Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (24 page)

Since the early days of the revolutionary struggle, Giap had seen political education as the lifeblood of the army’s success in battle. The potential challenges of conflict with the Americans demanded that the army institute even more systematic and intensive political education programs than it had done in the war with France. The objective of this training, wrote one historian of the American War, “was to engage the total consciousness of each soldier,” thereby making his own future and that of the Revolution one in the same.
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Ever realistic about the trials and sacrifices that fighting a protracted war against the United States would demand, Giap “repeatedly stated that motivation and morale was always ‘the decisive factor’ in combat, and strengthening it became the objective of the Party’s entire military organization.”
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QUESTIONS OF AUTHORITY AND CONTROL

Communist historians today freely admit what they categorically denied throughout the war: that the entire Communist movement in the South took its orders from Hanoi. Its various regional and provincial headquarters took orders from the Politburo of the Vietnam Workers’ Party (the formal name of the Communist Party), and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces was, in effect, a branch of the People’s Army of Vietnam, headed by Giap. During the war Hanoi claimed—vehemently—that the Southern insurgents operated independently. This was dissembling. In fact, the claim was a central tenet of Hanoi’s propaganda campaign designed to win sympathy for the Revolution internationally, as well as to suggest that the United States, not Hanoi, was the aggressor who was in flagrant violation of the Geneva accords. (In fact, both sides violated the terms of the Geneva agreement many times.)

So, too, the consensus among American historians today is that the Republic of Vietnam was never a truly independent nation calling on America to support its own struggle for survival against “external aggression from the
North.” It was, in reality, a creation of the United States. Its struggle against Giap and the Communists was spearheaded by American aid and would surely have collapsed had it not been for direct American intervention.

This is not to say that either Hanoi’s or Washington’s proxies on the ground—that is, the NLF or the government of Vietnam in Saigon—had no room to maneuver independently. Directives from Hanoi and Washington were challenged by these entities, albeit to radically different degrees. As the war progressed from bad to worse, the relationship between the United States and the South Vietnamese was increasingly beset by mistrust and rancor. By 1968, Washington and Saigon often seemed to work at cross purposes. By 1970, it could reasonably be argued that Washington and Saigon were no longer truly allies at all.

Hanoi’s relationship to the NLF was occasionally tense, and heated debates regarding strategic priorities were common, particularly in the desperate days for the southern insurgents, before political
dau tranh
gave way to armed
dau tranh
as the decisive pincer of Communist strategy in the early 1960s. For the most part, however, the Communists in the South fully accepted the Politburo’s war strategy and worked in a disciplined and cooperative fashion to achieve a goal that was as clear as it was shared.

What’s more, the distinction between the southern and northern Communists, which the Americans were at such pains to make during the conflict, was rather a gray one in need of qualification. Several southerners served on the Politburo in Hanoi during the war. Le Duan was a southerner. Having served as the head of the Committee for the South, the governing body for Communist activities south of the seventeenth parallel in the 1940s, he rose to be the first among equals on the Politburo after Ho Chi Minh died in 1969, surpassing Giap in power and influence. Tens of thousands of southerners traveled to the north to serve in Giap’s PAVN after Diem began his anti-Communist purge in the mid-1950s. William Duiker, that meticulous historian of Vietnamese Communism, says it best: “The insurgency was a genuine revolt based in the South, but it was organized and directed from the North.”
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THE ROAD TO WAR IN THE EARLY 1960S

By the fall of 1961, internal political strife, government indifference to the social and economic problems of the populace, and the rise of the insurgency combined to produce what Kennedy administration adviser General
Maxwell Taylor called “a deep and pervasive crisis of confidence and a serious loss of morale.”
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In light of Taylor’s report, Kennedy authorized another substantial infusion of military and economic aid to the Government of the Republic of Vietnam. Several thousand more military advisers were sent to Vietnam, bringing the total to 11,300 in December 1961 from a mere 900 a year earlier. The Vietnamese air force was supplied with three hundred planes. Two squadrons of Marine Corps helicopters (with their Marine pilots) sailed for Vietnam from the United States to beef up ARVN mobile operations.

