11/23/98 11:39
Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap
Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap was, and is, the
only PAVN figure known at all well outside of
Vietnam, the only PAVN general mentioned in most
counts of the Vietnam war, and the only Vietnamese
communist military leader about whom a full length
biography has been written. The disparity between
General Giap and the others-the lone figure
standing in the forefront of a legion of shadowy
Vietnamese communist generals-assures him a
prominent place in Vietnam's history. But history's
judgment on him, as general, is yet to be
rendered.
The three horses pulling the chariot of war are
leadership, organization and strategy. The ideal
general in any army would posses to perfection each
of these in careful combination. Evaluating the
performance of General Giap, therefore, must be in
terms of his performance as leader, organizer and
strategist, all three. While the jury is still
deliberating, this much about him seems reasonably
clear: he was a competent commander of men but not
a brilliant one; he was a first rate military
organizer once the innovative conceptual work was
past, a good builder and administrator of the
military apparat after the grand scheme had been
devised; as a strategist he was at best a gifted
amateur.
Giap of course, is a legend, with a
larger-than-life image which the party and State in
Hanoi, as well as the world's press, have
enthusiastically contributed. His metaphoric
appellation is Nui Lua, roughly "volcano beneath
the snow" meaning a cold exterior but boiling
within, an apt description of his personality
according to those who know him. Associates also
have described him as forceful, arrogant, impatient
and dogmatic. At least in earlier years, he was
ruthlessly ambitious and extraordinarily energetic,
with a touch of vanity suggesting to interviewers
that he should be considered an Asian Napoleon. He
is said to be fiercely loyal to those of his
political faction who grant him unreserved loyalty.
He once told an associate that he took a "Darwinian
view" of politics, and is said always to have been
indifferent to arguments or reasoning based mainly
on dogma. He always has been surrounded by
political enemies and the victim of decades of sly
whispers campaigns so common in Vietnam. (A typical
whisper: General Dung, not Giap, planned the final
successful at the battle of Dien Bien Phu because
Giap had been struck down by diarrhea.)
Vo Nguyen Giap was born, by his account, in
1912 in the village of An Xa, Quang Binh province,
although other reports say he was born into a
peasant family, but former associates say his
family was impoverished mandarin of lower rank. His
father worked the land, rented out land to
neighbors, and was not poor. More important as a
social indicator in Vietnam, his father was
literate and familiar with the Confucian classics.
Giap, in manner and in his writings, demonstrated a
strong Confucian background. At 14, Giap became a
messenger for the Haiphong Power Company and
shortly thereafter joined the Tan Viet Cach Mang
Dang, a romantically-styled revolutionary youth
group. Two years later he entered Quoc Hoc, a
French-run lycee in Hue, from which two years
later, according to his account, he was expelled
for continued Tan Viet movement activities. In
1933, at the age of twenty-one, Giap enrolled in
Hanoi University. He studied for three years and
was awarded a degree falling between a bachelor and
master of arts (doctorates were not awarded in
Vietnam, only in France). Had he completed a fourth
year he automatically would have been named a
district governor upon graduation, but he failed
his fourth year entrance examination.
While in Hanoi University, Giap met one Dang
Xuan Khu, later known as Trung Chinh, destined to
become Vietnamese communism's chief ideologue, who
converted him to communism. During this same period
Giap came to know another young Vietnamese who
would be touched by destiny, Ngo Dinh Diem. Giap,
then still something of a Fabian socialist, and
Diem, who might be described as a right wing
nationalist revolutionary, spend evenings together
trying to proselytize each other.
While studying law at the University, Giap
supported himself by teaching history at the Thanh
Long High School, operated by Huynh Thuc Khang,
another major figure in Vietnamese affairs. Former
students say Giap loved to diagram on the
blackboard the many military campaigns of Napoleon,
and that he portrayed Napoleon in highly
revolutionary terms.
In 1939, he published his first book,
co-authored with Trung Chinh titled The Peasant
Question, which argued not very originally that a
communist revolution could be peasant-based as well
as proletarian-based.
