Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (34 page)

About a day after the offensive began in Quang Tri, PAVN’s 320th Division, supported by tanks, pressed east in the Central Highlands in an effort to wipe out a dozen ARVN outposts southwest of Kontum, seize that town, and cut Routes 14 and 19, effectively severing the country in two. Then, on April 2, PAVN forces jumped off from their Cambodian sanctuaries, swept the ARVN back from its first line of defense in western Binh Long Province, took Loc Ninh, and encircled An Loc, the province’s capital. As these attacks developed in early April, Giap would deploy a total of eleven infantry divisions, seven artillery divisions, and twenty-two independent regiments supported by a few squadrons of MiG fighters, surface-to-air missiles, and T-54 tanks.

Preparations for the Easter Offensive, as the Nguyen-Hue Offensive (see map, page xix) was soon christened by the Americans, had begun in earnest in 1969, when Hanoi made (or perhaps was forced to make?) the strategic decision to lower the level of combat in South Vietnam, revert to guerrilla warfare, and withdraw most of PAVN’s divisions from active operations. As we have seen, in the wake of Tet, Giap never for a moment doubted that a return to “regular war” would prove essential to achieving complete victory.

To understand the offensive as Giap and the Central Committee conceived it, one must recall the thinking behind the fighting-while-negotiating strategy that Hanoi had adopted after Tet. The essence of that strategy was to forestall concessions at the negotiating table on all fundamental issues while Giap’s forces engaged in protracted warfare to grind
down the will of the United States and to demonstrate the bankruptcy of Vietnamization so clearly that the United States would have no choice but to concede two critical points: First, to permit all Communist forces to remain in place within South Vietnam once all American forces had withdrawn. Second, as one Communist document put it, to agree to the formation of “a broad national democratic coalition regime” in South Vietnam with “the South Vietnamese NLF at its core,” after the Thieu government had been dissolved.
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Giap had stated repeatedly since the mid-1960s that these concessions could be obtained only through a major conventional offensive supported by widespread guerrilla action. Just a few days before Nguyen-Hue was launched, Giap published an article confirming his belief that only a major conventional offensive could bring about a “clear change on the battlefield.”
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Nixon and Kissinger’s brilliant efforts to exploit Sino-Soviet rivalry by offering both powers diplomatic and strategic incentives in exchange for the application of pressure on the DRV to make concessions—the “linkage” strategy—showed signs of success in 1970, making a Communist offensive to alter the military balance in the South something of an urgent necessity as the end of the year approached. Hanoi had to use military force, observes a prominent American historian, to convince “the United States of the hopelessness of its positions and further accelerate the military, economic and psychological decline of its RVN dependents.”
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Thus, as General Abrams observed at the time, the offensive was essentially a test of “whether Vietnamization had been a success or failure.”
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At the time of its launch, only 90,000 American troops were deployed in Vietnam, and fewer than 10,000 of them were combat troops. It was also a test run for a larger conventional offensive envisaged by Hanoi to conquer all of South Vietnam after it felt reasonably confident that domestic politics in the United States would prevent Washington from coming to the rescue of the faltering regime in Saigon.

Within three days after the attacks in Quang Tri Province commenced, all the vital strongpoints adjacent to the DMZ save Dong Ha on the eastern end of the line were in the hands of the People’s Army. The entire ARVN Third Division had collapsed as Giap’s tank-infantry assaults broke through one defense line after another. A few ARVN divisions would perform heroically in defense over the next few weeks, but far more would bend and then break in mass confusion and panic under PAVN pressure.

The attacks in the north continued unabated until April 9, when ARVN’s shattered forces managed to regroup into tight perimeters around Dong Ha and Quang Tri City. Meanwhile, the 324B Division had moved out of the Ashau Valley to threaten Hue. Quang Tri City fell on May 1, as ARVN forces defending the town panicked and fled south toward Hue along with thousands of civilians along Route 1. Perhaps 10,000 soldiers and civilians were killed by heavy artillery fire along the “highway of death.”