With American funding Diem instituted the strategic hamlet program, a misguided effort in which peasants from different villages were rounded up and forced to live inside fortified encampments. In theory at least, new medical dispensaries and schools inside the encampments were designed to gain the loyalty of the populace and keep the Vietcong “fish” out of the “sea” of people. Like virtually every Saigon initiative, the hamlet program was wonderful on paper and a nightmare in reality. The program was administered by poorly trained administrators, immediately infiltrated by NLF sympathizers, and, thanks to graft, underfunded. It failed miserably. The inept GVN defense forces in the hamlets were no match for seasoned Vietcong guerrillas units. Hundreds of strategic hamlets were attacked and destroyed within a few months after their creation.

During 1962, the Politburo in Hanoi rebuffed requests by the Central Office for South Vietnam to intensify the conflict and move to full-scale war, confirming its intention to defeat Diem and the Americans with a strategy of protracted war, and calling for an “intensification of political and military struggle to defeat the enemy gradually, to gain advantage step by step, to progress toward final victory.”
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The Politburo did, however, instruct Giap to prepare contingency plans for the deployment of entire PAVN units to the South for the first time. The influx of PAVN infiltrators to the South ramped up markedly. They joined PLAF guerrilla and main-force units as platoon and company commanders, specialists, and instructors. According to the PAVN official history, between 1959 and the end of 1963, more than 40,000 regular PAVN soldiers traveled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail—far more than US intelligence at the time had estimated. The number of main-force PLAF troops jumped impressively from 15,000 in December 1960 to 70,000 three years later. The PAVN infiltrators—not the revolution’s indigenous sympathizers in the South—formed the core of the growing body of PLAF main-force units and virtually all of the military specialists.

By 1963, PLAF battalions were regularly chewing up ARVN units, despite the latter’s being kitted out with the latest US weapons, including armored personnel carriers and fighter bombers. PLAF forces also methodically expanded their base complexes and training grounds in the Central Highlands, northwest of Saigon near the border with Laos and Cambodia, and in the Cau Mau peninsula of the Mekong Delta. Smaller base areas cropped up elsewhere, especially in eastern Interzone V.

For the GVN, things went from bad to worse in the summer of 1963, as Diem’s repression of the Buddhist majority prompted widespread protests by monks, students, and political opponents of the regime. When Ngo Dinh Nhu’s police force fired on protesters with live ammunition, it provoked riots in Saigon and Hue. Shocking photographs of the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in protest against Diem’s repression of Buddhists and other groups prompted a worldwide outcry, gaining the movement much sympathy around the world, including in the United States.

With the entire country on the verge of exploding into chaos and anarchy, Diem and his brother Nhu refused to make conciliatory gestures. Instead they responded with even more brutally repressive measures. Intrigue had long been the favored sport of the senior ARVN generals. When a coterie of generals surreptitiously approached US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge about launching a coup, President Kennedy gave them his tacit consent on the assumption that the diminutive head of state would not be killed but stripped of power and ushered out of the country. The generals’ assassins chased down Diem and his brother as they took refuge in a Catholic church and killed them on November 2, 1963.

The coup confirmed Hanoi’s critique of Diem’s regime in Saigon, but his downfall was in no sense a cause for celebration in Hanoi; precisely the opposite. Popular hatred for Diem in the South had generated a great deal of sympathy for the NLF, lending credence in Hanoi to the idea that a “revolutionary situation” was in the making, possibly setting the stage for a “general uprising” against the GVN and the Americans by the people in the South, led by the NLF. Some in Hanoi felt that the deepening friction between Diem and the United States might lead the South Vietnamese leader to begin to distance himself from America, perhaps even seek direct negotiations with the NLF.
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But these hopes were soon dashed when it became clear that the new military junta in Saigon was enjoying a honeymoon in the wake of Diem’s demise. An imminent uprising leading to the collapse of the government in Saigon was clearly out of the question, as the South
Vietnamese people were overjoyed by Diem’s fall, and his replacements enjoyed something of a honeymoon. (In fact, the honeymoon proved to be short-lived, and the new junta, mired in corruption and intrigue, itself fell in yet another coup in early 1964.)

