Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (37 page)

Giap saw with far greater clarity than did his adversaries that the balance of forces could be fundamentally altered by ideas, events, and passions far from the battlefield. He was acutely conscious of the way domestic politics in France and the United States could be shaped and manipulated to drive a wedge between the people and the governments that claimed to
represent them. By protracting the conflicts against France and America, inflicting substantial casualties, and portraying his enemies’ war policies as unjust through the Revolution’s varied propaganda programs, Giap believed that he could sap the will of his adversaries to a point where their military victory would become impossible. He was entirely correct.

He also believed that he could instill a sense of futility and exhaustion in the French and American armies by avoiding large-scale combat engagements in favor of harassing tactics, including ambushes, booby traps, and luring the enemy into patrolling forbidding mountainous terrain and steamy jungles where his own troops were more at home. For Giap, military operations were often planned and executed to achieve specific psychological and political effects.

Giap never doubted that the power of his soldiers’ and citizens’ commitment to the Vietnamese revolutionary vision would compensate for the inferiority of their military forces. It was only necessary to instill the same level of belief and determination he himself possessed for the cause into the Revolution as a whole, and to direct that energy toward victory. Giap, the man and the general, came to embody the spirit of invincibility built into the fabric of the entire revolutionary enterprise—the PAVN, the PLAF, the political cadres, the aspirations of the people. Much of the revolution’s allure stemmed from Giap’s dexterity in presenting the Communist revolution as the only vehicle for achieving national liberation and unification, as the only way to give the people power to shape their own history and destiny. Whether this was true or not in some objective sense—and of course the French, the Americans, and many of their Vietnamese allies did not think it was—hardly mattered. What did matter was that the people and the soldiers loyal to the Revolution believed it was true.

When all is said and done, Giap’s enduring importance lies in recognizing that he was a successful general largely because he could see with extraordinary clarity all the factors and forces that shaped the trajectory of the wars in which he fought, and how each element related to all the others. He understood that the relative importance of each element was constantly in a state of flux, and that one’s strategy, and one’s tactics, must be constantly recalibrated in light of those changes.

The hallmarks of Vo Nguyen Giap’s way of war were, then, tactical flexibility, pragmatism, and a gift for seeing conflict as it was, not as he wished it to be. The diminutive history professor turned soldier from the tiny village
of An Xa in Quang Binh Province, Vietnam, humbled first the French and then the Americans. Giap himself once said he had learned his trade in the bush. In thirty years of fighting, he learned well—well enough to provide his adversaries with a very costly education in warfare simply by doing what worked.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

  
1.
 
Hoài Thanh, ed.,
Days with Ho Chi Minh
(Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), p. 181.

  
2.
 
Robert F. Turner,
Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development
, Hoover Institutions Publications, 143 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1975), p. 5.

  
3.
 
Ibid, p. 6.

  
4.
 
Ibid., endnote, p. 5.

  
5.
 
Cecil B. Currey,
Victory at Any Cost: The Genius of Viet Nam’s Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap
(Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1997), p. 100.

  
6.
 
Douglas Pike,
PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam
(Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1986), p. 18.

  
7.
 
William J. Duiker,
The Communist Road to Power In Vietnam
, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 22.

  
8.
 
Currey, p. 10.

  
9.
 
Hoài, p. 185.

10.
 
Currey, p. 32.

11.
 
Ibid.

12.
 
Duiker, p. 57.

13.
 
Ibid., p. 62.

14.
 
Ibid., p. 74.

15.
 
Phillip B. Davidson,
Vietnam at War: The History: 1946–1975
(Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988), p. 15.

16.
 
Samuel B. Griffith, tr.,
Mao Tse-tung: On Guerrilla Warfare
(New York: Praeger, 1961), p. 8.

17.
 
Ibid., pp. 42–46.

CHAPTER 2

  
1.
 
Fredrik Logevall,
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam
(New York: Random House, 2012), p. 71.

  
2.
 
Logevall, p. 73.

  
3.
 
Currey, p. 51.

  
4.
 
See ibid., p. 52.

  
5.
 
Ibid., p. 54.

  
6.
 
Logevall, p. 35.

  
7.
 
Duiker, p. 74.

  
8.
 
Pike, pp. 27–28.

  
9.
 
Võ Nguyên Giáp,
The Military Art of People’s War
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), p. 57. Hereafter cited as
MAPW
.

10.
 
See John T. McAlister, Jr.,
Viet Nam: The Origins of Revolution
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), pp. 263–264.

11.
 