A genuine sense of crisis swept over MACV and the presidential palace in Saigon, as equally grim reports came in from the Central Highlands area of operations. There PAVN forces had taken most of Binh Dinh Province on the coast, besieged Kontum, and were on the verge of wresting Dak To from a dispirited 22nd ARVN Division. The PAVN was once again on the verge of cutting South Vietnam in half.

To the north of Saigon, Giap’s forces took Loc Ninh, the capital of Tay Ninh Province, on April 7. Then PAVN armored forces surrounded five ARVN regiments at An Loc, a mere seventy miles from Saigon. The siege at An Loc was an extremely bloody and protracted engagement and was one of those rare battles where the South Vietnamese ground forces acquitted themselves well. Still, it is doubtful that An Loc could have held out were it not for extensive “Arc Light” strikes by American B-52s directed against PAVN units ringing the town. Once again, the Americans had to use a strategic bomber for horrendously destructive tactical air strikes. The siege of An Loc was not fully broken until early June. When the ARVN 21st Division in the Mekong Delta rushed north to join in the relief effort at An Loc, several PAVN regiments led by sappers slipped into the Mekong Delta from Cambodia and inflicted heavy damage on the pacification program in the Delta with more than one hundred attacks on lightly defended outposts.

In early May, General Abrams summarized the seriousness of the situation in a communication to his superiors. “Enemy staying power is his most effective battlefield characteristic. . . . An enemy decision to attack carries an inherent acceptance that the forces involved may be expended totally . . . . In summary of all that has happened here since 30 March 1972, I must report that as pressure has mounted and the battle has become brutal the senior [ARVN] military leadership has begun to bend and in some cases to break. In adversity it is losing its will and cannot be depended on to take the measures necessary to stand and fight.”
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Enraged at the audacity and success of the initial phase of the Easter Offensive, Nixon in early April ordered a rapid deployment of American tactical air assets to Southeast Asia from all over the world, adding 35 fighter squadrons to the 39 already in theater, along with more than 120 B-52s and the naval airpower afforded by two aircraft carriers. On May 10, around-the-clock bombardment of PAVN units began to blunt the momentum of all three prongs of the drive. On May 11, 1972, all US B-52 assets in theater were thrown against the attacking forces ringing An Loc for twenty-four hours straight, breaking PAVN’s drive toward Saigon. At An Loc, Giap lost most of his armor and suffered 10,000 casualties in the costliest battle of the offensive. On May 12 the B-52s struck with similar force at PAVN units pressing in on Kontum, inflicting frightful casualties and blunting that attack. The next day, the massive fleet of US strategic bombers pummeled PAVN divisions in the northern Tri-Thien front. Giap’s drive just below the DMZ was stopped cold at the My Chanh River, the southern boundary of Quang Tri Province. A shrewd ARVN tactician, General Ngo Quang Truong, having blunted PAVN’s attack on Hue, mounted a counteroffensive that succeeded in recovering about half of Quang Tri Province and Quang Tri City by September 15, but only after weeks of costly street fighting.

General Abrams had remarked to a State Department official during the battle that “it’s very clear to me that . . . [the South Vietnamese] government would have fallen and this country would be gone . . . if it hadn’t been for the B-52s and the tac air.”
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But it was Nixon’s decision to launch Operation Linebacker (May 10 to October 23, 1972) that truly broke the back of the Nguyen-Hue Offensive. Probably the most effective interdiction campaign in military history up to that point, Linebacker destroyed huge quantities of war matériel and production facilities in North Vietnam, including power plants, supply depots, and barracks. Communist antiaircraft efforts were stymied by electronic jamming. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was severely damaged by precision attacks against bridges, roads, and railroads with laser-guided bombs, used for the first time in history, and Haiphong Harbor was mined, sealing off the flow of seaborne Soviet high-tech weapons and desperately needed war matériel. The PAVN official history makes it clear beyond all doubt that Linebacker effectively stanched the flow of troops and supplies to the battlefield.
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American estimates have it that PAVN losses in the Nguyen-Hue Offensive were roughly 40,000 killed and 60,000 wounded. About half of
Giap’s armor and heavy artillery assets were lost. Factoring in the enduring American tendency to exaggerate casualty figures, the true losses were probably more like 25,000 killed and 45,000 wounded.

