Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (6 page)

Giap never reached the Communist Party school. In October 1940 Ho called on Giap and Dong to meet him again, this time in Kweilin. It was here that Ho first revealed to his disciples the new name of the front that would fight for Vietnamese independence: Viet Nam Doc lap Dong minh Hoi—the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or “Vietminh” for short.

More determined than ever to form a broad-based independence movement through an alliance presented to the world as nationalist and democratic despite its Communist leadership, Ho ordered Giap to put what he’d learned from Mao and his officers to use in the field immediately rather than attending school in Yenan. According to historian Cecil Currey, Giap was to set up a politico-military training camp at the tiny Chinese village of Ca Ma, abutting the China-Vietnam border, and, with the help of two experienced Vietnamese officers who had served with the Chinese Nationalists, execute a tough training regimen for some forty eager Vietnamese recruits then living in the Vietnamese exile community in southern China. Once their preliminary training was complete—after perhaps a month or so—Giap was to march his newly minted troops across the border into Cao Bang, where, as Ho put it, “they will consolidate and develop the movement further and organize communication links.”
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Giap completed his task with energy and efficiency. It marked the beginning of his long career as organizer, motivator, and trainer of revolutionary soldiers. For the rest of 1940, and periodically for the next four years, Giap traveled between training camps in China and the mountains of northern Vietnam, often with small, highly motivated armed teams, the precursors of the units formally known as the Armed Propaganda Units (APUs) he established in 1944. He went from one Montagnard village to another, proselytizing, gaining converts, and conducting classes in small-unit tactics.

So it was that the revolutionary movement’s political apparatus and military forces began to take hold in the Viet Bac.

The French presence in the provinces abutting the Chinese border was very spotty, permitting the revolutionary forces to expand methodically the area under their control. Around the time Giap was training his first soldiers at Ca Ma, Ho was in southern China, where he exhibited the diplomatic dexterity that proved so essential to the revolution’s success, and complemented so well Giap’s ferocious organizational energies in building up guerrilla strength. By obscuring his Communist affiliations from the Nationalist Chinese General Zhang Fakui, commander of the southwest (China) military area, Ho convinced Zhang to set up a substantial training camp for Vietnamese exiles at Jingxi in China, where regular soldiers with combat experience served as instructors.

Zhang sought to train the Vietnamese to spearhead a possible invasion of Vietnam to crush the Japanese. Clandestine Communist agents within Zhang’s camp expertly recruited these troops into the organization soon to be known as the Vietminh. The details are obscure, but it appears that Zhang’s trainees were hastily integrated into Giap’s mobilization plan in the making for the border region throughout 1941 and 1942.

Giap suspended his training and organizational work near Ca Ma to meet with Ho and the Central Committee, the senior decision-making body of the Indochinese Communist Party—one of several names of the Vietnamese Communist Party—at the Party’s new headquarters in a cave near an isolated village called Pac Bo in late April 1941. It was at this meeting, called the eighth plenum, that the Vietminh was formally established. Although its leadership was dominated by Communist Party members and always would be, the front eschewed the traditional Communist themes of class struggle and land redistribution in order to maximize its support from all patriotic elements. The goal of the front was to “capture the seething nationalism of Vietnam and make it their own.”
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It was at Pac Bo, now a revered national shrine, that the leaders of the front announced what historian William Duiker calls the “twin pillars” of Vietminh strategy: nationalism and people’s war. Through the vehicle of the front, the Party sought to link the forces of urban nationalism, the intelligentsia, the factory workers, the students, and mobilized peasantry to achieve independence and to destroy the power of feudalism and imperialism.
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The eighth plenum called for intensifying the politico-military training program among the mountain tribesmen. Once the armed forces had
substantially expanded the Viet Bac, Giap would be responsible for extending the revolutionary administration southward into Thai Nguyen Province on the edge of the Red River Delta. Additional smaller base areas inside the Delta as well as along the central coast of Annam and in Cochinchina would also be developed.

After Pac Bo, Giap returned to the daunting task of building up military and political forces among the Montagnard peoples, learning as he went. In his own mind, building up a way of thinking among the villagers and instilling in them a profound commitment to the cause formed the bedrock of military training. He learned, in short, how to build up “revolutionary consciousness.” He became, writes Douglas Pike,

extremely well skilled in the art of gaining access to the enemy’s sources of supply and in knowing how to make do when such war materiel was unavailable. He learned how to move men and supplies around a battlefield far faster than anyone had a right to expect. . . . He and his cadres learned the importance of advertising the guerrilla’s cause and of creating the proper image. Finally, he learned how best to work with villagers without being betrayed by them. . . . Giap . . . knew he needed something far more sophisticated than a simple combat force, so he sought . . . [a] military mechanism that would place a premium on organization and motivation and thus harness social pressure, the strongest force in any society.
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Even at this early stage, when his thinking on the relationship between political mobilization work and armed forces was inchoate, Giap seems to have been convinced that the Revolution’s success would require the formation of several types of armed units, both permanent and mobile and part-time and local, and a flexible, yet responsive apparatus for coordinating their operations. It would take several years of trial and error to establish the proper relationships between guerrilla units, propaganda teams, and the traditional regular forces of an infantry army. In practice, it happened that the roles of these varied types overlapped considerably, but with remarkably little friction among commanders of the different tiers of the military forces.

