Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (10 page)

France’s response to the insurgency, much like that of the Americans who came after them, suggests a general failure among those at the highest levels of command to grasp the
political dynamics
of the war and the nature of the adversary. By 1948, the French, aware of their lack of popularity and legitimacy in the eyes of the population, had cobbled together an “independent and free” government under the former Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai. The old emperor was presented in French press releases and briefings as a legitimate alternative to the Vietminh. True, Bao Dai was an ardent patriot. But he had little of the common touch. He was dissolute, a playboy who loved wine, women, and the luxuries of Parisian life. His interest in the welfare of the peasantry of Vietnam was entirely perfunctory. Thus, the “state” of Vietnam, its seat of government in Saigon, had precious little legitimacy in the eyes of the population, or indeed, in the eyes of the world powers.

The French colonial administration itself made no serious effort to address the needs of the peasantry, or to provide them with some measure of political participation in their own affairs. Indeed, the people were exploited by French officers, abused by enlisted soldiers, and often made
to feel like prisoners in their own villages. The best the ordinary peasant could hope for from the French colonial government, its civil or military arm, was indifference. The French reaction to advocates of political reform and progressive economic policies for Vietnam ranged from indifferent to hostile. Meanwhile, the Vietminh were intensely focused on cultivating the loyalty of the populace, in addressing their needs, in running literacy programs, in participating in village projects. And the cadres continually hammered away at the venality and indifference of the French.

From Paris to Saigon to Hanoi, the lion’s share of French senior officers and colonial officials saw the Indochina war as one of low-intensity combat against resourceful bandits and insurgents. General Valluy and his officers were oblivious to the revolutionary nature of the struggle, and to the tenacity with which their adversary held on to both territory and the people’s allegiance. What documentary evidence we have makes it clear that neither the French army nor the colonial administration in Saigon took Mao’s ideas on protracted war seriously. In the eyes of the French command, Giap was only an amateur, given over to romantic notions of a Marxian utopia. The idea that he could wage a successful war against French general officers who had distinguished themselves during two world wars and sundry colonial campaigns in Africa was absurd, even preposterous. So it was that a combination of ignorance and arrogance pervaded the French command and its strategic decision making throughout the conflict.

General Valluy appeared particularly ignorant of his adversary. He confidently predicted in September 1947 that his expeditionary force “could eliminate all organized resistance in three months.”
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On October 7, 1947, he launched Operation Lea, the war’s first major offensive, with some twenty battalions (15,000 troops) of the FEF. Valluy ordered an elite parachute battalion to drop on Vietminh headquarters in the mountains near Bac Kan with the intention of killing or capturing the senior leaders of the Vietminh. Meanwhile, mobile armored forces as well as amphibious troops would penetrate the heart of the Viet Bac along three axes, encircle the bulk of Giap’s growing army of regular troops and his recruits in training among the limestone karsts and caves of the Viet Bac, and inflict sufficient casualties to render most of Giap’s regiments and battalions ineffective—perhaps even extinguish the resistance entirely.

In dramatic fashion, the French paras landed directly on top of the Vietminh’s headquarters, forcing Giap and Ho to seek refuge in a covered pit for several hours before making a harrowing escape by crawling into the jungle. Ho Chi Minh’s mail was confiscated from his small field desk. Several German and Japanese army instructors, who for various reasons sought refuge with the Vietminh after the defeat of their own nations, were captured. Despite catching the Vietminh by surprise, the French force became bogged down and disorganized as they attempted to ferret out the PAVN’s larger units in the difficult terrain around Bac Kan. Soon the jungle paths of the Viet Bac were littered with the corpses of French paras who died attempting to extricate themselves from slashing ambushes or to break through the Vietminh’s prepared defensive positions. The hunters had become the hunted.

