Giap obituary: winner of three small wars

[Bill Moore]

Sometimes it takes some time for the real historical account to surface (especially those associated with a Communist regime and a sympathetic Western news-press). That said, there are those who maintain now, as more records and accounts are surfacing, that Giap was on the outs with the North Vietnam government through much of the US involvement. Any sources or comments on this? Remember that Communist regimes are quick to lionize and slow to discredit. Tet '68 is a good place to start in this type of research and work back from there.

Through the years the biggest criticism I heard about Giap was his disregard for his people's lives. His unconventional campaigns may have been skillfully executed (not sure how much influence he had those tactics), but the human wave attacks on fortified positions (repeatedly) were called into question. I suppose doing that a couple of times would demonstrate their will to the world which is important, but if (this is a big if) we continued to fight it would have eventually depleted his conventional capacity to wage major combat operations. However it didn't get to that point, so whether through deliberate strategy based on sound analysis or sheer luck he prevailed.

Some thoughts from various authors on Giap follow:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...guyen-giap.htm

Giap's nearly fatal mistake in the anti-French war was the too-early challenge of French forces in open battles during the first half of 1951. In three battles, the Viet-minh were defeated each time and Giap almost lost his position as Viet-minh commander in chief. The Viet-minh immediately went back to stage II - smaller battles on their own terms in scattered areas.

The basis of this fame is Giap's leadership of the Viet Minh in their victory over the French in the Indochina War. Giap's fame as a tactician and strategist were exaggerated, that neither his tactics nor his strategies were new or imaginative. Giap's greatest ability was an organizer of the masses in a total effort behind the war. Giap successfully combined the roles of civil organizer, politician and battlefield leader in achieving his victory over the French.

I have seen several comments like the one above, and it illustrates that those who conduct this type of analysis don't understand that as a strategist in this type of war his ability to mobilize the masses, sustain their will to fight, and remaining focused on the political objective was decisive (not the tactics).

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a141243.pdf

This particular paper claims Giap offered nothing new as a strategist or tactician, which in my view demonstrates the flawed understanding of war that many U.S. Army officers have due to their education and training beingfocused on tactics and campaigning. While this paper in many ways praises Giap's achievements, I think the author misses that Giap designed a holistic strategy (not simply a military strategy) to achieve their strategic political objectives. Winning battles was not his focus, so perhaps his brilliance was his ability to keep his focus on the desired strategic aim, while his Western adversaries on the other handwere very much focused on winning battles, which may imply no one in the U.S. sidewas looking at the larger picture. I'll go a step further and argue that our COIN doctrine as practiced simply reinforces this approach.

ABSTRACT (Continued) drawn from the research are that Giap's fame as a tactician and strategist were exaggerated, that neither his tactics nor his strategies were new or imaginative. Giap's greatest ability was as an organizer of the masses in a total effort behind the war. Giap successfully combined the roles of civil organizer, politician and battlefield leader in achieving his victory over the French.

Break, jump to the summary:

Although Giap does not rank with Napoleon or Rommel as either a strategist or tactician, he should be remembered for his ability to simultaneously combine the roles of organizer, politician, and military leader while creating and leading his army. Few other generals have played such all encompassing roles in the history of warfare, especially modern warfare.

This is the key in my view, and unfortunately I have little hope in the U.S.'s ability to transform its approach to where it can truly combine the political and military into one coherent strategy.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/peoplescentu...ranscript.html

This PBS interview with Giap is interesting.

Q: What was new about the idea of the "People's War"?

Giap: It was a war for the people by the people. FOR the people because the war's goals are the people's goals -- goals such as independence, a unified country, and the happiness of its people.... And BY the people -- well that means ordinary people -- not just the army but all people.

We know it's the human factor, and not material resources, which decide the outcome of war. That's why our people's war, led by Ho Chi Minh, was on such a large scale. It took in the whole population.

Q: Was Dien Bin Phu an easy victory because the French made so many mistakes?

For us, the problem was that Navarre wanted to retain the initiative whereas we wanted to seize it. There is a contradiction that exists in a war of aggression whereby you have to disperse your forces to occupy a territory but rally your mobile forces for offensive action. We took advantage of this contradiction and forced Navarre to disperse his forces.

Q: Was your Tet offensive in 1968 a failure?

