Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (8 page)

CONCLUSION

The complexity and fluidity of events in Vietnam beginning with France’s decision to outlaw the Communist Party in 1939 and continuing through
the fabled August 1945 Revolution posed enormous challenges to all politically active Vietnamese who sought to exploit the convulsions wrought by the Second World War. If the Communists’ August Revolution was incomplete and open to challenge from the Allied occupation forces en route to the shores of Vietnam, it was nonetheless an extraordinary political and organizational achievement.

Of course, Ho Chi Minh was unquestionably the visionary, the father figure of steel will and humble manner who inspired millions. His extraordinary ability to work with potential rivals, even anti-Communists, to achieve his revolutionary ends stands out as the greatest individual contribution to the success of the August Revolution, an event the Vietnamese people celebrate to this day.

Next to Ho, however, Vo Nguyen Giap was surely the most important of the revolution’s senior leaders. A sound argument can be made that he remained so during the next 25 years, as he built on the promise of his brilliant political and military organizational work during World War II, perfecting and applying a distinctive way of war that would baffle and defeat two advanced Western nations with military establishments that dwarfed his own. If Ho was the visionary, Giap was the driven politico-military captain. “Over time,” historian Fredrik Logevall writes insightfully, Giap “made himself more and more the indispensable man—capable and efficient and ruthless in equal measure.”
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Over the next years, through all the trials and sorrows of a highly destructive war, Giap seldom left Ho’s side. In the years to come, Giap’s ferocious tenacity, his refusal to consider defeat despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, served as the engine of the revolution’s military power, and a symbol of the Vietnamese people’s resolve to secure freedom through victory.

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THE WAR OF RESISTANCE AGAINST FRANCE: 1945–1950

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mid the tumultuous upheaval and uncertainties that shook Vietnam between the end of World War II and the beginning of the War of Resistance against France in December 1946, Vo Nguyen Giap solidified his reputation as one of the Revolution’s indispensable men. In looking back at his performance during this excruciatingly tense prewar phase of the struggle, one comes to understand why he was chosen to serve in the dual roles of commander in chief of the armed forces in the field and minister of defense. As the storm clouds of war swept across Indochina, Giap was at once a leading politician and diplomat, a creative military strategist, the chief practitioner of Vietminh strategy, and the architect of the army. Through a combination of prodigious energy and no small measure of ruthlessness, he succeeded admirably in all these roles.

POSTWAR DEVELOPMENTS AND THE RETURN OF THE FRENCH

The August Revolution confirmed definitively the Vietminh’s claim to represent the self-determination movement in the eyes of the Vietnamese people. Whether Ho’s government would be recognized as the legitimate authority in the nation after World War II by the world powers was another question altogether.

At the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the Allies had agreed that upon Japan’s surrender, the British would occupy Vietnam south of the 16th parallel, disarm the Japanese, repatriate their forces, and maintain order. The Nationalist Chinese forces would do the same north of the 16th parallel. In southern Vietnam, the commander of British occupation forces, unfortunately for the Vietminh, was an ardent believer in colonialism and an unapologetic racist. General Douglas Gracey took his brief to mean that his division of Indian troops should oust the Vietminh upstarts from their positions of newly earned power, disavow Ho’s claims of independence, and open the floodgates for the return of the French government and its army. Gracey’s troops summarily freed the interned forces of the French and the Japanese. He then rearmed French soldiers, who were almost delirious at the prospect of pushing the Vietminh, who had disgraced their honor and seized their colony, out of the cities and towns and into the countryside by force of arms.

