Military Art of People's War. Vo Nguyen Giap

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СКАЧАТЬ persistence of the revolutionary forces, in their sheer capacity to survive over time. As in China, so, too, in Vietnam: the revolutionary forces have emerged the victors by showing their ability to endure protracted conflict. Vietnam has experienced nearly uninterrupted war since the mid-1940’s, and the insurgents have had an ever widening impact. Set in deeper perspective, Vietnam has fought for its independence for two thousand years. Her statesmen frequently refer to this long history of resistance warfare, and they do so for more than rhetorical effect. Out of this long history a distinctive military science has evolved, with direct relevance to the present situation.

      In all their wars, the Vietnamese have confronted a more powerful enemy, whether numerically, as in the case of the ancient Chinese, or technologically, as in the case of their contemporary opponents. A strategy of passive defense, in which one relies on fortresses and treats material resources and terrain as ends in themselves, has never worked. The Vietnamese suffered their own Dien Bien Phu five and a half centuries before the French, when the impregnable stronghold of Da Bang in the interior of Thanh Hoa fell under siege by the Chinese. The common features of the successful resistance wars stand out clearly. All relied on tactical, and often strategic, flexibility. (This conception was elaborated in the first Vietnamese handbook of the military profession—in the thirteenth century!) All have utilized the natural advantages of terrain and environment to permit a mobile defense. All have utilized the expanse of time to the advantage of the resistance, building up strong forces in a war of long duration so as to be in a decisive position at the critical time. All have had a popular character, based on the support of the peasantry through a general mobilization. (A system of conscription affecting every village has existed in Vietnam from the tenth century.) Every victorious leader understood politics as the key to success.²

      The inventiveness of the Vietnamese is well known. We are familiar with the use of thousands of bicycles to carry ammunition and supplies to Dien Bien Phu and with the tunnel warfare of the National Liberation Front. All this has a precedent in the Vietnamese past. In the 1780’s, Quang Trung surprised an army of two hundred thousand Chinese by raising a massive army and bringing it five hundred miles in a month and ten days. He grouped his men in threes: in the long, swift march, two men carried the third between them in hammocks. Few in the West have comprehended the significance of this tradition. From a sociological and historical point of view, the Vietnamese are uniquely equipped to understand military dynamics and to fight the present war.

      The contrast with American strategists and popular thinking is stunning. As secretary of defense in 1962, Robert S. McNamara stated: “Every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war.”³ It is fruitless to speculate on the extent to which successive administrations fell victim to their own propaganda: the Pentagon appears to be incapable of understanding the dynamics of people’s war. It is not so much that McNamara’s statistics were exaggerated or even false. His military algebra is itself barren. America has been unable to endure the Vietnam war; yet this moral incapacity has never shown on the IBM punchcards. It was well understood in Hanoi long before the first GI’s mutinied at Da Nang, for the Vietnamese understanding of war goes deeper than balance sheets and kill ratios. More than this, their senior strategist approaches, in real life, the status of an ever victorious general.

      The life of Vo Nguyen Giap, taken as a whole, evinces remarkable energy and determination. Although he is less than sixty years old at the time of writing, he has helped to shape the decisive events of his nation’s history in the twentieth century. Giap was born in 1912 in An Xa village of Quang Binh province, one of the country’s poorest regions in the days of French rule. His peasant family was strongly nationalistic. Giap’s father was respected among the peasants not only for his learning but also for his participation in the last resistance to French dominion in the late 1880’s. He remained an active nationalist and sent young Giap, in 1924, to the Quoc Hoc, or Lycée National, at Hue. With its emphasis on integrating traditional (Vietnamese) and modern (Western) learning, the school was to serve as the training ground for nearly all the important figures in national politics after independence, including Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem. At school, Giap became acquainted with diverse currents of nationalist opinion. Records left behind by the French Surété indicate that even as a schoolboy his idealism was noted as subversive. His dynamism was equally impressive from an early age.⁴

      As a teen-ager, Giap was dismissed from school because of his role in the growing student movement. His involvement with the underground nationalist organization, Tan Viet (Revolutionary Party for a Great Vietnam), drew the attention of the police soon thereafter. In 1930, the entire Indochinese colony was shaken by an eruption of nationalist revolts. These events stirred young Giap, who had been recalled to Hue by the Tan Viet. The Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD), a nationalist party styled after the Chinese Kuomintang, began an abortive revolt with an uprising at the Vietnamese garrison at Yen Bai, along the Chinese border, on February 9. It was crushed ruthlessly, and the VNQDD virtually ceased to exist for the next fifteen years. The fledgling Communist Party attempted to maintain the revolutionary mood. When railwaymen struck at Vinh and other workers followed suit in the Ben Thuy match factories, the communists organized solidarity actions among the peasants in the provinces of Ha Tinh and Nghe An in Annam, who had themselves felt acutely the effects of the worldwide depression on Vietnamese agriculture. Facing the swift French repression, peasant groups established rudimentary “soviets” to sustain the revolt. As six thousand peasants marched in Nghe An, young Giap in turn organized and led a student demonstration of solidarity in Hue, for which he was arrested by the French authorities for the first time. He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, but as the revolutionary mood seemed to wane, he was released after serving a few months.⁵

      The Communist Party’s first years were difficult. It was founded officially in Canton in 1930, with a membership of 211, as a result of Ho Chi Minh’s negotiations with various communist groups which had come into existence from 1925 onward. Ho’s time was soon given over to other activities, and in the period which followed, the Party was directed by Tran Phu and Le Hong Phong, both of whom had been trained by the Comintern. Throughout the first decade of the Party’s existence, the influence of the Comintern (especially through the intermediary of the French Communist Party) was preponderant. In the mid-1930’s, the Party created a legal organization known as the Indochinese Democratic Front. Giap was active in the Front and probably joined the Party as a result of this association.⁶

      In 1936 the situation was eased by the establishment of the Popular Front in France. Important cadres, such as Pham Van Dong and Tran Van Giau, were liberated from prison, and numerous restrictions on political activity were removed. The Communist Party functioned semilegally for the first time. By this time, Giap had reached Hanoi, after passing the exacting baccalauréat in Hue. He studied for one year at the Lycée Albert Sarraut before enrolling as an undergraduate in law at the university. For a time he boarded at the home of a distinguished Vietnamese writer, Professor Dang Thai Mai, whose daughter he was later to marry. He received his law degree in 1937 and pursued postgraduate studies in political economy the following year. Financial hardships obliged him to work as a history teacher during this period, and he also devoted an increasing portion of his time to political journalism. Writing in Vietnamese for Tin Tuc (The News) and Thoi The (Current Situation) and in French for Le Travail and Notre Voix, Giap soon emerged as a leading Party intellectual.⁷ He completed his first major work at this time, a two-volume analysis entitled The Peasant Problem, on which Truong Chinh collaborated. This work was signed under the pseudonyms Van Dinh and Qua Ninh. When the Popular Front government fell, an order was issued to confiscate and burn all copies of the book. Those which were preserved gave the guidelines for subsequent communist policy in peasant regions.⁸

      On September 26, 1939, the Communist parties were banned in France and in the colonies. In the repression which followed, more than a thousand Party members were arrested in Vietnam alone. Many, including the secretary general, Tran Phu, were summarily shot. Giap and his young bride, Nguyen Thi Minh Giang, were in jeopardy. She and her sister, Minh Khai, were also Party members; Minh Khai had, in fact, studied in the Soviet Union and was a member of the Central СКАЧАТЬ