Three weeks after the Diem killings, John F. Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet, and Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency. Hopes in Hanoi that the new American president might change course and pursue negotiations rather than military escalation were quickly dashed when Johnson retained Kennedy’s foreign policy team and announced his intention to carry on with Kennedy’s initiatives. He promised that under his watch, the Communists would be defeated in Vietnam. Aggression, he remarked on several occasions, could not be tolerated. American resolve would not, could not, falter in the pursuit of freedom.

In December 1963, the Central Committee met for a stormy session in Hanoi to reconsider strategy for the South in light of recent developments. There was a clear consensus, as one official resolution put it, that

now [that] we are stronger than the enemy politically, we must continue to strengthen our political forces. However, we are still weaker than the enemy militarily. Therefore
the key point at the present time is to make outstanding effort to rapidly strengthen our military forces in order to create a basic change in the balance of forces between the enemy and us in South Vietnam
. . . . If we do not defeat the enemy’s military forces, we cannot overthrow his domination and bring the revolution to victory. To destroy the enemy’s military forces we should use armed struggle
. For this reason, armed struggle plays a direct and decisive role.
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But should entire PAVN units be sent south for the first time? How much aid should the North allocate to the struggle in South Vietnam? We do not know the details of the debate, but the bulk of the evidence suggests that Giap pressed for restraint, for continuing to devote the lion’s share of resources then available to build up military power in the North, while continuing to aid the southerners with additional shipments of weapons and individual PAVN troops, but not entire infantry units. Such a dramatic escalation, Giap probably reasoned, might very well result in an American decision to do the same. And that was to be avoided at all costs. At least for the time being.

The argument for sending entire PAVN units south as soon as possible was spearheaded by Le Duan and his protégé, Nguyen Chi Thanh, the only other senior general in the PAVN. Both men had more extensive contacts with the NLF military and political leaders than did Giap, and in effect, they became spokesmen for the southerners’ concerns during this critical period before full-scale war. Thanh, in fact, is generally thought to have consistently argued throughout the next several years for more aggressive military action and the deployment of more PAVN units in the South than Giap.

In late 1963, Giap’s view apparently prevailed. The resolution to emerge from the December 1963 conference confirmed his view that the upcoming war would almost certainly move from guerrilla actions at the battalion level or lower to mobile warfare involving entire divisions—a progression Giap had often described in his writings since the early 1950s. He also advocated political action aimed at a target far from the battlefield: American popular opinion. Again, his view was reflected in the official resolution: “We must also win the sympathy and support of the people of the nationalist and imperialist countries (the U.S., France and England). . . . Along with the intensification of our armed and political struggles in South Viet-Nam, we must step up our diplomatic struggles for the purpose of isolating warmongers, gaining the sympathy of antiwar groups in the U.S. and taking full advantage of the dissensions among the imperialists to gain the sympathy and support of the various countries which follow a peaceful and neutral policy.”
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Early in 1964 a conference of the CPMC and the Ministry of Defense considered the buildup of forces in the South, and laid out some tactical and doctrinal guidelines for the upcoming conflict. Operations were to be of three types: (1) Maneuver operations planned and executed by main force units. These involved closing in on strong enemy units as they were deployed in the field. (2) Attacks on enemy bases by a combination of main force and regional forces. (3) Guerrilla operations by all three types of forces, including independent companies detached from their main-force parent unit. The conference also called for intensive focus on close combat, night operations, and “continuous combat,” meaning operations where Communist forces would engage and withdraw in good order, only to attack and withdraw again somewhere else.
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Interestingly, US ground forces’ training at this time emphasized none of these types of operations.