Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (16 page)

Some 400 PAVN dead were left on the battlefield at Tu Vu—a costly victory. Similar carnage attended many of the other Vietminh assaults around Hoa Binh throughout December. Yet, as would be the case time and time again, Giap’s battalions licked their wounds and returned rapidly to the battle line, displaying a resilience their opponents found as astonishing as it was dispiriting. By mid-January 1952, Hoa Binh took on the coloration of a rescue operation for the French. The five FEF battalions inside Hoa Binh were running low on supplies and demoralized by shelling from the hills above the airfield. On January 8 the entire 308th Division had attacked a series of outposts along RC6. Most of the attacks were launched at extremely close range and quickly devolved into hand-to-hand combat as the Vietminh managed partial penetrations, only to be repulsed after hours of furious fighting with heavy casualties on both sides. The French often prevailed, but by January 20, both of Hoa Binh’s supply lines had been cut. Meanwhile, the operations of Giap’s 320th and 316th inside the Delta had succeeded in wresting control over scores of villages from the colonial government. The ignominious French withdrawal from Hoa Binh in mid-February required a massive logistical effort; thousands of French soldiers fell to Vietminh artillery and ambushes as they marched down RC6.

Giap wrote a few years after the war that Hoa Binh was “typical of the coordination between guerrilla warfare and mobile warfare” that he viewed as essential to the successful prosecution of protracted war.
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And indeed, Hoa Binh was exactly that, for it combined a highly effective operation combining strong ambushes by platoons and companies of FEF columns and regimental attacks against enemy strong points—classic mobile warfare—with guerrilla operations far afield to tie up potential reinforcements and fuel the process of
pourissement,
or rotting away, of French control over the population.

THE FALL 1952–WINTER 1953 CAMPAIGN

Between March and September 1952, guerilla operations were the order of the day. People’s war called for long stretches of small-unit operations, and this was such a period. As the monsoon season of 1952 waned in September, the Vietminh army was poised to engage in a mobile warfare campaign that would expose the FEF’s political and military vulnerabilities as dramatically as it revealed Giap’s growing strategic maturity. The spring and summer had been put to good use refitting the PAVN’s infantry divisions with tons of modern small arms and artillery from China. PLA advisory teams developed a more systematic training regimen for combined operations at the divisional level, while the drawbacks of relying heavily on porters were studied and at least partially resolved by the introduction of several hundred trucks acquired from the Soviet Union.

In the second week of October 1952, three PAVN divisions marched along a forty-mile front toward the Nghia Lo Ridge between the Red and Black Rivers. Here the French had established a string of lightly garrisoned outposts anchored by one strongly defended fortress in the town of Nghia Lo. In September 1951, the single French regiment there had handily repulsed Giap’s first effort to penetrate Tai country. Now he would try again, but this time with a force that was considerably larger, and more seasoned. The attack proved a shocking surprise to General Salan and the rest of the FEF’s senior leadership.

The forts along the ridge were too remote for the French to employ effective air support. Giap had every expectation of overrunning them rapidly and pressing on with his three divisions along a southwesterly axis to attack a much stronger line of French strong points on the western bank of the Black River. Those fortresses ran from Lai Chau in the northwest to Moc Chau in the southeast. Even if this thrust was blunted, Giap reckoned he could gain invaluable intelligence on France’s capacity to defend the Red River Delta and a remote region in the hinterlands of Tonkin simultaneously.

PAVN divisions traveled at night, marching independently, making their way undetected to the first line of outposts on the Nghia Lo Ridge. The first hammer blow struck on October 15, when a regiment of the 312th encircled a lone company at Gia Hoi, ten miles west of Nghia Lo. Salan read the 312th’s attack at Gia Hoi as a diversion. Accordingly, he dispatched a single elite para battalion to a neighboring post to the northwest at Tu Ve on October 16 to conduct a rescue operation. The paras fought their way
through to Gia Hoi and evacuated the besieged defenders in a harried withdrawal back toward the tenuous security of Tu Ve.

