Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (23 page)

For their part, the peasant soldiers were given no clear reason to fight the Communists. The Saigon regime inspired no loyalty. Little wonder the ARVN was beset by a lack of fighting spirit. Diem’s response to American pleas for concerted reform of his armed forces was exactly the same as his response to requests to undertake reforms in the political arena. He promised changes in return for additional aid and support. Typically, Washington obliged and Diem made no reforms whatsoever. A shockingly high percentage of the new aid package would make its way into Saigon’s thriving black market, controlled by senior ARVN officers.

Thus, an ominous dynamic emerged in which Diem was able to resist American pressure for concrete reforms while he succeeded in building up his personal power at the expense of his people. The United States had little leverage, as it needed his cooperation in halting the spread of Communism—at least in theory—to avoid the appearance of being yet another colonial power bent on the conquest of Vietnam for its own selfish ends. By 1960, the Americans had invested too much in Diem to refuse his demands. Thus, as one American official in Vietnam at the time put it, Diem “was a puppet who pulled his own strings.”
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HANOI’S STRATEGY

Hanoi’s initial strategy in the postwar period was to employ limited political struggle against Diem and his American backers while it focused on
building up the North’s military and economic strength. As late as April 1956, Giap and the rest of the Politburo were reasonably confident that Diem’s regime would collapse of its own weight. Those Communist cadres who had remained in the South after Geneva were instructed by Hanoi to eschew armed violence in favor of engaging in political work such as protests, marches, political consciousness-raising classes, and adversarial journalism in order to challenge Diem’s initiatives and degrade his authority in the eyes of the populace of the South. Party salvation associations in the South were officially disbanded after Geneva and reconfigured as legal organizations containing a wide variety of nationalists, but surreptitiously controlled by the Communist Party.

Giap and the rest of the Politburo initially hoped that Diem would abide by the Geneva accords and seek peaceful unification through elections. Even after Diem steadfastly refused to enter into talks because of alleged North Vietnamese ceasefire violations, Hanoi clung to the naïve hope that elections would nonetheless bring the revolutionary forces to power in the South. Ho’s closing speech at the ninth plenum of the Central Committee in April 1956 reaffirmed the pursuit of peaceful unification and the primacy of developing the DRV rather than stepping up armed struggle in the South with combat forces from the North:

[W]e must always raise high the flag of peace, but we must at the same time also raise high our defenses and our vigilance. . . . If you want to build a good house, you must build a truly solid FOUNDATION . . . North Vietnam is the FOUNDATION, the ROOTS of the struggle to complete the liberation of our people and the unification of our nation. Therefore everything we do in the north is aimed at strengthening our forces in the North and the South.
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By 1957 Southern cadres and sympathizers grew increasingly frustrated and militant in the face of Diem’s harsh repressive measures. Vigorously supported by senior Politburo member Le Duan, Hanoi came under intense pressure from the Party’s leadership in the South to challenge the Government of the Republic of Vietnam (GVN) by violent means. Communist histories of the period invariably cite Le Duan’s August 1956 “Tenants of the Revolution in the South” as a landmark document, calling on the Party as a whole to recognize that “the road to advance the revolution in South Vietnam was the road of revolutionary violence.”
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A few
months later, the Party’s Committee for the South affirmed that while it was not yet time to resort to general guerrilla warfare, the Party’s military apparatus in the South was sufficiently well developed to launch Armed Propaganda Units (APUs) in the countryside and form self-defense units at the hamlet and village level. The APUs had been put together by General Giap in the waning days of World War II as the initial military formations of the People’s Army. The task of the APUs in the South was described in the Politburo’s resolution of December 1956. They were to expose

the true face of the enemy to the people. They will encourage hatred, develop revolutionary organizations among the masses, suppress enemy thugs and intelligence agents, win support of enemy troops and governmental personnel to support our mass struggle movements. . . . These units will be dispersed into cells and squads for purposes of living, traveling, and operations, but they must be organized into platoons with a command section to administer the unit, carry out political operations and train the unit’s troops.
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In 1957 and 1958, the APUs pressed forward aggressively, organizing self-defense units and laying the groundwork for the first companies of light infantry troops that would operate under the Committee for the South, which, in turn, took its orders from the Central Committee in Hanoi. Several hundred local and district GVN officials were neutralized in a limited assassination program carried out by the APUs. As Diem stepped up his efforts to counter Communist initiatives, the Party responded by formally approving the resumption of armed struggle in the South in January 1959. A midlevel southern cadre who rejoined the revolutionary movement in 1956 described the shift in activities that characterized the movement in the South:

From 1956 to 1959 we lacked the right conditions [for armed struggle]: on the one hand, there were successive government troop operations; on the other hand, we cadres lacked means. Our small number of cadres have to live secretly in remote zones. . . . We were like fish out of water. . . . Toward the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960, we received orders to enlarge the field of our activities to attack military posts, to arouse the conscience of the people, to make ourselves known publically. Two comrades and I, with the help of three volunteers from the militia to help us as spies, successfully attacked the village militia [of the GVN] and seized one sten
gun and five rifles. In February 1960, profiting from this success, we penetrated the village and made contact with P-----, who joined us with a typewriter. We, the fish, were now in the water.
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In January 1959 the fifteenth plenum of the Politburo announced a subtle but nonetheless seminal shift in strategy by declaring for the first time that “it is possible that the popular uprising of South Vietnam may become a protracted armed struggle between ourselves [meaning the DRV, as opposed to the Communist infrastructure already struggling in South Vietnam, led by the Central Office for South Vietnam, or COSVN] and the enemy. Our party must plan for this possibility and make adequate and vigorous preparations for any eventuality.”
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It was Hanoi’s formal recognition that the Revolution could only prevail if the DRV shifted its current allocation of resources from consolidating its 1954 victory in the North to liberation of the South. The tacit understanding was that it was time for Hanoi to assume complete responsibility for directing the struggle in the South.
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Developments soon after the plenum strongly suggest that Hanoi expected military struggle to assume a greater level of importance in the struggle than it had up to that point. The General Military Party Committee (GMPC), chaired by Vo Nguyen Giap, laid out a broad program to expand PAVN’s role in the South by reinforcing the southern cadre’s efforts to build up base areas in remote areas where the population was already under Party control.