Meanwhile, the main FEF force of ten motorized battalions prepared to launch their attack from the east, marching northwest into the heart of the Viet Bac along a narrow road in the middle of mountainous terrain. Repeatedly ambushed by Vietminh guerrillas and stalled by blown bridges, the French took six full days to reach Giap’s outer defense positions ten miles north of the town of Bac Kan. There the Vietminh main force units took heavy casualties, but they fought with resolution and bravery, gaining the respect of professional French soldiers and Legionnaires. The main task force never succeeded in rescuing the paras, many of whom stumbled out of the dense jungles in groups of three or four exhausted men.

A French river-borne amphibious attack force attempted to partially encircle the Vietminh base area from the southeast. It, too, bogged down, first on river sandbars and then against increasingly stiff resistance in the dense jungle near Tuyen Quang. Finally the two pincers of the attack—the amphibious force and the motorized one—met at Chiem Hoa, more than one hundred miles inside the Viet Bac. “The main Communist redoubt in Indochina had become a vast pocket [meaning it was surrounded by enemy forces in every direction except the north] but . . . in this kind of war and that kind of terrain, the term ‘encirclement’ was of course totally meaningless,” writes Bernard Fall, perhaps the greatest contemporary reporter-scholar of the war. “Between the towns and key points the French now garrisoned . . . there were vast stretches where the Viet-Minh regiments could slip through, and did.”
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Giap’s forces suffered perhaps 3,000
casualties, but they had gained invaluable experience against French conventional operations.

Operation Lea failed to achieve its objectives. So did Operation Ceinture (“Belt”), an attempt to destroy PAVN Regiment 112, the elite “Capital” Regiment that would soon form the heart of Giap’s “Iron” Division—the 308th. Operation Ceinture was a major land-sea-air effort involving an attack by eighteen French battalions against the southern edge of the Viet Bac. The FEF succeeded in besting the PAVN in several sharp engagements, prompting Giap to break off contact and retreat to his sanctuaries in the mountains. The PAVN surrendered a number of small supply depots on the Viet Bac’s perimeter, but they were expendable.

In late December 1947, the French pulled their mobile units out of the Viet Bac, leaving behind lightly defended garrisons to man a string of old forts along the China-Vietnam border. The forts, however, were not in close enough proximity to one another to be mutually supporting. Therefore, they were all vulnerable to attack by a superior Vietminh force. But Valluy didn’t believe Giap’s forces could ever mount a sustained and coordinated attack by a force as large as even one regiment.

By early 1948, the PAVN was growing at an impressive rate in both size and skill, while the French command seemed to fall back on the defensive. French support at home for the “dirty war” (as it was called by the French Left) was already beginning to falter, albeit slowly, and the government refused to send reinforcements in the numbers requested by Saigon.

In light of these developments, Giap began to increase guerrilla operations and clandestine organizational work in the Red River Delta aggressively. He also continued to professionalize and expand the PAVN, adding new training camps, and expanding his control in the north well beyond the Viet Bac into some strategic areas in the Red River Delta.

In frustration, the French soldiers inside the Red River Delta coined a new term to describe the slow but steady breakdown of government authority at the hands of the Vietminh cadre:
pourissement.
It meant “rotting away.”
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GENERAL CARPENTIER ARRIVES

A new French commander, Lieutenant General Marcel Carpentier, arrived in Saigon in the summer of 1949. He possessed a superb combat and
command record over two world wars. He claimed to know little about Indochina, but he was well aware that the steady increase in guerrilla attacks in the Red River Delta was a very ominous development. Even as the size of the FEF grew steadily toward 150,000, French troops were spread perilously thin in static defense duties. This severely restricted Carpentier’s ability to launch mobile offensive operations against Giap’s largest units at the time—his regiments. These early problems would dog the French as the war dragged on. As Bernard Fall observed, “Once full-scale hostilities had broken out, the French, for budgetary and political reasons, could not . . . make the large-scale effort necessary to contain the rebellion within the confines of small-scale warfare.”
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Realizing that another massive offensive operation like Lea was unlikely to inflict serious damage on the enemy, Carpentier focused on the same sort of pacification operations that had dominated the early phase of the war. His maneuver battalions (that is, mobile offensive as opposed to static defense forces) could usually clear out Giap’s guerrillas and cadres from a cluster of villages, or even a whole provincial district. Yet the government’s “control” was both evanescent and cosmetic. The French never had enough troops to garrison the newly won ground and respond effectively to Giap’s roving guerrillas as they struck small posts and communication lines.