On September 21, 1945, mobs of French troops went on a wild rampage through the streets of Saigon, beating and killing scores of Vietnamese citizens and reserving their special wrath for the Communists, hanging several in gory public spectacles. On September 23, the French easily overpowered the lightly armed Vietminh militia security forces, occupied the government buildings, and hoisted the tricolor over Cochinchina’s capital city. Although the Vietnamese people mark the beginning of the War of Resistance as December 19, 1946, it could well be argued that the revolution’s first war for independence began on September 23, 1945, for the French action, coming after a week of seething emotion and political volatility, demanded a response.
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The Vietminh obliged. Tran Van Giau, head of the Vietminh in southern Vietnam, who worked somewhat independently of the Central Committee in Tonkin, staged massive demonstrations and a strike. Finally, on September 25, Saigon exploded with what seemed like hundreds of attacks by armed Vietminh squads on French-manned
buildings and neighborhoods throughout the city. Tensions had already reached a fever pitch, and the French section of Saigon, the Cité Hérault, was flooded with enraged Vietminh and their sympathizers. They began to massacre French nationals, women and children prominently among them, with antique rifles, pistols, and machetes. The killing persisted for several days before Gracey’s forces restored order and disarmed the French once again.

On October 12, a powerful, 25,000-man French expeditionary force under Philippe LeClerc, spearheaded by an armored regiment, landed in Saigon and quickly removed the new government’s officials from all public buildings. Charles de Gaulle, now installed with full powers in Paris, took a hard line. Minor concessions to the Vietminh might in time be negotiated, but for the time being, France was to reassert full authority. The French, with the aid of British forces and even some rearmed Japanese units, quickly went on the offensive and captured most of southern Vietnam’s strategically important cities and towns, including the gateway to the Delta, My Tho, and Bien Hoa, the key communications and trading center in Vinh Long Province. Fighting was fierce with several hundred casualties on both sides, and the Vietminh fell back, but its forces quickly established themselves as tough, resilient fighters, “adept at withdrawing and regrouping, then, under cover of night, striking back.”
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More than 150,000 Chinese troops had swarmed like locusts into northern Vietnam above the 16th parallel to take the Japanese surrender and maintain order. Instead, they pillaged the countryside instead, and Vietnam’s centuries-long domination by China prompted Ho and Giap to see the removal of the Chinese as a more pressing issue than attempting to come to an understanding with the French. As Ho famously remarked at the time, “As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”
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In any case, the Vietminh desperately needed time to build up their strength before they could hope to challenge France militarily. The French wanted the Chinese out of Vietnam just as much as the Vietminh. Working with the French to remove the Chinese bought the Vietminh time.

Demonstrating once again his ability to work with one adversary to achieve his ends against another, Ho worked closely with the French in fall 1945 to ease the Chinese out of the north. The French, for their part, wanted the Chinese to withdraw for the most obvious of reasons: they stood
in the way of France’s quest for reestablishing their colony in Indochina. The Chinese, more and more preoccupied with Mao’s Communists in their own country, agreed to withdraw in spring 1946 in exchange for some economic and diplomatic concessions from France.

As the Chinese began their withdrawal and French forces began to pour into Tonkin, Ho and Giap turned their attention to the French. Vietminh soldiers resorted to the tactics that were their stock and trade throughout the next eight years: the well-executed ambush, extensive sabotage of the precarious bridges and roads that the French forces needed to maneuver, and general harassment and obstruction of French authority in whatever guise they encountered it.

A number of battalion-size engagements erupted between French and Vietminh troops, including a fierce nine-hour fight following a Vietminh ambush of a French convoy resulting in heavy casualties on both sides. These attacks occurred frequently enough to heighten feelings of resentment and distrust to the point where progress at the negotiation table became all but impossible. As the year progressed, it became increasingly clear that the yawning divide between the two governments was simply too great to be crossed. Intransigence was general on both sides, and good faith vanished in an endless cycle of accusations and counteraccusations.

