorize an ambitious expansion of the Vietnamese National Army. The FEF would peak at 200,000 men in the War of Resistance, but, given the unforgiving terrain and climate, as well as its mission to defend its own installations and the urban centers, pacify the villages, and conduct offensive operations, the force was fatally undersized. To pay for these initiatives, the French called upon the Americans. Unwilling to countenance the expansion of
Communism in Asia after “losing” China to Mao, and fighting their own war in Korea, the Americans were willing to pay.

France’s reluctance to make the hard choices required was masked by the appointment of its most distinguished soldier to replace Carpentier as the commander of the FEF in Indochina. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny had an explosive temper and was regarded by many as a megalomaniac, but his credentials as a combat commander were second to none. His brilliant performance during the first six months of his tenure in Vietnam would foster the illusion that the Vietminh were on the run.

De Lattre insisted on absolute authority in Vietnam. He refused to seek advance approval for his initiatives from Paris, and exercised dual political and military control over all of Indochina. Arriving in Saigon on December 17, 1950, he immediately fired scores of defeatist officers and canceled his predecessor’s panicked order to evacuate women and children. He knew his troops would fight harder if civilian lives were at stake. He put thousands of French colonial and Vietnamese civilians to work constructing the “De Lattre Line,” 1,200 mutually reinforcing defensive positions around the Red River Delta, with a view to blocking any Vietminh thrusts. The fledgling Vietnamese army, ostensibly an independent force under control of the Vietnamese government but in reality an adjunct force under French command, would man these static posts, thereby freeing up thousands of tough French Legionnaires and paratroopers for offensive operations. Through the sheer force of his personality, General de Lattre restored French morale in Vietnam virtually overnight. Time was of the essence, for he felt sure Giap’s forces were about to strike into the Red River Delta. He was right.

Giap had seized the initiative during the border campaign. By December 1950, thanks to unremitting guerrilla warfare, the tentacles of the Vietminh’s political infrastructure were extending outward everywhere—even in Cochinchina.

In his analysis of war strategy published early in 1950, “The Military Task in Preparing for the General Counter Offensive,” Giap argued that stage three of the war would most likely emerge gradually as French forces were worn down in a series of battles combining increasingly powerful mobile warfare in selective areas with guerrilla operations in the enemy’s rear—meaning, of course, all the territory ostensibly under the control of the FEF, at least during the daylight hours. It was not necessary for the revolutionary forces to achieve general military superiority over the adversary before the beginning of the offensive, as Mao had argued. Rather, it was only
necessary for the PAVN to achieve temporary superiority in limited locations, leading to a gradual shift in the military balance of forces. Success in the political struggle—the shorthand term for the organizational, psychological, and international dimensions of the conflict—would, as always, remain critically important.
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Around December 1950 the Central Committee of the Party approved Giap’s campaign plan for a series of assaults against widely divergent points on the perimeter of the Red River Delta. Neither Giap nor other Communist leaders have written much about the planning or execution of the 1951 Red River Delta battles, but in retrospect, it appears that the campaign had several objectives. The most important goal was obvious: to assert the revolution’s authority over greater swaths of Tonkin, thereby hastening the decline of French morale in the field. The seizure of Tonkin’s major port, Haiphong, was a secondary objective, for the FEF had little hope of sustaining offensive operations in the Viet Bac or Thanh Hoa base area without a steady flow of ship-borne supplies. Giap also hoped to threaten Hanoi, but at this point, it seems doubtful he had any hope of taking the city itself.

On January 13, 1951, two regiments of Giap’s 308th Iron Division jumped off from their assembly area in the thickly forested Tam Dao Ridge in assault formation, pressing southward. Within a couple of hours, the Vietminh had overwhelmed a series of small French posts on the rolling hills north of Vinh Yen. The site of a critical road junction leading from the northwestern edge of the Delta to Hanoi, Vinh Yen was a provincial capital held by French Mobile Groups 1 and 3. The two units were separated by a gap of about three miles. Giap’s intention was to attack from the north with two regiments of the 308th Division and from the west with the 312th Division, breach their perimeter defenses, either contain or destroy both mobile groups, and then punch through the gap between the two and drive toward Hanoi.

The initial attack succeeded in annihilating a fifty-man FEF fortified outpost in hills north of Vinh Yen. The next morning Mobile Group 3 moved out from its defensive bastion to clear the Vietminh from the hills. It was ambushed, losing a full battalion as it withdrew under close air cover and artillery fire. At the same time, the forward elements of the 312th cracked French defenses northwest of the town, forcing open a gap between Group 3 and Group 1, three miles to the east. All was going to plan, but inexplicably, Giap failed to exploit the gap, opting instead to consolidate his defenses in the hills.

Sensing impending disaster, General de Lattre flew into the city and took command himself on January 14. He ordered a rapid airlift of an entire additional mobile group into the town. The next day, Group 1 took back one of the key northern hill positions. With beefed-up ground and air power, de Lattre pushed the PAVN out of the hills on January 16. The French crisis appeared to have been averted. A few hours later, however, Giap flung the entire 308th Division against the French defensive positions in the hills. Elements of the 312th pressed forward simultaneously from the northwest. In a series of furious and costly human-wave assaults lasting through the night, the Vietminh took back two large hills in the center of the battlefield, but the French beat back attacks on two other hills on the flanks of the PAVN positions despite their being temporarily overrun several times by PAVN assault units.

Giap launched a furious massive assault at dawn on January 17 with virtually every effective company of infantry at his disposal, but by this point in the battle de Lattre had assembled a formidable armada of fighter-bombers, napalm-bearing transports, and well-registered artillery in the area of operations (AO). The combined destructive power of all these supporting arms decimated entire waves of attacking PAVN infantry. Terrified soldiers broke and ran before sheets of liquid fire, as a Vietminh officer recalled:

All of a sudden a sound can be heard in the sky and strange birds appear, getting larger and larger. Airplanes . . . all of a sudden, hell opens in front of my eyes. Hell comes in the form of large, egg-shaped containers, dropping from the first plane, followed by other eggs from the second and third plane. Immense sheets of flames, extending over hundreds of meters, it seems, strike terror in the ranks of my soldiers. This is napalm, the fire which falls from the skies . . . The bomb falls closely behind us and I feel its fiery breath touching my whole body. The men are now fleeing in all directions and I cannot hold them back. There is no way of holding out under this torrent of fire which flows in all directions and burns everything on its passage. . . . In addition, French artillery and mortars now have our range and transform into a fiery tomb what had been, ten minutes ago, a quiet part of the forest.
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At noon on January 17, a dispirited Giap ordered a general withdrawal. In his first multi-division engagement, the Vietminh’s commander in chief
had been trounced by the deft application of the FEF’s supporting arms and a virtuoso command performance by General de Lattre. It was at Vinh Yen that Giap began to earn a reputation for callous expenditure of the lives of his own troops. Out of a force of 22,000, 6,000 were killed and 8,000 wounded.