Giap: As far as we're concerned, there's no such thing as a purely military strategy. So it would be wrong to speak of Tet in purely military terms. The offensive was three things at the same time: military, political, and diplomatic. The goal of the war was de-escalation. We were looking to de-escalate the war. Thus, it would have been impossible to separate our political strategy from our military strategy. The truth is that we saw things in their entirety and knew that in the end, we had to de-escalate the war. At that point, the goal of the offensive was to try to de-escalate the war.

[uwew]

One should not forget Vietnam's war against Cambodia and China. During that
time (1979) Vo was still Minister of Defense. If you judge the outcome of this
war by China's objectives, it was another Vietnamese victory.

[jmm99]

so, may Giap rest in peace - wherever that may be (to an athiest).

Based on what I've read (not having been in Hanoi with Jane or anyone else ), Giap will not be ranked among the great tacticians or strategists; but will find a place among the great military planners and logisticians.

A lesser known aspect of Giap's life is that he was educated in law, history and economics (licensed in law, the colonial authorities never allowed him to practice - probably for good reasons). It's not surprising then that he played a dominant role in purges against counter-revolutionaries from 1945-1956. In that role he was absolutely ruthless and effective.

Giap's role in "targeted killings" (ranging from individual to large-scale) went with the role carved-out for the Propaganda Unit for National Liberation. That armed unit was set up on 27 Dec 1944; and initially consisted of a picked group of some 34 officers and soldiers. It was commanded by one Vo Nguyen Giap. Starting as an armed propaganda unit, its purpose in life was to train and educate local cadres and guerrilla units in both the political and military struggles; and to further both struggles by non-violent agitprop and targeted killings.

Giap was very much focused on the importance of the Rear Area in war, and preserving its security and integrity. The Rear Area was North Vietnam, which had been rebuilt with so much cost and effort between 1955-1964. He wrote about that well before we jumped into an Asian ground war in 1965 centered on South Vietnam (the Front Area). Without laying out the full rant, McNamara-Johnson were ignorant of (or disregarded) Giap; and they did not effectively target the Rear Area from 1964 on - ignorance, fear of risks, etc., etc.

Giap's focus on preserving the North (and being a reluctant warrior in attacking the South) caused him to fall out of favor with those (e.g., Le Duan) who wanted to attack the South regardless of the risks. They were right in the long run.

Regards

Mike

PS: Giap's Front Area - Rear Area construct was initially laid out in Vo Nguyen Giap, People's War, People's Army. New York: Praeger, 1962; and then in 1967 (when he told us how they'd win), Article by DRV Defense Minister Giap "The Big Victory; The Great Task" - October 16, 1967.

[davidbfpo]

It is a while since I read Peter McDonald's biography of Giap. What I do remember is that Giap, along with "Uncle Ho" and others were able to politically mobilise the Vietnamese - a skill that is very hard, even if you eliminate the opposition ruthlessly. North Vietnamese effectively became the "Prussians" of Indo-China.

[jmm99]

In the sanitized North Vietnamese version, the Propaganda Unit for National Liberation was the ancestor of the regular NVA (PAVN). In part, this is true. But, the PUNL's more "irregular" activities, such as purges and targeted killings, are ignored - as in this July 2013 article, Meeting a fighter of the Armed Propaganda Unit for National Liberation:

PANO – Under the instruction of General Phung Quang Thanh, Minister of National Defence, a delegation of the Military History Institute of Vietnam, led by its director, Lieu. Gen. Vu Quang Dao, visited To Van Cam, one among 34 fighters of the Armed Propaganda Unit for National Liberation, the predecessor of the Vietnam People’s Army. ...

The "irregular" role is more accurately depicted in this article, The Armed Propaganda Teams of Vietnam:

This article will discuss the Armed Propaganda Teams of the Government of Vietnam in depth. Curiously, the terms “Armed Propaganda Team” or “APT” was first used by the Communist Government of North Vietnam, and later borrowed by the anti-Communist South who saw that it was a concept that worked.