While negotiations stalled, Ho and Giap worked feverishly to consolidate their power as the only voice for the people of Vietnam. The task of neutralizing potential nationalist rivals fell to Giap. How could this task be accomplished? Through the tried-and-true Communist method: discredit, discourage, and eliminate rival parties through any means necessary. The chief rivals of the Vietminh were the VNQDD and the Dai Viet parties. Until spring 1946, they had been protected by the Chinese occupiers, who had hoped to use them for their own purposes. Now that their protectors had departed, Giap launched a vicious and decidedly effective campaign of terror and intimidation against these groups. Specially trained Vietminh security units—in effect, Giap’s secret police force—pounced on rival nationalist political figures and their chief adherents, killing several thousand and forcing others to flee north to China. The revitalization campaign cemented Giap’s growing reputation for ruthlessness in the quest to consolidate Communist power. In Giap’s eyes, dissenters, even if they were sincere patriots, were by definition traitors to be silenced for the good of the Revolution.

Already, the demands of preparation for war were beginning to transform the idealistic Vietminh front into a spartan Communist police state
with an unstated policy of crushing all internal dissent. Even before the first sparks of fighting in Hanoi in December, recalled one Vietnamese nationalist, “there seemed to be no way of resisting Communism except by the unpalatable means of accepting French control, or the formation of a government inspired and beholden to the Paris master.”
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Meanwhile, Giap stepped up the indoctrination and proselytizing program in the villages with a view to consolidating the Communist hold over the population. His success in the elimination campaign planted the seeds of his reputation in the many years of war to come. “Even his enemies, men who were notoriously anticommunist,” observes historian Stein Tonnesson, “showed respect for him. They seemed to lose some of their aggressiveness when they were in his presence.”
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Meanwhile, after six months of intransigence, on March 6, 1946, Ho and the French emissary, Jean Sainteny, signed a letter of understanding, hoping to avert war. Under the terms of the agreement, France would be permitted to deploy 15,000 troops in Vietnam for five years; to enjoy favored economic status in trade relations; and to maintain a permanent cultural presence throughout Indochina. For its part, France recognized the legitimacy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the DRV, the formal name adapted by Ho’s government) “as a free state having its own government, parliament, army and treasury, and belonging to the Indochinese Federation and the French Union.”
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Crucially, the French retained overarching political control of the Union—an organization akin to the commonwealth of Great Britain—and total control over Vietnam’s foreign relations and armed forces.

More troubling for the new government was the failure of the letter of understanding to include Cochinchina as a part of the DRV. The French sought to maintain complete control there, offering to grant but a few cosmetic concessions for Vietnamese participation in its governance. Cochinchina was an integral part of Vietnam and had been so since time immemorial. A Vietnamese state without Cochinchina was completely unacceptable to either Ho’s government or the Vietnamese people. In the end, the parties agreed to leave the status of Vietnam’s most economically developed region temporarily unresolved. A plebiscite at a later date would decide whether it would join the DRV or enter into a separate agreement with France. In the eyes of the hardliners in the Communist Party the agreement was a nonstarter for obvious reasons. Soon thereafter, the governor of Indochina, a hardline reactionary named Admiral Thierry D’Argenlieu,
enraged the Vietminh by unilaterally declaring Cochinchina an independent republic allied with France.

The fledgling government of the DRV was now between the proverbial rock and hard place. Ho’s government desperately sought the help of allies on the international front and pressed forward with little hope of gaining critical concessions at conferences at Fontainebleau and Dalat with the French in summer and fall 1946. That fall, a frustrated and defiant Ho had an oft-quoted exchange with American correspondent David Schoenbrun. “How can you hope to wage war against the French? You have no army, you have no modern weapons. Why, such a war would seem hopeless to you,” said the journalist. Ho’s reply would be echoed time and time again by his commander in chief once the battle had been joined:

No, it would not be hopeless. It would be hard, desperate, but we could win. . . . The spirit of man is more powerful than his own machines. It will be a war between an elephant and a tiger. If the tiger ever stands still the elephant will crush him with its mighty tusks. But the tiger does not stand still. He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges only at night. He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing huge chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the jungle. And slowly the elephant will bleed to death. That will be the war in Indochina.
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