In September 1939, with the French crackdown on
communist, Giap fled to China where he met Ho Chi
Minh for the first time; he was with Ho at the
Chingsi (China) Conference in May 1941, when the
Viet Minh was formed.
At the end of 1941 Giap found himself back in
Vietnam, in the mountains, with orders to begin
organizational and intelligence work among the
Montagnards. Working with a local bandit named Chu
Van Tan, Giap spent World War II running a network
of agents throughout northern Vietnam. The
information collected, mostly about the Japanese in
Indochina, went to the Chinese Nationalist in
exchange for military and financial assistance
which in turn, supported communist organization
building. Giap had little military prowess at his
command, however, and used what he did have to
systematically liquidate rice landlords who opposed
the communist.
On December 22, 1944, after about two years of
recruiting, training and military experimenting,
Giap fielded the first of his armed propaganda
teams, and forerunner of PAVN. By mid-1945 he had
some 10,000 men, if not soldiers, at his command.
During these early years, Giap led Party
efforts at organization busting which, with the
connivance of the French, emasculated competing
non-communist nationalist organizations, killing
perhaps some 10,00 individuals (although these
figures come from surviving nationalist and may be
exaggerated). One of the liquidation techniques
used by Giap's men was to tie victims together in
batches, like cordwood, and toss them into the Red
River, the victims thus drowning while floating out
to sea a method referred to as "crab fishing."
Giap's purge also extended to the newly created
Viet Minh government: of the 360 original National
Assembly members elected in 1946, only 291 actually
took their seats, of whom only 37 were official
opposition and only 20 of these were left at the
end of the first session. Giap arrested some 200
during the session, some of whom were shot. He also
ordered the execution of the famed and highly
popular South Vietnamese Viet Minh leader, Nguyen
Binh. Giap sent Binh into an ambush and he died
with a personal letter from Giap in his pocket. He
also was carrying a diary which made it clear he
knew of Giap's duplicity, but Binh went to his
death in much the same manner in which the old
Bolshevik, Rubashov, in darkness at Noon. Giap
later confessed to a friend, "I was forced to
sacrifice Nguyen Binh."
With the Viet Minh war Giap faced his most
challenging task, converting peasants cum
guerrillas into fully trained soldiers through a
combination of military training and political
indoctrination. He built an effective army.
Colonial powers always controlled the colonial
countryside with only token military forces; they
controlled the peasants because the peasants
permitted themselves to be controlled. Giap built
an army that changed that in Indochina.
In military operations in both the Viet
Minh and Vietnam Wars, Giap was cautious and so
meticulous in planning that operations frequently
were delayed because either they or the moment was
premature. Giap's caution and policies led his
opponents to underestimate both his military
strength and his tactical skill. Although as
someone noted, in war everyone habitually
underestimates everyone else. Historians,
particularly French historians, tend to case Giap
in larger than life terms; they write of his
flashing brilliance as a strategic and tactical
military genius. But there is little objective
proof of this. Perhaps the French write him large
as a slave for bruised French ego. Giap's victories
have been due less to brilliant or even incisive
thinking than to energy, audacity and meticulous
planning. And his defeats clearly are due to
serious shortcomings as a military commander: a
tendency to hold on too long, to refuse to break
victory to intoxicate and lead to the to the taking
of excessive and even insane chances in trying to
strike a bold second blow; a preoccupation, while
fighting the "people's war," with real estate,
attempting to sweep the enemy out of an area that
may or may not be militarily important.
Giap always was at his best when he was moving
men and supplies around a battlefield, far faster
than his foes had any right to expect. He did this
against the French in 1951, infiltrating an entire
army through their lines in the Red River Delta,
and again in advance of the Tet offensive in 1968
when he positioned thousands of men and tons of
supplies for a simultaneous attack on thirty-five
major South Vietnamese population centers. If Giap
is a genius as a general at all, he is, as the late
Bernard Fall put it, a logistic genius. General
Giap's strategic thinking early in the Vietnam War,
from 1959 until at least 1966, was to let the NLF
and PLAF do it by the Viet Minh War book. Cadres
and battle plans in the form of textbooks were sent
down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Southern elements were
instructed in the proper mobilization and
motivation techniques, centered on the orthodox dau
tranh strategy that had worked with the French and
in which Giap had full faith. Certain adjustments
might be necessary with respect to political dau
tranh and some minor adaptations of armed dau tranh
might be required, his writings at this time
indicated but essentially the necessary doctrine
was in existence and was in place.