In May 1959, the GMPC established a two-battalion unit called Military Transportation Group 559. The new unit took responsibility for developing the transportation and communication network leading from North Vietnam into Laos and then into western South Vietnam. This marvel of logistical planning and effort soon became known to the Americans as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By year’s end, work on new roads leading south had begun, and 500 PAVN soldiers, mostly company-level commanders and sapper trainers, headed down the trail and were dispersed among newly formed APUs and guerrilla companies. Most of these early PAVN infiltrators were deployed in Interzone V.
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The trail slowly developed from a series of foot trails and unpaved roads into a complex transportation network on both the western and eastern sides of the Annamite Mountains, replete with repair crews, supply depots, barracks, PAVN security troops, and even an oil pipeline. Despite a massive
American interdiction campaign, the trail remained the revolution’s lifeline in the South. As the war progressed, the numbers of troops and tons of war matériel steadily increased. The interdiction campaign was one of several major American initiatives that failed outright.

Throughout 1959 the entire 338th PAVN Division in North Vietnam, composed largely of Southern re-groupees, was broken down into training groups and tasked with preparing several thousand southern civilian recruits who had moved to the North after 1954 to return to the South to serve in full-time battalions. Between 1959 and 1961, the politico-military structure in the South, buttressed by the organizational and insurgency skills of PAVN troops dispersed into local units, made very impressive gains, wresting control over entire districts in the Central Highlands, the Plain of Reeds, and the forests north of Saigon near the Cambodian border. The assassination program took an increasingly heavy toll on the GVN apparatus. In 1959, 1,200 GVN officials were eliminated; in 1961, some 4,000 died at the hands of Communist assassination teams.

The National Liberation Front for South Vietnam (NLF) was formally established on December 20, 1960, along with its constituent committees for provinces and districts throughout the South. According to the official PAVN history, “these organizations served to gather together all the forces of the front and served as our revolutionary governmental administration. Military Command Sections were established at the region, province, district and village levels to aid the Party at these levels” in command, recruiting, and receipt of supplies.
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In early 1961, the senior leadership formally adapted the protracted war strategy Giap, Ho, and Truong Chinh had refined during the War of Resistance to fight the “special war” waged largely by the South Vietnamese, a steadily increasing number of American advisers on the ground, and American pilots and air power. The coming war would almost certainly be more complicated and arduous than the War of Resistance. It could not be expected to unfold straightforwardly, according to Mao’s three-stage model. Giap envisaged different “fighting forms” in each of South Vietnam’s three strategic regions. The Central Highlands would serve as the “Viet Bac” of the American War. Hence it was essential to expand the Ho Chi Minh Trail deep into the mountainous jungle there. Here the PLAF would train its main force regulars. The lowlands or plains near the coast were the key contested area, for here in the populous rural areas the revolutionary forces would struggle to wrest control of the villages from the South Vietnamese
government. In the cities, clandestine political work would dominate, supplemented with assassinations and terrorist tactics.
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Again, three types of armed forces were required in the South to meet the looming challenge: main-force PLAF units
(bo dai chu luc)
; local or regional forces
(bo doi dia phuong)
; and militia units of two types—lightly armed guerrillas
(dan quan du kich)
and village self-defense forces
(dan quant tu ve)
. The General Military Party Committee’s directive in January 1961, made public only in the 1990s, makes it clear that, as the commander in chief of the People’s Army of Vietnam, Giap exerted overarching command of the People’s Liberation Armed Forces, although the planning of individual campaigns, operations, and the training of PLAF units fell under the direct responsibility of the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN).

GIAP’S RESPONSIBILITIES

And what of Giap’s activities during this period, beyond shaping broad strategy along with his compatriots Ho Chi Minh, Truong Chinh, and, increasingly, Le Duan? Giap, as the leading member of the General Military Party Committee and the minister of defense, developed and supervised the first five-year plan (1955–1959) for expansion of the army. By the end of 1956, revamping the PAVN’s tables of organization had been completed. The seven-division force (six infantry, one artillery, and engineers) that had prevailed against the French was expanded to fourteen infantry, four artillery-antiaircraft, and several independent regiments and battalions of engineer, signal, and transport troops. Small naval and air force structures were put in place, though at this stage the training of jet pilots was still on the drawing board, and the navy consisted largely of lightly armed patrol boats similar to American PT boats. Technical training schools, repair facilities, and large troop installations to accommodate the newly minted divisions were constructed, and new staff agencies at all echelons were put in place. By 1958, small arms had been standardized with new shipments of SKS rifles and Kalashnikov assault rifles from China and the Soviet Union.

The implementation of universal military service in April 1960 and the looming threat of facing off against American ground troops led to an intensification of combat training and expansion of the reserve forces of 750,000 newly minted soldiers between the ages of 18 and 25, led by a
hard core of 30,000 Vietminh veterans. Of that force, 130,000 were kept under tight control and trained to a high enough standard for instant activation in the regular forces. Between 1955 and 1957, all units in the army were trained from the squad up to the battalion level for combat in regular terrain, and selected units completed training for jungle and night combat operations. Combined arms training at the regimental and divisional levels commenced in May 1957.