Long before the Americans came upon the scene in Vietnam, the Indochinese Communist Party formed Armed Propaganda Teams called Doi Tuyen truyen Vo trang. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the man who would later become the hero of Dien Bien Phu in 1953 served as a Team Leader at one point in his career. Although both Uncle Ho and General Giap are given credit for the teams, it appears that Ho wrote the idea down on the back of a pack of cigarettes during the First Revolutionary Party Military Conference in September 1944 and General Giap brought the idea to fruitition. The units had the ability to fight if threatened by the enemy. Otherwise, they would do recruitment, propaganda plays and skits, and organize and mobilize the villages in the Communist cause. On 22 December 1944 Giap formed the First Armed Propaganda Brigade consisting of three teams with a total of 34 people called the Tran Hung Doa Platoon. The unit was armed with one machine gun, 31 rifles and 2 revolvers. That same month Ho Chi Minh created the “Vietnamese People's Propaganda Unit for National Liberation,” which became the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) in September 1945. After the Japanese conceded defeat on 16 August 1945, Armed Propaganda Teams spread the news across the country.

and

According to Forrest E. Morgan in Big Eagle, Little Dragon: Propaganda and the Coercive use of Airpower against North Vietnam:

Nearly all Communist military plans and directives for South Vietnam included lengthy instructions for producing and disseminating propaganda materials to reorient liberated citizens.

and

Robert Munshower served with 95th Military Police Battalion in Bien Hoa during 1967 to 1968. He told me:

The armed propaganda teams traveled from hamlet to hamlet presenting dramatized plays usually based on historical events but altered in theme to reflect the communist line and to legitimize the invasion of the South. These drama teams also entertained North Vietnamese Army units in the areas that they performed in. Propaganda, Proselytizing, and Drama teams brought the latest news, albeit distorted, invented and modified to fit the official party line emanating from Hanoi. The photos of a North Vietnamese Armed Propaganda Team in the Field are originals that I purchased from an employee of The Museum of The Revolution in Hanoi.

He adds:

A former Government of Vietnam Army Captain told me that when many of the drama and music teams were captured, the groups usually had a very high number of homosexual males, which just goes to show how committed the communists were to winning the war. They used every resource, including gays, to the maximum.

and

It is probably correct to say that almost any nighttime visitation of Viet Cong into a village was preceded by an armed propaganda team that explained the Communist cause and prepared the people to meet the needs of the combat forces. The enemy Armed Propaganda Team could move about within the village and pass as farmers or tradesmen. For instance, David Hunt mentions the APTs in an article entitled Villagers at War: The National Liberation Front In My Tho Province, 1965-1967. Some of his comments are:

Government of Vietnam cadres only came into the hamlets when it was convenient for them to do so, while (Communist) Front cadres who operated openly - that is, who possess legal papers, whose National Liberation Front affiliation is secret - seem to live within the community. The situation in the villages is relatively favorable to the Saigon regime in that the local Front organization cannot function above ground during the day, and Saigon’s “Armed Propaganda Teams" (the idea for such teams, including the name itself, is borrowed directly from the NLF) and regular troops can move around without fear of being hit hard by guerrillas or other NLF units.

There is much, much more in the article - on both the PAVN teams and the ARVN counter-teams.

The last quoted David Hunt article is still linked on the Vietnam webpage of Grover Furr of Montclair State Univ. (who still defends Stalin), as reviewed by Furr:

Villagers at War: The National Liberation Front In My Tho Province, 1965-1967, by David Hunt. One of the two or three foremost American experts on Vietnam, Hunt published this book as a special issue of Radical America in 1974. It has been long out of print and unavailable.

Ever since I read it some years ago, I've found this work very inspiring -- in fact, matched by few if any other works I can think of. It's based upon RAND Corp. interrogations of Vietnamese peasants -- POWs (i.e. members of the NLF), Communist Party members, 'deserters' who fled to the US/South Vietnamese side, and just plain villagers. The quotations from these interrogations are wonderful! They show how the Communist movement won tremendous respect from the Vietnamese peasants, by standing up for the poor and middle peasants; opposing the landlords and their murderous government; fought sexism; and organized young and old, male and female, to build communist relations while in the midst of a horrendously murderous military assault by American forces.

Hunt's BLUF is less polemical:

INTRODUCTION - A LOCAL STUDY OF THE NLF

Our knowledge of a generation of war in Vietnam is strikingly uneven. On the one hand, eye-witness accounts from veterans, books and newspaper reports, Watergate related disclosures and the Pentagon Papers, have given us a picture of American involvement in Indochina all the way back to 1946. But at the same time, we still know very little about the other side, the Viet Minh and the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam. This is an essay about the NLF in My Tho Province. It deals with the years 1965 to 1967 when the United States tried and failed through large-scale military action to crush the insurgents in the South.