What changed Giap's thinking, and his
assumption that the war against the Americans could
be a continuation of the war against the French,
was the battle of Ia Drang Valley,the first truly
important battle of the war. Giap's troops veterans
of Dien Bien Phu, when thrown against green First
Cavalry Division soldiers, experienced for the
first time the full meaning of American-style
conduct of war: the helicopters, the lightweight
bullet, sophisticated communications, computerized
military planning, an army that moved mostly
vertically and hardly ever walked. Technology had
revolutionized warfare, Giap acknowledged in Big
Victory, Great Task, a book written to outline his
strategic response to the U.S. intervention. The
answer he said, was to match the American advantage
in mass and movement or, where not possible, to
shunt it aside. He was still searching for the
winning formula when suddenly he was handed
victory. The South Vietnamese Army which had stood
and fought under far worse conditions in January
1975, under minor military pressure, began to
collapse. Soon in could not fight coherently. Giap
was handed a victory he neither expected at the
time nor deserved. How much command responsibility
Giap had in the last days of the war, in 1975, is
debated - much direction had passed to General Dung
but is unimportant in terms of distributing
laurels, since none was deserved by any PAVN
general.
After the Vietnam War General Giap slowly began
to fade the scene, withdrawing gradually from
day-to-day command of PAVN. General Dung began to
take up the reins of authority. Giap was given a
series of relatively important short term tak force
assignments. He supervised the initial assumption
by PAVN of various production and other postwar
economic duties. He reorganized and downgraded the
PAVN polotical commissar system, as the battle
organized Reds and Experts tilted ever more clearly
towards the latter. He defended PAVN's budget
against the sniping attack of cadres in the
economic sector.
When the 'Pol Pot problem" developed truly
serious dimensions in late 1977, giap returned to
the scene. He spent most of 1978 organizing an NLF
style response for Kampuchea, that in creation of a
Liberation Army, a Liberated Area, a radio
Liberation, and a standby Provisional Revolutionary
Government. This was the tried method, but by its
nature, slow. Apparently the politburo judged it
did not have time for protracted conflict, and so
in 1978 opted in favor of a Soviet-style solution:
tanks across the border, invasion and occupation of
Kampuchea. Giap opposed it, although evidence of
this is mostly inferential, holding that a quick
military solution was not possible, that Pol Pot
would embrace a dau tranh strategy against PAVN and
the result would be a bogged down war. Giap proved
to be painfully correct and, for the sin of being
right when all others are wrong in a collective
leadership decision-making process, was eased out
of Politburo level politics. Apparently all
factions ganged up on him, but his removal was
designed to eliminate Giap as factional infighting
without tarnishing Giap the legend. It appears he
did not resist this power play as he might have
done, with possibly bloody consequences, which may
be a tribute to his better judgements.
Today Giap still is on the Vietnamese scene,
but plays a lesser role. He has taken upon himself
the task of lifting Vietnam by its technological
boot straps, has become the leading figure in the
drive to raise the country's technical and
scientific capability. This requires, among other
things, soliciting continued Soviet assistance,
something Giap is able to do well because of the
regard for him in the USSR. He confers frequently
with Soviet advisors in Hanoi and in the Soviet
Union; in 1980 he went to Moscow three times in a
nine-month period.
General Giap has been a prolific writer and he
continues to publish although Big Victory, Great
Task is more innovative and original. His most
interesting book is Dien Bien Phu, while his worst
certainly is Once Again We Will Win, his initial
assessment of what was required to defeat the
Americans which is virtually devoid of correct
factual and technical judgments