Military Art of People's War. Vo Nguyen Giap

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СКАЧАТЬ was to decide on the launching of the campaign. That was an unforgettable event. It rained heavily for days prior to the holding of the conference. Streams swelled, cutting the roads. He had to ford swollen and fast-running streams to come to the conference. He told us all that had happened and how resolute he was to get across the streams. Many local people who had come to the place before him and did not know what to do followed his example, and all succeeded in reaching the opposite bank. Knowing that fording swollen streams in rainy days was not an easy thing, and seeing that he came to the conference in time, all of us were moved by the solicitude he showed to the army. Moreover, we considered it a most valuable lesson for us before we went to the battlefront. That lesson was, as he often said, “Determination, determination; with determination one can do everything successfully.”

      He is the incarnation of a great energy, an energy which possesses a great mobilizing force and of which nothing can stand in the way. On that very first day when I met him in Kunming I got an impression which I failed to distinguish, the impression of standing before a man endowed with a simple, lucid, resolute, and steady mind. And today, he is still that kind of man.

      Several years ago, at the setting-up of the Vietnam Propaganda and Liberation Unit, he again and again advised us to be active, quick in taking initiative, to act secretly during the combat, to come unseen and to go unnoticed, and to go throughout the country from north to south. More than nine years later, when the revolutionary army had become a full-fledged and powerful fighting force, just when our troops had triumphed at Dien Bien Phu and enemy troops had capitulated, we received his message saying, among other things, “Though great is the victory it is only the beginning.”

      Every piece of advice of his at a given time has its particular meaning. But there is one common thing we have found in his teachings, several years ago or at the time of the Dien Bien Phu victory, and that is the spirit inherent in them: consistency, calmness, firmness, simplicity, steadfastness, perseverance in the fight until victory, upholding the great spirit of the Party, of the working class, and of our people as a whole.

      This memoir appeared under the title “President Ho Chi Minh, Father of the Vietnam Revolutionary Army” in the collection Days with Ho Chi Minh (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, rev. ed., 1962), pp. 179–228. It was not, in the strict sense, written by Giap, but his oral account was recorded and edited by those compiling the original volume.

* Despite the fact that Admiral Decoux, the French governor general in Indochina, had yielded to their ultimatum and signed an agreement granting Japan the right to establish three air bases and garrison six thousand troops in Vietnam, the Japanese launched an attack on the same day, September 22, on the cities of Lang Son and Dong Dang in northern Tonkin. Lang Son surrendered on September 24, and the following day all French resistance to the Japanese crumbled.

* Giap’s wife and infant, both of whom were to die during World War II.

* A member of the Central Committee, killed in July 1941 in a clash with the French.

† A veteran cadre and soldier; now an officer in the Vietnam People’s Army.

‡ Leader of the Dong Du (Go East) movement and of many other movements against the French from 1904 to 1925, when he was arrested in Shanghai. He lived under house arrest in Hue subsequently and died on October 29, 1941.

* A member of the Central Committee of the Indochinese Communist Party, executed by the French May 24, 1941.

* Following the agreement reached at Nanking by the Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang on September 22, 1937, the Red Army in the Yenan area was renamed the Eighth Route Army.

* An old nationalist who had lived in China since before World War I. The Kuomintang placed him at the head of the moderate nationalist coalition organized under their auspices during World War II (known as the Vietnam Cach Menh Dong Minh Hoi).

* The revolutionary traditions of Cao Bang go back to 1929, when the Young Comrades Association had many adherents in this region. When the Communist Party was founded the following year, a number of cells were organized in Cao Bang, and many were preserved during the most difficult years of the 1930’s. In the Popular Front period, numerous meetings were held there in support of the All Indochina Party Congress. In the repression which followed, the cadres were forced underground, but they maintained their political strength.

* Le Quang Ba is now commander of the air force of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Hoang Sam is now a general in the Vietnam People’s Army. Bang Giang is now a general in the Vietnam People’s Army, responsible for the conduct of military affairs in the Viet Bac zone.

† The Nung, Tho, and Man minorities (see below) are ethnic groupings who live traditionally in the mountainous Sino-Vietnamese border regions. These tribes were usually hostile to the ethnic Vietnamese; autonomous in their cultural, economic, and political life; and neglected by the central authorities. Often these tribesmen (and especially the women) did not speak the Vietnamese language, and Vietminh organizers, including Giap, were obliged to learn local dialects and resort to crude drawings in order to propagate their ideas. Despite these difficulties, the tribes were to play an important role in the early days of the Vietminh.

* Less than a mile from the Chinese border.

† A veteran cadre, now a member of the Political Bureau and deputy chairman of the National Assembly of the D.R.V.

* In autumn-winter 1947, the Central Committee decided to launch widespread guerrilla warfare in all French-occupied areas. One part of the regular army was scattered in independent companies, whose task was to penetrate deep into the enemy rear to carry out propaganda and armed activities.

      The War of Liberation, 1945-1954

       I. A Few Historical and Geographical Considerations

      Vietnam is one of the oldest countries in Southeast Asia.

      Stretching like an immense S along the edge of the Pacific, it includes Bac Bo, or North Vietnam, which, with the Red River delta, is a region rich in agricultural and industrial possibilities; Nam Bo, or South Vietnam, a vast alluvial plain furrowed by the arms of the Mekong and especially favorable to agriculture; and Trung Bo, or Central Vietnam, a long narrow belt of land joining them. To describe the shape of their country, the Vietnamese like to recall an image familiar to them: that of a shoulder pole carrying a basket of paddy at each end.

      Vietnam extends over nearly three hundred and thirty thousand square miles and has a population of approximately thirty million inhabitants. During its thousands of years of history, the Vietnamese have always maintained a heroic tradition of struggle against foreign aggression. During the thirteenth century in particular, they succeeded in thwarting attempts at invasion by the Mongols who had extended their domination over the whole of feudal СКАЧАТЬ