At 1700 hours on October 17, the Iron Division struck Nghia Lo with overwhelming force. A 120mm mortar attack prefaced three rapid regimental assaults. The French garrison was completely overrun. When French planes reached Nghia Lo at dawn, it had been reduced to smoking ruin, and a long column of FEF prisoners was spotted, flanked by two columns of PAVN troops. The collapse of Nghia Lo and the loss of 700 French troops there, writes Edgar O’Ballance, “was like the breaching of a sea dyke.”
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The string of small posts between Lao Cai and Yen Bay were either evacuated, with troops fleeing toward the Black River strong points, or overwhelmed as the PAVN pressed down on them from the northeast.

As the FEF’s Sixth Paras at Tu Ve attempted to cover the withdrawal at a critical mountain pass just west of the base on October 20, Giap’s troops attacked, catching these elite and seasoned fighters in a trap as they were strung out in a column between the pass and a hill line. The unit fought for its life, losing half its complement in the process. A veteran French lieutenant who survived the harrowing combat recalled that the density of automatic weapons fire during the battle was greater than any he had heard before. Another officer, a POW who passed by the battlefield around Tu Ve several days later, reported that it “looked like something out of Dante’s Inferno or one of the paintings of Goya. The wounded were still lying there just like on the first day, intermingled with men who had died several days ago and who were beginning to rot. They were lying there unattended, in the tropical sun, being eaten alive by the rats and the vultures.”
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LORRAINE AND THE LAOS CAMPAIGNS

While Giap was punching into Tai country in the mountainous northwest, Salan was putting the finishing touches on Operation Lorraine, an ambitious two-pincer thrust toward the Viet Bac from the northwest edge of the De Lattre Line, up Route Coloniale 2. Salan’s primary objective was to lure several Vietminh divisions then fully engaged in the campaign in the northwest back toward the low-lying plains around Phu Doan and Yen Bay where the PAVN had several important supply depots. Salan reckoned that Giap could ill afford to lose the depots if he intended—as Salan felt sure he did—to launch a major thrust into the Delta before the rainy season began in May 1953.

Lorraine was truly a massive effort. Some 30,000 FEF troops thrust out of the Red River Delta at the end of October, supported by the lion’s share of FEF airpower and even some
dinassaut
flotillas for river operations. Like so many FEF offensive operations, Lorraine got off to a promising start. By November 7, Salan’s two pincers converged at Phu Doan and, meeting only light resistance, seized 500 square miles of Vietminh-controlled real estate, threatening the supply depots.

Giap refused to take the bait. He would keep his force in the northwest to keep up the pressure in an area of operations where the French were vulnerable. His understanding of Salan’s dilemma of holding on to territory in the Delta while conducting hinterland offensives was clearly maturing. By this point in the war, the Vietminh’s network of clandestine agents was well placed in the French rear to obtain excellent intelligence on all of Salan’s operations in advance. The Vietminh’s commander believed that Lorraine would sputter out before it could reach his major supply depots at Yen Bay and Thai Nguyen. He was exactly right.

The French were able to capture hefty quantities of weapons and ammunition in hidden stores around Phu Doan, but the Vietminh had by that point transported most of its weapons and stores out of reach of the leading French units. Salan opted to bypass Yen Bay; his communication lines were growing dangerously thin. After reaching as far north as Phu Yen on November 13, he ordered a withdrawal. Meanwhile, Giap had detached two seasoned PAVN regiments from their parent divisions and deployed them in the Lorraine area of operations. Joined by substantial guerrilla forces along the route of withdrawal, they harassed the French with roadblocks and sniper fire as they struggled to return to the Delta. The French public affairs spokesman put a positive gloss on Lorraine, but it had plainly been a failure all around.

As Lorraine foundered, Giap pressed on confidently against the Black River strong points from Lai Chau in the northwest to Moc Chau in the south. If he could break through the line, he could penetrate into northern Laos, thereby exerting enormous pressure on Salan to airlift a large force from behind the De Lattre Line to defend the Laotian capitals of Vientiane and Luang Prabang. The capture of either of those cities or, indeed, of substantial portions of Laotian territory would be a political disaster for the government in Paris. Around November 20 the 316th overwhelmed the garrison at Moc Chau.