By concentrating on this Mekong Delta Province, I hope [p.4 ] to show what U. S. escalation meant in a specific locale, and how Front cadres (1) resisted the ambitious American campaign to destroy the movement they had built. ...

NLF leaders have always stressed the interdependence of military and political activity within the guerrilla movement. Still, in practice these two facets of the insurgency are clearly distinguishable. There is a great deal of information available on NLF military units, on the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare, on problems of supply, fortification, recruitment and training of soldiers. At the same time, many of our informants are peasants who had served the Front in hamlets and villages, and their recollections provide us with a unique opportunity to observe the "civilian" side of the movement at this grassroots level. In the following pages, I am concerned with the work of local cadres who supported the war effort from their posts in the rural communities of My Tho. In other words, our subject is the political aspects of NLF resistance to U. S. intervention.

My analysis rests on material drawn from the RAND Corporation's "Viet Cong Motivation and Morale'" project, conducted in Vietnam from 1964 to 1969. Designed under Pentagon sponsorship to explore strengths and weaknesses of the NLF, the project consisted of interviews with prisoners of war and with defectors from guerrilla ranks who sought refuge in the Chieu Hoi ("Open Arms") program of the Saigon Government. The interviews are organized by topic, one of which is : "Activities of the Viet Cong Within Dinh Tuong Province." Covering the period from 1965 to January 1968, the "DT" sequence of interviews is the only [p.5] series in the RAND project to focus on a single province.

IMO: All of this reinforces some (perhaps, all) of Bill Moore's points.

Regards

Mike

[jcustis]

A lesser known aspect of Giap's life is that he was educated in law, history and economics (licensed in law, the colonial authorities never allowed him to practice - probably for good reasons). It's not surprising then that he played a dominant role in purges against counter-revolutionaries from 1945-1956. In that role he was absolutely ruthless and effective.

I haven't read much in the way of biographical information on Giap, same some stuff in a History course on Vietnam in college (I have however read a lot on Vietnam).

It doesn't seem to matter that Giap wasn't an exceptional strategist, theorist, tactician, or anything else that folks are inclined to measure him on.

If the wikipedia entry is sufficiently accurate, what is important to remember about Giap was that he was a fairly classically-trained young man (by Western standards), who went to China and spent time with the Communists. He didn't go to West Point, or Anapolis, didn't have the benefit of Command and Staff College or NDU education.

He was Vietnamese-good-enough, and he beat the US because he held a longer view of war. For me at least, that's what comes to mind when I consider his legacy.

[BayonetBrant]

quoting someone else - I think it was globalsecurity.org

Giap's nearly fatal mistake in the anti-French war was the too-early challenge of French forces in open battles during the first half of 1951. In three battles, the Viet-minh were defeated each time and Giap almost lost his position as Viet-minh commander in chief. The Viet-minh immediately went back to stage II - smaller battles on their own terms in scattered areas.

The basis of this fame is Giap's leadership of the Viet Minh in their victory over the French in the Indochina War. Giap's fame as a tactician and strategist were exaggerated, that neither his tactics nor his strategies were new or imaginative. Giap's greatest ability was an organizer of the masses in a total effort behind the war. Giap successfully combined the roles of civil organizer, politician and battlefield leader in achieving his victory over the French.

Some simple word replacement...

Washington's nearly fatal mistake in the anti-British war was the too-early challenge of British forces in open battles during the first half of 1777. In three battles, the Colonials were defeated each time and Washington almost lost his position as Colonials commander in chief. The Colonials immediately went back to stage II - smaller battles on their own terms in scattered areas.

The basis of this fame is Washington's leadership of the Colonials in their victory over the British in the AWI. Washington's fame as a tactician and strategist were exaggerated, that neither his tactics nor his strategies were new or imaginative. Washington's greatest ability was an organizer of the masses in a total effort behind the war. Washington successfully combined the roles of civil organizer, politician and battlefield leader in achieving his victory over the British.

OK, so it's not a perfect 1-for-1 swap. But it's not half-bad.