Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (9 page)

Giap’s hopes of gaining the military and diplomatic support of the United States as a result of Vietminh cooperation with the OSS were soon dashed, in part due to the Americans’ not-unfounded belief that a strong French presence in the Western coalition was an essential asset in the looming conflict against the Soviet Union known as the Cold War. Consistently throughout the War of Resistance, the United States supported France’s effort to regain its hold over Vietnam, despite America’s longtime advocacy of self-determination for colonized peoples. Mao, for his part, was too deeply engaged in civil war with Chiang’s Nationalists to offer much help to his fellow Communists—at least for now.

THE MARCH TO WAR, STEP BY STEP

As the French Expeditionary Force (FEF) rose in strength to 100,000 men, including thousands of troops from France’s African colonies and the units
of the French Foreign Legion, Giap labored nonstop to build up Vietminh military power on the ground. Between September 1945 and the formal start of the War of Resistance in December 1946, Giap essentially doubled the size of the Vietminh’s main base area in northern Tonkin, and established several other smaller bases in Tonkin, and along the coast in northern Annam. The regular army expanded from perhaps 5,000 to 50,000 troops, with 30,000 north of the 16th parallel, and about 50,000 trained guerrillas throughout Vietnam.
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Throughout the remainder of 1946, local French and Vietminh military units shared responsibilities for preserving order throughout the country, but their interactions were increasingly beset by misunderstanding and mistrust. In such a climate local commanders took matters into their own hands. Murders, ambushes, and atrocities were committed by both sides in the summer and fall of 1946. On September 24, an intense clash between Vietminh and French troops in Saigon degenerated into a riot. Enraged Vietnamese broke into the European sector of the city and killed 150 Western civilians, most of them French.

By early November, General Jean Valluy, the new FEF commander in chief, began contingency preparations for a major operation against Giap’s forces in Tonkin. The operation’s objective: to crush Giap’s forces before they had a chance to redeploy from the environs of Hanoi to the Viet Bac. On November 20 he sent several units into Haiphong to seize control of the customs house along the waterfront, where Giap’s troops had been collecting vital customs fees. More importantly, the Vietminh had been receiving critical arms shipments through Haiphong. Some Vietminh Tu Ve—local militia—apparently fired on the French and took one or more soldiers prisoner just as the French moved in on the customs office.

Hostilities quickly escalated. Valluy knew he would need control of the port in order to land fresh expeditionary forces for a mobile campaign in Tonkin. Accordingly, he ordered all Vietminh to evacuate the area around the port. A defiant Giap refused to budge. Valluy answered in a manner that French commanders, to their detriment, would repeat time and time again. On November 23, a French cruiser approached the port and bombarded the Vietnamese areas of the city indiscriminately, setting off a host of firefights all over the town, and leaving 6,000 civilians dead.

It took French reinforcements from the Red River Delta until November 28 to clear out the Vietminh units. Covered by militia and regional
forces, Giap’s regulars withdrew into the countryside with few casualties. “Although the French government in Paris seemed anxious to achieve a settlement [thereby averting war],” writes Duiker, “its representatives in Vietnam were taking matters into their own hands.”
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The march toward full-scale war continued. Both sides took measures to strengthen their positions in Hanoi, twenty miles from the port of Haiphong. On December 7, Giap called on all militia and regional forces in the vicinity to prepare to launch attacks on French military installations and government offices within five days. Civilians joined Vietminh forces to prepare defensive positions throughout the city, constructing roadblocks and firing positions in buildings and digging tunnels to facilitate maneuvering out of the line of fire. Believing these forces could stand up against the French in Hanoi for perhaps a month, Giap made plans for the withdrawal of the main forces surrounding the city to the north and west, where he believed he could hold on in the countryside indefinitely. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 Legionnaires landed at ports in Tonkin and Annam in order to take the fight to the capital city.