In Giap’s thinking from the early 1940s on, the relationship between military work and political work was understood to be symbiotic. Giap and his ever-growing number of young cadres and guerrilla units established
village and district chapters of Quu Quocs or “mass salvation associations.” These civilian organizations were composed of various segments of society that shared a particular function, activity, or gender—for example, farmers, factory workers, women, or students who met regularly to participate in group consciousness raising sessions led by Party members, to plan community improvement projects, and to demonstrate against French legislation or repressive treatment. The associations were also recruiting organizations, encouraging the reluctant to become directly involved in such tasks as gathering intelligence, joining guerrila units, or digging trenches and tunnels in fortified villages.

The mass salvation associations were formed in this way: Giap’s cadres began by entering a village and befriending a few young men who were already keenly interested in the resistance movement. The cadres then presented a cogent critique of colonial exploitation and explained the revolutionary Vietminh program designed to liberate the nation from French and Japanese oppression. Soon thereafter, village salvation associations were introduced, along with liberation committees consisting of sympathetic village elders and committed local sympathizers. The committees bore responsibility for administering village civil and legal affairs and improvement projects. Giap described the process of creating the overarching revolutionary administration as follows:

A duality of power came into being in nearly all the localities where the Party had its branches. Village authorities sided with the revolution, became members of organizations for national salvation and, in whatever they did, Vietminh committees were consulted beforehand. In reality our own administration already dealt with nearly all the people’s affairs. The inhabitants came to us for marriage registrations and to settle their land disputes. Orders were given by French . . . military authorities to set up guard posts in every village as defense measures against revolutionary activities. But unfortunately for them, there existed right in the village revolutionaries for whom both militiamen and villagers had sympathy. As a result, the majority of these guard posts did not yield their authors the expected results. In many localities they were turned into our own communication links or guard posts.
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During the war years, the network of salvation associations came into prominence first in the Viet Bac and later, farther south in Tonkin
and along the coast of central Vietnam roughly from Nha Trang in the south to Danang in the north. In the south, they functioned essentially as underground clandestine groups because the French security forces were much stronger in Cochinchina, particularly around Saigon. The people who joined the salvation associations were not, technically speaking, part of the nation’s armed forces except in the sense that in Giap’s mind, as well as in that of the other Hanoi leadership, the army and the people “were one.”

Every mass association was organized in a pyramidal structure: village associations elected one or two of their number to serve on district association committees; district associations elected members from their group to serve in provincial association committees, all the way up to the national level of the hierarchy. Each echelon had wide latitude to respond to issues and concerns within its territorial purview, but the national association issued general directives and policies down through the echelons, that is, from regional association to provincial, to district, and so forth. So it was that all the village associations were integrated into a national structure, controlled in the end by the Vietnamese League for National Salvation—in effect a governing body of all mass salvation organizations—tightly regulated by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

The extent of each echelon’s authority in operating within the Communist political infrastructure is unclear, and in many cases there were redundancies of authority and overlapping responsibilities. Even today, the Vietnamese have never explained clearly the chain of command or the exact distribution of responsibilities within the mass salvation associations. The redundancy ensured smooth functioning even when association leaders were killed or captured.

But the most important point to be made about the system was that it worked, and very well. The associations were responsive to changes in local areas and provided the senior leadership with excellent information on the ground throughout the country, enabling the central authorities to adapt their indoctrinational techniques and marching orders all the way down to the villages. It was an ingenious and highly effective system of political organization. And it was exceptionally resilient.
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Giap established his leadership skills in this work in the year between summer 1942 and summer 1943, when Uncle Ho was placed under arrest by Zhang Fakui in China because he was suspected of being a Communist
operative. During his imprisonment, he was able to communicate with the Party leadership only intermittently.

It was sometime during 1943 that Giap received some devastating news. He had known that his beloved wife, Quang Thai, and her Communist operative sister, had been imprisoned in the French crackdown on the Communist party in 1939–1940, but he had been unable to contact them for more than two years. He now learned that his wife had died after suffering the tortures and depravations of a French prison. His sister-in-law had been summarily executed.

The revolutionary political and military apparatus continued to grow impressively throughout 1943 and 1944. Personal loss only strengthened Giap’s resolve to accomplish the vital work that Ho had entrusted to him. As Giap recalled, “Our Southward March was steadily progressing. It drew in ever greater numbers of cadres and enjoyed an even mightier response from the youth. Hundreds of boys and girls in Cao Bang province left their families and took part in various armed shock-operative groups.”
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The growth of the apparatus is all the more impressive when one considers that it occurred during a period of intense oppression. French patrols penetrated deep into the Viet Bac, issuing proclamations of reprisals against families whose members joined the Vietminh and offering handsome rewards to those who turned in guerrillas. “Many villages and hamlets were razed to the ground,” recalled the future commander in chief long after the War of Resistance. “Those arrested who had revolutionary papers on them, were immediately shot, beheaded, or had their arms cut off and exhibited at market places.”
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By early 1944, though, it was increasingly clear that the declining fortunes of the Japanese in the Pacific war and the impending fall of the Vichy collaborator government to de Gaulle’s Free French organization would lead inevitably to a Japanese
coup de force
against the French in Vietnam. The long-awaited moment for the revolutionary forces to take up arms and attack the imperialist forces of the French and perhaps the Japanese—though how Japan would react was very much open to debate—seemed to be imminent. But when should the Vietminh take up arms? It would not be an easy decision to make.

At a conference of the Cao-Bac-Lang interprovincial committee (in effect the governing body of the Viet Bac) in July 1944, Giap was the driving force for a motion that called for taking up arms as soon as possible and fomenting at least a localized uprising in northern Tonkin. This was the
rare case when Giap seems to have abandoned his penchant for extensive preparation for military action. The committee was generally receptive. After spirited debate, it approved a resolution to initiate the uprising by launching a guerrilla offensive in the Viet Bac within a couple of months.