Many Western historians describe the offensive as another of Giap’s strategic gaffes, confirming his habit of wasting tens of thousands of troops for no good end. They point to the survival of the ARVN and the GVN as decisive evidence of the failure of Hanoi’s big push.

Yet, as was the case with Tet, it is quite unlikely that Hanoi expected the Easter Offensive to achieve a complete collapse of South Vietnam’s army and government. Its true objectives, surely, were ambitious but more modest. They had to be. By early 1972 no competent Communist planner, certainly not someone with Giap’s uncanny ability to gauge the strengths as well as the weaknesses of his enemies, could possibly have believed that President Nixon would permit the outright collapse of South Vietnam in an election year. Although Nixon was increasingly under siege from the antiwar movement and a growing body of detractors in Washington, he still had the wiggle room to unleash decisive US air power to prevent South Vietnam’s collapse. If the American people had long ago tired of Vietnam, they were not yet willing to suffer the humiliation of the first major defeat in the history of American warfare. Of course, Hanoi would hope for the best, but it would be enough if the offensive changed the political and military balance of forces substantially in favor of the Revolution. That would indeed be the “decisive victory” Hanoi had hoped to achieve in the planning phase of the operation.

Giap had not abandoned protracted war on March 30, 1972, in favor of a conventional campaign to crush ARVN and the GVN once and for all as many American historians claim. It was no “last gasp” effort. Rather,
he used conventional operations in the service of protracted war.
The offensive ratcheted up congressional and popular opposition to Nixon’s war strategy in the United States, further constricting his military options to prevent the fall of South Vietnam in the future, and placing enormous pressure on Washington to come to an agreement in Paris. The uproar over the continuation of the war four years after Nixon had begun his elusive search for “peace with honor” was a clear sign that the American people had had about all they could stomach of the Vietnam War.

The Nguyen-Hue Offensive was costly, but it went far in establishing the “correct conditions” for a favorable peace agreement with the United
States. It left the Communists substantially stronger in the South, with more than 140,000 hardened regulars on South Vietnamese soil. They were the nucleus of the force that would inflict a humiliating defeat on the ARVN a mere two years after the Americans departed for good in March 1973. The offensive left Communist forces in full control of large swaths of territory in Quang Tri and along the border with Cambodia, in addition to a number of smaller “liberated areas” of strategic significance. These could be used as springboards by Armed Propaganda Units to recoup lost ground in the political struggle movement.

Having said that, it must be admitted that both the planning and the execution of the Nguyen-Hue campaign were seriously flawed. The logistical system could not sustain the furious pace of the attacks, causing disruptive halts in advances, giving the ARVN and American air power golden opportunities to stanch the attacks, inflicting heavy casualties in the process. The combined arms attacks (tank-infantry attacks supported by artillery) generally lacked coordination. And unquestionably, any Western general who sustained such high casualties would have been summarily sacked. But in fighting the Americans, neither the Communists nor Giap should be judged by conventional Western military criteria of success. This was not a conventional conflict; Communist Vietnam was not an industrialized military power, and its military performance should not be judged as if it were. In the end, a fair-minded observer should recognize that Giap’s accomplishments in Nguyen-Hue as a strategist and a commander were far more impressive than his failures, or those of his army. How could one reasonably expect the Communists to sustain logistics for 200,000 troops over hundreds of miles against the world’s most powerful air force? Indeed, it seems to me that the very fact that Giap could mount such an offensive at all was itself a sterling military achievement.

Finally, the offensive essentially confirmed—to Giap at least—that the ARVN could not defend South Vietnam in a sustained campaign against PAVN conventional forces once the Easter Offensive losses had been replaced. The most charitable assessment of the ARVN’s performance was that it was uneven. Despite the official pronouncements that the offensive showed how far the ARVN had come, more candid private appraisals soon proved to be on the mark: the ARVN had a great deal of firepower, but it was too poorly led and trained to use its combat power effectively, and most of its units clearly lacked the fighting spirit to take on highly motivated PAVN units.