On the night of December 18, the War of Resistance began with a Vietminh sapper team attack on Hanoi’s main power station. The Tu Ve struck French outposts in many Vietnamese cities and towns that night. Urban fighting, typically fierce small unit clashes, erupted sporadically for the next two to three weeks in most cities; in Hanoi, the Vietminh regional forces put up a spirited defense until late January, suffering about 6,000 killed in action, but gaining time for Giap to withdraw his precious regulars. According to his protracted war paradigm, it was essential for these forces to avoid battle and remain in secure base areas for expansion and further training. Today, the Vietnamese celebrate December 19 as the anniversary of the outbreak of their War of Resistance against France.

VIETMINH DOCTRINE AND STRATEGY

A few days after the outbreak of hostilities, the Party’s Central Committee issued a strategic directive, laying out their understanding of the war that was to follow. A theory, a way of thinking about how the war should unfold, was required to guide decision making. Giap himself surely had a strong
hand in shaping the document, and his strategic thinking on the application of the three-stage model of protracted war in Vietnam, which he had been contemplating since Mao’s lectures on the subject were published around 1938, is clearly in evidence in the directive itself.
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In the first stage, the revolutionary forces would find themselves on the strategic defensive. Base areas needed to be expanded and strengthened for training and sanctuary purposes; political work had to intensify in order to lay the groundwork for recruiting and intelligence networks. Meanwhile guerrilla units, still lightly armed, could harass the French forces’ lines of communication through sabotage, ambush, and raids.

In stage two, the equilibrium stage, the French would reach their peak military strength and consolidate their hold on the cities and towns. Simultaneously, the Vietminh would shift gradually from the defensive to offensive operations by whole regiments, and then divisions, engaging in combat in places and times of their own choosing, grinding down French strength by protracting the conflict. Mobile operations by regular units would be coordinated with guerrilla warfare both within the enemy’s rear—the areas under his control—and, to a lesser degree, in offensive campaigns.

The objective of military operations in this stage was not to gain and hold territory, but to force the French to disperse their forces into small units to conduct static defense duties. Once the FEF had been spread thin, they would be vulnerable to battalion and regimental attacks by Vietminh regulars. It was essential that PAVN units develop proficiency in hit-and-run attacks, in which units would disperse before the French could bring artillery or air power to bear. Then they could re-form as a complete unit at a prearranged point, typically in a remote area inhospitable to France’s mobile armored groups and air attacks.

Stage three was called the counteroffensive. In theory at least, it culminated in the “general uprising,” meaning the point at which the power of the people and the army together was so great that spontaneous rebellions would erupt all over the country.

By the third stage, the regular PAVN would have formed full divisions equipped with modern weapons, including artillery and engineers (in 1946 the PAVN was capable of fighting only at the battalion level of about 600 men in any one engagement) and would be sufficiently trained and seasoned to engage in sustained conventional warfare.

Truong Chinh, writing in
The Resistance Will Win
early in 1947, elaborated on the war strategy of the senior leadership, particularly on the thinking of Giap, who had co-authored with Truong Chinh a prominent book on the Vietnamese peasantry as a force in revolutionary politics. (Indeed, one finds passages in
The Resistance Will Win
that are virtually identical to Giap’s earlier writings.) Chinh embraced Mao’s doctrinal framework but took exception to his assertion that for protracted war to succeed, insurgents needed one vast sanctuary to develop regular forces and launch major multidivision (i.e., corps-level) campaigns. Vietnam was a small country, but its revolutionaries could compensate for its lack of terrain by developing a large number of small, isolated base areas through the kind of assiduous clandestine mobilization work that Giap’s guerrillas had been conducting within villages and districts since 1940.