Meanwhile, the Vietnamese who had joined the fledgling French-led Vietnamese national army were dependably undependable. Desertions were general, and the maneuver forces, such as they were, lacked the critical ingredient in all military organizations: fighting spirit.

On the other hand, Giap and his cadres offered the villagers something they had never had in nearly one hundred years of French rule—a sense of belonging to something important, a national crusade for self-determination, and a bright future in which every soul, even women and children, played an important role. Whether hostile or indifferent to colonial rule, most villagers could not be coerced into providing intelligence on Vietminh operatives to the French, and so, sooner or later, even in villages where political cadres had been caught and killed, the Vietminh returned, and re-established control, whether covert or overt. In the War of Resistance, as in the American War, Giap seldom lacked highly motivated, well-trained replacements. When the French planned to return to a district or village, Vietminh operatives were usually tipped off and faded into the
countryside until the threat had passed. In describing this phase of the war in Tonkin, Giap wrote:

Realizing the war was being prolonged, the enemy changed their strategy. They used the main part of their forces for “pacification” and for consolidating the already occupied areas . . . They gradually extended their zone of occupation in the North and placed under their control the major part of the Red River delta. . . . [w]e then advocated the wide development of guerrilla warfare, transforming the [enemy’s] rear into our front line. Our units operated in small pockets, with independent companies penetrating deeply into the enemy-controlled zone to launch guerrilla warfare, establish bases, and protect local people’s power. It was an extremely hard war generalized in all domains: military, economic and political. The enemy mopped up; we fought against mopping up. They organized supplementary local Vietnamese troops and installed puppet authorities; we firmly upheld local people’s power, overthrew straw men, eliminated traitors, and carried out active propaganda to bring about the disintegration of the supplementary forces. We gradually formed a network of guerrilla bases. On the map showing the theater of operations, besides the free zone [the Viet Bac], “red zones,” which ceaselessly spread and multiplied [Vietminh-controlled zones], began to appear right in the heart of the occupied areas.
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Between early 1948 and September 1950, neither the French nor the Vietminh attempted to engage in major conventional operations. On the Vietminh side the fighting was conducted by regional guerrillas and a limited number of operations by regular PAVN battalions operating independently of the regiments to which they belonged. These operating battalions typically broke down into companies of about 150 men who planned and executed raids or ambushes of short duration. These were the “fighting forms” Giap favored in stage two of the people’s war.

Giap’s forces invariably returned to Communist base areas after a period of sustained combat operations. As the war ground on, new base areas emerged, most of them on the fringes of population centers. The majority were small, often little more than a cluster of villages. A prominent student of Giap’s fighting methods aptly describes the characteristics of a typical base area as “a closely integrated complex of villages prepared for defense [containing] a politically indoctrinated population in which
even children have their specific intelligence tasks; a network of food and weapons dumps; an administrative machine parallel to that of the legal authority, to which may be added at will any regular [army] unit assigned to operations in the area.”
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BUILDING UP THE PEOPLE’S ARMY

Throughout the first three years of the War of Resistance, Giap worked assiduously to expand and improve all three echelons of the revolution’s military forces and the political infrastructure that sustained them. And he had to do this while simultaneously frustrating the efforts of tens of thousands of French troops to pacify the Vietnamese population with the limited operational forces at his disposal. This expansion would not have been possible without the conflation of disciplined military and political activity across ever-widening swathes of territory from the Mekong Delta to the Chinese border, a process that was spearheaded in large measure by small Armed Propaganda Teams ranging from a section of eight to ten men (a squad in American parlance) to a platoon of about thirty men (and sometimes women).