Military Art of People's War. Vo Nguyen Giap

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      Henceforth, Vo Nguyen Giap was to be known to the world not as a diplomat, but as commander in chief of the Vietnam People’s Army. As such, his day-to-day life is much less a matter of public record. Few foreign journalists have had an opportunity to see him, and there are few personal accounts of the historic moments in which he has participated directly. Even the history of the Indochinese war has not been recorded in detail from the Vietminh side. The early period is especially obscure. These were the difficult months in which the Vietminh had to build its bases in Tonkin and begin to send organized units southward. Giap’s own work was not merely practical; building an army also entailed developing an understanding of the war and an analysis of the struggle to be waged. In 1947 he published, in a limited Vietnamese edition, a work entitled Liberation Army, which was to serve as a key text for military cadres.⁴⁷ The People’s Army built up regular units gradually. Its structure was a pyramid. The base was the peasant masses, who created their own local defense forces. From these, guerrilla and mobile forces could be organized. The process of selection carried on to the point of recruitment of regular forces from the most seasoned units. An army structured in this way could not be destroyed. The regular units were constantly replenished from below with combat veterans. In 1950 the Vietminh had built up its forces to the point of organizing its first regular divisions. By 1951—in two years—the People’s Army had increased the strength of its regular forces four-fold.⁴⁸

      The broad contours of the war are indicated by General Giap in the writings that follow. These articles, interviews, and speeches represent the most complete body of analytical writings on the two Indochinese wars written from the point of view of the insurgent forces. The lessons of failed negotiations and broken promises which we have narrated in this introduction are reflected in the principles expounded in these writings. When the Vietnamese entered their second round of negotiations with the French in 1954, they did so from a position of incomparably greater strength, dramatically highlighted by the Dien Bien Phu victory. Yet in many ways, the Geneva settlement was flawed in similar ways to the 1946 accords. The concessions made by the West were again unenforceable. As commander of the People’s Army, General Giap was to appeal repeatedly to the International Control Commission established at Geneva to demand the enforcement of the agreement’s provisions and to protest at violations of the agreement by the Diem regime. When conditions grew worse in the South and the revolt against Diem brought into existence a new organ of struggle—the National Liberation Front, in December 1960—the task fell to Giap to explain the new circumstances to the ICC. In a historic letter of January 26, 1961, to Ambassador M. Gopala Menon, chairman of the ICC, Giap wrote that “violence and oppression have led them [the southern people] into a situation wherein they have no way out other than to take in to their own hands the defense of their lives, property and living conditions.”⁴⁹

      The second Indochinese war was set in a new global context, in the wake of successful revolutions in Cuba and Algeria and at a time of ferment throughout the Third World. Giap’s later writings take full account of these developments and are imbued with a deep internationalism. Eighteen months before Che Guevara called for “many Vietnams,” Giap considered how “many Santo Domingos” would sharpen the contradictions in which imperialism is fixed.⁵⁰ But internationalism has never blurred Giap’s respect for the sovereignty and independence of nations in the struggle for socialism.⁵¹ His determination is strong, and he knows that his country cannot be independent until the last foreign soldier is gone. We hope that the writings presented here will help the reader understand this determination and gain some insight into the strategy which has led Vietnam to its victory over the United States. We also hope that these writings will constitute the final chapter in Vietnam’s two-thousand-year saga of war and injustice, and we trust that the 1970’s will begin a new period of liberation.

       Russell Stetler

       London

       November 1969

       Notes

      1. Quoted in J. S. Girling, People’s War: The Conditions and the Consequences in China and in South-East Asia (London, 1969), p. 58.

      2. The best analysis of the impact of Vietnamese military history on present-day strategy is that of Georges Boudarel, “Essai sur la pensée militaire vietnamienne” in L’Homme et la Société, n. 7 (January-February-March, 1968). Though marred by small inaccuracies, this article is a first-rate contribution.

      3. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston, 1965), p. 549.

      4. Source material on the life of Vo Nguyen Giap is scant, and most of the Western accounts are unreliable. We have, therefore, relied wherever possible on conversations and interviews with Vietnamese friends who are personally acquainted with General Giap. He has contributed two brief memoirs himself, but these deal only with a limited period of his life. One is included as the first chapter of this volume, and the other appears in two slightly different versions as “Stemming from the People” in A Heroic People (Hanoi, Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.) and as “Naissance d’une armée” in Récits de la résistance vietnamienne (Paris, Maspero, 1966). We shall cite below the standard Western texts which we have consulted. For a discussion of Giap’s family and early life, for example, see Bernard Fall, “Vo Nguyen Giap: Man and Myth” in People’s War, People’s Army (New York, Praeger, 1962), pp. xxix–xxx; Philippe Devillers, L’Histoire du Vietnam de 1940 à 1952 (Paris, 1952), p. 70; and Robert J. O’Neill, General Giap, Politician and Strategist (Melbourne, 1969), pp. 1–4.

       5. See Fall, op. cit., p. xxx; O’Neill, op. cit., pp. 5–10; and Jean Chesneaux, “The Historical Background of Vietnamese Communism” in Government and Opposition, v. 4, n. 1 (winter 1969), p. 121.

      6. Chesneaux, op. cit., p. 119, and The Vietnamese Nation: Contribution to a History (Sydney, 1966), p. 144; Devillers, loc. cit.; and Fall, op. cit., p. xxxi.

      7. Fall, op. cit., pp. xxxi-xxxii, and O’Neill, op. cit., pp. 10–11.

      8. Wilfred G. Burchett, Vietnam Will Win (New York, 1968), p. 161.

      9. Devillers, op. cit., pp. 72–73 and 264.

      10. O’Neill, op. cit., pp. 16–17.

      11. See Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh (London, 1968), pp. 55–56, 60–61.

      12. Boudarel, op. cit., p. 188.

      13. Ibid.; Lacouture, op. cit., pp. 57–58; O’Neill, op. cit., pp. 21–24; Hoang Quoc Viet, “Peuple Héroïque” in Vo Nguyen Giap et al., Récits, pp. 162–165; and Ellen J. Hammer, The Struggle for Indochina, 1940–1955 (Stanford, 1966), pp. 95–96.

      14. Chesneaux, “Historical Background,” p. 119.

      15. Lacouture, op. cit., p. 55.

      16. Boudarel, op. cit., p. 188.

      17. Devillers, op. cit., pp. 102, 105.

      18. See Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy 1943–1945 (New York, 1968), chapters 4, 9, and 24 (especially, pp. 607–610).

      19. Ibid.

      20. French journalists and historians writing during the war (including Devillers, Fall, and Lacouture) shared the view that the OSS was entirely СКАЧАТЬ