Mao believed that a successful insurgency could not rely on external developments or allies to win; revolutionaries ultimately had to build an army capable of defeating its adversary in conventional warfare using their own resources. Chinh joined Giap in believing that external factors, especially the growing strength of Communism in the world and the effect of prolonged military action on public opinion in France, could shape the direction of the war in all sorts of ways. Perhaps most significantly,
The Resistance Will Win
argued that in the end Vietminh military forces did not need to achieve clear superiority over French forces in order to achieve victory. Political factors within Vietnam and France, as well as international political trends, might very well result in French withdrawal. This could not be called a military victory in a conventional sense. But it would be a victory nonetheless, because it would mean that the war’s objective had been reached.
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During the next six years of the War of Resistance, Giap would further refine and adjust Mao’s theory of protracted war to reflect his reading of events on the battlefield, as well as the political and moral pressures at work on his own forces and those of the enemy. It is a remarkable tribute to Mao’s paradigm, as well as to Giap’s refinement of that paradigm, that the conflict, broadly speaking, followed the three-stage trajectory.

The application of the Mao-Giap doctrine would have failed if Giap had been intimidated by the vast superiority of the military forces he confronted. What explains his audacity, his refusal to be daunted and discouraged? A speculative answer, which is really the best we can do with
the limited sources at hand, is that he saw the Revolution in almost religious terms and himself as the devoted apostle of Ho Chi Minh. He could brook no compromise and was always ready to die for the cause. A tireless exhorter and teacher as well as a general, he was also willing to give over the lives of his soldiers for the cause in ghastly numbers. He earned his reputation as a butcher, but he was a butcher who always believed that the ends of the Revolution justified horrendous casualties. After all, as Douglas Pike pointed out, Giap understood that people were his major weapon, not firepower.
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And in war, one uses one’s weapons to maximum effect. Therefore, they are essentially expendable.

Giap survived as the commander in chief of the PAVN by discerning with uncanny accuracy not only his own strengths and weaknesses, but also those of his adversary. For Giap, the three-stage model was no procrustean bed; it had to be applied to the war in Vietnam with confidence, discernment, and flexibility.

THE WAR OF RESISTANCE: THE FIRST PHASE

For the first nine months of the conflict, French operations were surprisingly restrained and cautious. FEF commander Valluy had only 40,000 troops at the outbreak of the war—too few in his view to undertake major offensives in the Viet Bac. There, under the watchful eye of Giap, the Vietminh were busily engaged in building up their military and political infrastructure. Meanwhile, Valluy contented himself with ousting the Vietminh from the towns and cities in the most populous regions of Tonkin—the Red River Delta and the coastal lowlands—and gradually re-establishing administrative control in the villages. This was called pacification. In the south, guerrilla fighting was the order of the day and continued to be so with a few exceptions throughout the war. The Vietminh never had the strength there to launch sustained campaigns by regulars.

Pacification operations in Tonkin were conducted by the “oil slick” method, meaning that French control extended outward from a central point, usually a city or a large town, in an irregular pattern. On a map, the areas of French control appeared something like an oil slick gradually expanding on top of the sea over time. Pacification operations worked as follows: Mobile units would clear out Communists from a particular district, set up small defensive posts, then move on and repeat the process in
adjoining areas, leaving indigenous (and notoriously unreliable) Vietnamese troops under French control to man the district on a permanent basis.

The core purpose of pacification was to deny the Vietminh guerrillas and propaganda teams access to their critical sources of strength: the people and their provisions, particularly rice. As Mao famously put it, the “fish had to be kept out of the sea.” The guerrillas had to be kept out of villages, away from the people.

In Cochinchina, French pacification efforts worked very well, as Giap’s forces were weak and had only small sanctuaries from which to mount operations. In Tonkin and northern Annam, it was another story entirely. French gains were far more limited, and even those gains proved tenuous. Inside the Red River Delta and along the central coast, the nights belonged to the Vietminh, as cadres and soldiers alike crept silently into the village centers and began to do their proselytizing and recruiting. In this political work, they had been trained up to the highest standard, and they achieved impressive results. The percentage of territory under Vietminh control expanded slowly but steadily between 1947 and 1950, in large part due to the ever-growing number of guerrillas and political cadres coming down from the Viet Bac, many of whom had just finished their training in southern China.