Meanwhile, the 308th pressed in on the heavily fortified base at Na San airstrip. Salan saw Na San as a vital anchor for the defense of Laos. Determined to hold the base at all costs, he airdropped a number of battalions of troops into the area of operations. By the time Giap attacked, at least ten battalions of FEF troops defended the base. Giap had reckoned that the base was manned by half that number. Uncharacteristically, Vietminh intelligence failed to detect the FEF’s rapid buildup of forces there. The 308th lost at least 3,000 men in a series of one- and two-regimental attacks between November 23 and December 1, 1952.

Salan saw Na San as a vindication of the concept of fighting from a
base aeroterrestre
—a well-defended combat base in Vietminh territory without road links, supplied entirely by air. After Giap’s initial regimental attack on November 23, Na San had been rapidly reinforced with 300 tons of barbed wire, a hundred vehicles, and tons of extra ammunition. As such, the battle went far to instill confidence in the French high command that the Na San scenario could be repeated elsewhere on a larger scale, perhaps bringing about a decisive defeat if Giap opted to fight a pitched battle somewhere else in the northwest.

Giap saw the Na San engagement quite differently. After withdrawing from the battlefield, he regrouped and bypassed the French strongpoint before plunging into Laos. Once there, the army swept through a handful of small FEF outposts, gaining valuable intelligence for Giap’s planned 1953 spring offensive drive deep into the Laotian countryside.

Soon after the withdrawal from Na San, an American journalist with Communist sympathies named Joseph Starobin was taken to Giap’s headquarters, a bamboo shed with a roof of thatched palm leaves. “We are leaving them there [at Na San],” said the PAVN commander in chief. “ Let them use their supplies to hold it. [Na San] illustrates the French dilemma. Either they try to extend their strong-points once again, with their depleted manpower, in which case they spread themselves thin, or else they move out of their strong-points, which frees territory and population to us.”
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Na San can be read as an early example of Giap’s startling ability to “lose” an engagement—in the traditional Western sense of suffering heavy losses in a failed attempt to achieve a given objective—and yet implant in the minds of his adversaries illusions that would ultimately result in a shift in the overall “balance of forces” in the Communists’ favor. Such was the case with Na San. Indeed, it could be said that the loss at Na San set the
stage for Dien Bien Phu, the climactic pitched battle of the war that stands among the great disasters in the long history of French warfare.

The Vietminh campaign in the northwest from the fall of 1952 through the winter of 1953 offered a dramatic demonstration of Giap’s ability to maneuver several divisions deep in the jungle without revealing his ultimate campaign objectives. Seasoned PAVN troops displayed the skills that were their hallmarks for the next twenty years of conflict: the ability to mask their movements in the daytime by continually altering their camouflage to fit the terrain on the march, and their mastery of moving stealthily in the dark of night. As Giap told Starobin, “In the battle of Na San we had to move deep into valleys. We had to cross 30 streams, some of them 250 yards wide, and make our way over high mountains. The French officers whom we captured told us later they did not see how we could have done it. They did not understand how our forces could appear at Na San hundreds of kilometers from our bases.”
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At Na San, FEF defenders also witnessed Giap’s terrifying assault tactics, as PAVN sappers, commandos with special training in explosives and lightning fast raids, sprinted through minefields and flung themselves directly into the barbed wire perimeter so their comrades could penetrate defensive positions more quickly by running over their corpses. What unnerved the French infantry was the Vietminh units’ ability to sustain frightful casualties, only to rebound and attack again after a day or two of refitting and regrouping. No Western army in modern memory has sustained such a level of casualties so often in so many places.

Undaunted by the setback at Na San, Giap continued to press southwest into northern Laos with elements of three divisions. After bypassing Na San, the PAVN overran a string of thinly garrisoned French outposts on the Laotian border and headed in the direction of Sam Neua, a provincial capital in northern Laos. Within a month, though, Giap’s failure to conscript loyal porters in the Tai country—the Tais were largely pro-French—caused his drive to lose steam. He drew all three of his divisions, the 308th, the 312th, and the 316th, back into northwestern Vietnam, where they rested for further action in the spring of 1953.

1953 OFFENSIVES