Military Art of People's War. Vo Nguyen Giap

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СКАЧАТЬ Washington on September 20 that Ho Chi Minh “is an old revolutionist … a product of Moscow, a communist.”³¹ The Allies never had the intention of permitting the Vietminh to take the Japanese surrender and receive their arms. As early as the Potsdam Conference, it was agreed that Kuomintang troops would enter the northern half of the country and British forces from the Burmese theater would supervise the surrender in the South. This arbitrary Allied demarcation at the sixteenth parallel served to reinforce the tendencies of power concentration already established by the Vietminh in the last months of Japanese rule.³²

      The most secure Vietminh strongholds in northern Tonkin were scarcely affected. At an official level, the Kuomintang had been effectively neutralized in Ho’s ongoing negotiations with the Vietnamese nationalists who enjoyed their backing. The Vietminh had respected the commitments entered into by Ho at the time of his release from prison and had allotted the VNQDD’s representatives more posts in the new government than their strength within the country would have commanded. At the practical level, the Kuomintang were in no position to intervene significantly with effective troops. (Although some three hundred Chinese divisions existed on paper at the end of the war, Gen. Albert Wedemeyer estimated that only five were militarily effective units—and three of these were in India under American command!) Some 185,000 Kuomintang troops are reported to have reached Vietnam, but many merely paused at the border to sell their arms to the Vietminh. Large numbers of those who entered Vietnam were actively engaged in looting; they were certainly not concerned about restoring the French presence. Those disciplined units on hand carried out their official instructions literally and saw to the rapid repatriation of the Japanese troops.³³

      In the South, the situation was radically different. The British had long been on record as supporting the French return to Indochina. Their command in southern Vietnam saw this as their major task and even resorted to the use of Japanese troops forcibly to depose the provisional Vietminh government. To be sure, there was resistance to the French restoration in the South, and there was vigorous fighting. But the rapid re-establishment of the French security network and the early landing of French troops made the over-all tasks of military organizing difficult. Giap continued to build his army in the North. The resulting situation prefigured the political division of the country which was to persist two decades later. French power was restored in Cochin China in a short time, and the Vietminh were left to wage a political struggle, against impossible odds, to avert a quick reconquest of the entire colony.³⁴

      While serving as interior minister, Giap carried on informal discussions throughout the autumn of 1945 with the French commissioner in Tonkin. Although Chu Van Tan held the post of defense minister, Giap retained effective control of the army, and his heavy burden of responsibility in this tense atmosphere can hardly be exaggerated. Simultaneously, he had to build an army and to keep the peace, to prepare his people for an inevitable war, and to restrain their hatred as an earnest of the new government’s capacity to govern. In January 1946 nationwide elections were organized, in which the Vietminh candidates fared well. Ho emerged as undisputed leader of the new nation. Only he received a higher percentage of the votes than Giap, who took 97 percent of the count in his home province of Nghe An. Diplomacy continued within the government, as the Vietminh maintained lingering hopes of convincing the Western powers and the coalition government in France of their capacity to govern responsibly and with moderation.³⁵

      Giap was removed as minister of the interior and was replaced by a noncommunist.³⁶ He understood the acute crisis which was developing. On February 27, 1946, Jean Lacouture interviewed him for Paris-Saigon, and he commented thus on the progress of the talks between the Vietminh and the French:

      If the conditions on which we do not compromise and which can be summarized in these two words, independence and alliance, are not accepted, if France is so shortsighted as to unleash a conflict, let it be known that we shall struggle until death, without permitting ourselves to stop for any consideration of persons, or any destruction.³⁷

      On March 2, he was named head of the Committee of National Resistance, in consideration of the increasing danger of the outbreak of war.³⁸

      The negotiations were difficult. The Vietminh were in an unfavorable position. The dikes in the Red River delta had been in disrepair for some months, and floods brought famine to Tonkin. United States bombing of the Japanese had disrupted communications between North and South, making it difficult to transport needed rice to Tonkin; over a million people were to die as a result. The famine could not be relieved without a restoration of normal relations between North and South, since Cochin China traditionally supplied its rice surplus to Tonkin. The Chinese were by then using Indochina as a pawn in a larger chess game, yielding to French demands there in return for important concessions with respect to their own territory. The Americans and the United Nations had turned a deaf ear toward Vietminh appeals for assistance and support. The Communists’ political opponents of both Left and Right accused the Vietminh of treason for consenting to talks with the French. Racial incidents erupted in Hanoi and Haiphong, the legacy of a century of racial oppression; and bitter fighting continued in the South.³⁹

      Agreement was finally reached on March 6. In a dramatic meeting in Hanoi the following afternoon, Ho and the other leaders came forward to explain why they had signed the accord. A hundred thousand people assembled. Giap spoke first, and his speech distills all the tensions then confronting Vietnam. It is remarkable for its candor:

      First of all, there is the disorder of the international situation, characterized by the struggle of two world forces. One force has pushed us toward stopping the hostilities. Whether we want to or not, we must move toward the cessation of hostilities. The United States has taken the part of France, the same as England. But because we have resisted valiantly, everywhere and implacably, we have been able to conclude this preliminary agreement.

      In this agreement, there are arrangements which satisfy us and others which don’t satisfy us. What satisfies us, without making us overjoyed, is that France has recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as a free country. Freedom is not autonomy. It is more than autonomy, but it is not yet independence. Once freedom is attained, we shall go on until independence, until complete independence.

      Free Vietnam has a government, a Parliament, finances—which amounts to saying that all the interior powers are entirely in our hands. Moreover, we have troops under us, which means that we preserve our forces and can augment them.

      On the question of the unification of the three Ky, the discussions between the government and the representatives of France have been heated enough. France wants to retain Cochin China, but the government has firmly declared: if Cochin China, Annam and Tonkin are separated, we are resolved to resist to the end. In the final reckoning, the representatives of France had to yield to recognize the unification of the three Ky after a referendum of all the people of Vietnam. The result of this referendum we know in advance. Is there anyone in Vietnam who doesn’t want Annam, Cochin China and Tonkin to be a single country?

      We now turn to the arrangements which do not satisfy us. First, the return of the French troops. We had to accept this provision, although it was against our hearts. We have done it nevertheless, knowing that we bore responsibility for it before our country. Why has the Government permitted the French troops to come? Above all, because if we hadn’t signed it they would have come anyway. China has signed a treaty with France permitting French troops to come to replace the Chinese troops. Moreover, France has already made numerous concessions to us. That is why we have accepted the advent of French troops. If not, there would have been no accord….

      The people who are not satisfied understand independence only as a catch-word, a slogan, on paper or on one’s lips. They do not see that the country’s independence results from objective conditions and that in our struggle, to obtain it, there are moments when we must be firm and others when we must be mellow.

      In the present circumstances, there were СКАЧАТЬ