Giáp, p. 65.

12.
 
Ibid., p. 64.

13.
 
Ibid., p. 67.

14.
 
Pike, p. 29.

15.
 
Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, Central Committee of Propoganda of the Viet Nam Lao Dong Party and the Committee for the Study of the Party’s History:
Thirty Years of Struggle of the Party
, Book One (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), p. 91, quoted in McAlister, p. 158.

16.
 
McAlister, p. 269.

17.
 
Logevall, p. 71.

18.
 
Democratic Republic of Viet Nam,
Thirty Years of Struggle of the Party
, p. 88.

19.
 
McAlister, pp. 155–156.

20.
 
Ibid., pp. 156–159.

21.
 
Logevall, p. 149.

CHAPTER 3

  
1.
 
Logevall, p. 115.

  
2.
 
Ibid., p. 118.

  
3.
 
Ibid., p. 133.

  
4.
 
Ibid., p. 151.

  
5.
 
Quoted in Logevall, pp. 149–150.

  
6.
 
Bernard B. Fall,
The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 73.

  
7.
 
Logevall, p. 144.

  
8.
 
Duiker, p. 126; Davidson, p. 42.

  
9.
 
Duiker, p. 128.

10.
 
See ibid., pp. 134–137.

11.
 
Ibid., p. 136.

12.
 
Pike, p. 215.

13.
 
Joseph Buttinger,
A Dragon Defiant
(New York: Praeger, 1972), vol. 2, p. 1023.

14.
 
Bernard Fall,
Street without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina
(Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Co., 1964), p. 30.

15.
 
Ibid., p. 54.

16.
 
Ibid., p. 27.

17.
 
Giáp, pp. 87–88.

18.
 
George K. Tanham,
Communist Revolutionary Warfare: From the Vietminh to the Viet Cong
, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 25.

19.
 
Davidson, p. 76.

20.
 
Giáp, p. 11.

21.
 
Robert J. O’Neill,
General Giap: Politician and Strategist
(New York: Praeger, 1969), p. 66.

22.
 
Duiker, p. 142.

23.
 
Davidson, p. 59.

24.
 
Pike, p. 220.

25.
 
Giáp,
MAPW
, pp. 168–176.

26.
 
Pike, p. 24.

27.
 
Edgar O’Ballance,
The Indo-China War, 1945–1954: A Study in Guerilla Warfare
(London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 105.

28.
 
Logevall, p. 147.

CHAPTER 4

  
1.
 
Stanley Karnow,
Vietnam, a History
(New York: Viking, 1983), p. 181.

  
2.
 
Lucien Bodard,
The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 247.

  
3.
 
Võ Nguyên Giáp,
People’s War: People’s Army
(Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 49. Hereafter cited as
PWPA
.

  
4.
 
Ibid., pp. 108–109.

  
5.
 
Bodard, p. 174.

  
6.
 
Ibid., p. 279.

  
7.
 
O’Neill, p. 76.

  
8.
 
Logevall, p. 238.

  
9.
 
Davidson, p. 80.

10.
 
Bodard, p. 241.

11.
 
Ibid., p. 57.

12.
 
Davidson, p. 83.

13.
 
United States Marine Corps,
Warfighting
(New York: Doubleday, 1994), p. 1.

14.
 
Fall,
Street
, p. 33.

15.
 
Logevall, p. 250.

16.
 
Fall,
Street
, p. 34.

17.
 
Ibid.

CHAPTER 5

  
1.
 
Duiker, p. 151.

  
2.
 
Fall,
Street
, pp. 39–40.

  
3.
 
Davidson, pp. 123–125.

  
4.
 
Fall,
Street
, p. 5.

  
5.
 
Ibid., pp. 52–53.

  
6.
 
Giáp,
PWPA
, p. 109.

  
7.
 
O’Ballance, p. 177.

  
8.
 
Fall,
Street
, p. 71.

  
9.
 
Ted Morgan,
Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu that Led America into the Vietnam War
(New York: Random House, 2010), p. 158.

10.
 
Joseph R. Starobin,
Eyewitness in Indo-China
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1954), pp. 158–159.

11.
 
O’Ballance, p. 187.

12.
 
Ibid., pp. 191–192.

13.
 
Logevall, p. 345.

14.
 
Morgan, p. 151.

CHAPTER 6

  
1.
 
Giáp,
PWPA
, p. 159.

  
2.
 
Morgan, p. 178.

  
3.
 
Logevall, p. 388.

  
4.
 
Ibid., pp. 388–389.