Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (39 page)

Thus the lessons of Kitson’s clever, deceptive irregular operations have tended to be lost, with the emphasis instead being on “surging” forces into the various theaters of irregular operations that have opened up, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. The fallacy of Pye’s conclusion was growing apparent even at the time he was writing it down in the mid-1950s, as French counterinsurgent forces were being defeated in Vietnam, losing half the country. Soon Americans would take their place; yet their “vastly superior” air and naval forces, along with more than half a million troops, would fail to stop the insurgents from conquering the other half.

Kitson’s greatest insight is that irregular warfare need not, perhaps should not, be waged by the numbers. His concepts hold out the possibility of doing more and better with less. He recognized that the fundamental challenge in confronting insurgents and terrorists was to find them. He understood that intelligence, in a looming age of irregular wars, was no longer simply a supporting arm. It had to be an integral part of what military professionals call “operational art.” Kitson’s insight implied the need for formations that can mount pseudo operations, soldiers capable both of finding and, on the right occasions, shooting at the enemy.

In the years after his retirement from active service, Kitson’s counsel was sought by military and security officials in several countries confronting insurgent or terrorist threats. His sagacity, drawn from his many experiences in the field, continued to prove highly effective in settings where no vast superiority over the enemy existed.

Today Kitson’s ideas are overlooked, for the most part, by the greater states still held in thrall to troop surges and muscle-bound notions of “overwhelming force.” But they are honored by those smaller nations whose independence often came in the wake of insurgent and terrorist campaigns, the likes of which Kitson spent his most active years opposing. As we shall see over the next three chapters—which take us from Vietnam to the terror war—it is Kitson’s concept of counterinsurgency, not Pye’s and his successors’ preferences, that hold out the better hope of prevailing in the irregular wars now underway and those to come.

PEOPLE’S WARRIOR:
VO NGUYEN GIAP

Agencia Brasil, www.agenciabrasil.gov.br/media/imagens/2008/07/10/1007200850012.jpg/view

Perhaps the greatest single benefit to be had from waging irregular warfare is the improved prospect of victory over a materially much stronger adversary. To be sure, some of the “masters” profiled in this book have fought on the side with the big battalions, but even they had difficulties to overcome. The British in eighteenth-century North America outnumbered the French and their Native American allies by far, but they were vastly inferior in bush tactics, and at the outset Rogers’s rangers were virtually on their own in confronting their foes. The Russians had far more people than France but fewer soldiers in the field than Napoleon in 1812; the defeat of the
GRANDE ARMÉE
was due in large part to Denis Davydov’s highly successful raids. In his campaigns against the Sioux and Apache tribes, George Crook was backed by the enormous resources of his government, yet he chose to operate in small units, his ranks often filled with “turned” enemies—somewhat akin to Frank Kitson’s pseudo gang approach. As for the other masters of irregular warfare, all operated against heavy odds for part or all of their campaigns. Yet most emerged victorious, and each put up a hard fight, no matter the numbers.

Of all these remarkable results, none is more memorable than the victory of Vietnamese insurgents in thirty years of warfare, from 1945 to 1975, against two of the world’s great powers: France and the United States. The newly unified nation forged by this fighting would then more than hold its own in a short, sharp conflict with the People’s Republic of China, a disaffected former patron determined to punish the Vietnamese upstarts for intervening to end the genocidal (but nonetheless Communist and Beijing-friendly) Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Just how all these victories were won is a remarkable tale, one best told through the story of Vo Nguyen Giap, the able soldier who served as creator and overall commander of the fighting forces of the Vietminh, the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong.

Giap was born in 1911 into a family of modest means living in the coastal town of An Xa in the Quang Binh province of Vietnam, some sixty miles north of the old imperial capital of Hué. His intelligence was quickly discerned, his education encouraged. This was the heyday of French colonialism in Southeast Asia (or Indochina, which included Laos and Cambodia), so Giap learned to speak French in addition to his native tongue, well enough to teach it at the high school level. But he also taught history and was particularly drawn to the French Revolution and the campaigns of Napoleon. Thus began his dual interest in social reform and military affairs. For Giap, the two would always go hand in hand.

Living in Hué and continuing his education while teaching by studying law on the side, he became radicalized as the inequities of French colonial rule grew more apparent to him. By the late 1920s the energetic Giap added to his already full schedule of activities by joining a secret society, the Tan Viet (Great Vietnam), and hiring on with an anticolonial newspaper,
TIENG DAN
(The People’s Voice). Both as secret operative and reporter, Giap was intent on serving the cause of Vietnamese independence. Neither the Tan Viet nor the newspaper was Communist, but the propaganda of the secret society, as the historian Cecil Currey has assessed it, “sounded very Marxist.”
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Giap soon came under government suspicion and was sent to prison for subversive activities, serving more than a year at hard labor between 1930 and 1932, the same time that Tito was in the middle years of his own sentence for revolutionary activities in Yugoslavia.

Upon his release, Giap returned to teaching, news reporting, and, undaunted, his secret activities in support of Vietnamese independence from France. Like Tito he became stealthier, and managed to avoid further incarceration, advancing to the ranks of the leading members of the indigenous resistance to continued French rule. He also got married during this period, to a dedicated revolutionary woman named Quang Thai, whom he had come to know during his time in prison. They worked closely together for their cause throughout the 1930s and had their only child, a daughter, in January 1940. She was born five months before the fall of France to a German invasion.

In the wake of the Nazi
BLITZKRIEG
, with the collapse of France’s Third Republic clearly looming, Giap and his fellow revolutionaries reasoned the time was right for an open break with the French. One day in May 1940 Giap and Quang Thai disappeared abruptly. He went to China for advanced political and military instruction; she left the baby with relatives and stayed on the run, but still in the country, being hunted the whole time and captured a year later. She was tortured, most probably sexually abused, and beaten to death in prison.
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Giap would not learn of this for several years, as he spent World War II in and out of China and Tonkin (the northern part of Vietnam), organizing insurgent cells into the force that would become the Vietminh.
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It was during this time that he met and began his long, close partnership with Ho Chi Minh, the revolution-minded son of Vietnamese intellectuals who had spent long years in exile—much of it working as a sous chef in France.

During the war years the collaborationist Vichy government had reached an accommodation with the Axis powers that allowed it to remain in control of Indochina. It wielded power in a repressive manner aimed at stamping out the insurgents. Vichy also agreed to allow the Japanese to use their territory for staging operations against the British and the Nationalist Chinese forces of Chiang Kai-shek. Thus Giap and his comrades had to elude both French and Japanese forces, in the process becoming ever more skillful at stealthy movement. It was a talent that would be put to great use in the decades to come.

Ho, seeing that Giap had a natural bent for strategic affairs, urged him to take as much Chinese military training as possible. Giap was as always an apt pupil, absorbing Mao Zedong’s ideas about people’s war. In his famous
GUERRILLA WARFARE
(1937), Mao argued for a rural hit-and-run campaign to wear down the stronger opponent, later taking the battle to the cities and mounting conventional offensives with massive forces. Giap did not wholly accept this formula, believing instead that it was possible to conduct an irregular campaign in the countryside and in the cities simultaneously. He drew this conclusion from his study of Napoleon, who made a habit of attacking several points at once, causing confusion and compelling his enemies to disperse their forces widely. Giap believed that adopting such a concept of operations against the French, or any occupying power, would be a highly practical choice for guerrilla forces.
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While Giap was able to move back and forth between China and Tonkin, Ho was kept in custody by Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist Kuomintang forces until 1943, then on “parole” in Liuchow for another year after finally, but falsely, promising that the Vietminh would join the fight against Mao. During this period Giap necessarily became the de facto political and military head of the Vietminh movement, working tirelessly to build new cells, train cadres, and manage finances. He also began to direct small-scale guerrilla operations against the forces of the Vichy French, the brutality of whose countermeasures intensified as the threat posed by Giap and his cadres grew.

Ever more aware of the rise of the Vietminh, and increasingly stung by their ambushes and acts of sabotage, the French launched a “white terror” in response. It was nothing short of criminal, with summary executions of suspects in the field and bounties paid to Vietnamese who would turn in the decapitated heads of rebels. Of due process there was no hint. But there was also some subtlety on the part of the French, who strove hard to have friendly Vietnamese infiltrate Giap’s organization. Between the terror and mistrust, Vietminh morale and numbers began to sag, a decline only partially offset by an occasional retaliatory strike. The French were proving to be formidable opponents.

As the war neared its end, with the Vichy regime collapsing and the Japanese now on the defensive, Giap and his movement enjoyed a bit of a breather. American intelligence operatives now entered the picture, their warm assessments of Ho and Giap leading to airdrops of U.S. supplies to the Vietminh. An added bonus during this period was that as the Japanese withdrew, they turned over their outposts and some matériel—perhaps out of malicious pique at the French—to the Vietminh, who used this opportunity both to wipe out other insurgent factions and to declare an independent republic.

But the French were determined to reassert colonial control over Indochina. While the “white terror” was largely curtailed by the new postwar government in favor of a negotiated settlement of issues in dispute, Vietnam’s freedom was not viewed in Paris as an acceptable option. Still, Ho and Giap pursued a negotiating strategy, reasoning that by this means they could at least arrange for the departure of the nearly two hundred thousand Kuomintang troops that had barged into Tonkin. In this they were successful; but by late 1946 wider-ranging talks broke down and a renewed insurgency flared up just a week before Christmas.

The fighting took on what was to become the trademark form of Giap’s future offensives: simultaneous strikes on outposts throughout the country, in both urban and rural zones. These were augmented by acts of sabotage against infrastructure, particularly small bridges, so numerous in a land of marshes, mountains, and rice paddies. French conventional forces struck back with powerful daylight sweeps, retiring to their fortified encampments at night. The dynamic that emerged—and persisted right on through the American intervention—was one in which, as the noted historian of the Vietnam War Joseph Buttinger put it so clearly and concisely, “many regions controlled by the French during the day became Vietminh territory after darkness fell.”
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Giap, who had been building his forces and honing his doctrine for employing them, and who had already been fighting the French for some years, was well prepared for the conflict that had come. In the years 1947–1949 neither side could gain a decisive advantage, but it was a period in which Giap’s strength grew to such an extent that he could contemplate mixing in a more conventional offensive along with his guerrilla operations—much as Nathanael Greene did during the American Revolution. He was also inspired by Mao’s just-concluded victory over Chiang and pressured by the exhortations of his Chinese military advisers to mount a major conventional offensive. Soon there was also the influential example provided by the way Communist forces were handling United Nations troops—so many of them American—in the ongoing fighting in Korea.