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Vo Nguyen Giap
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General Vơ Nguyên Giáp (born August 25, 1911) is a retired Vietnamese career officer in the Vietnam People's Army and a politician. Principal wars: First Indochina War (1946-1954) and Vietnam War (1960-1975). Principal battles: Lang Son (1950); Hoa Binh (1951-1952); Dien Bien Phu (1954); the Tet Offensive (1968); the Nguyen Hue Offensive (known in the West as the Easter Offensive) (1972); and the final Ho Chi Minh Campaign (1975). Giap was also a journalist, an interior minister in President H? Chí Minh's Viet Minh government, the military commander of the Viet Minh, the commander of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), and defense minister.
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Encyclopedia
General Vơ Nguyên Giáp (born August 25, 1911) is a retired Vietnamese career officer in the Vietnam People's Army and a politician. Principal wars: First Indochina War (1946-1954) and Vietnam War (1960-1975). Principal battles: Lang Son (1950); Hoa Binh (1951-1952); Dien Bien Phu (1954); the Tet Offensive (1968); the Nguyen Hue Offensive (known in the West as the Easter Offensive) (1972); and the final Ho Chi Minh Campaign (1975). Giap was also a journalist, an interior minister in President H? Chí Minh's Viet Minh government, the military commander of the Viet Minh, the commander of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), and defense minister. He also served as Politburo member of the Lao Dong Party.
He was the most prominent military commander besides Ho Chi Minh during the war and was responsible for major operations and leadership until the war ended.
Early life
Vơ Nguyên Giáp was born in the village of An Xa, Qu?ng B́nh province. His father and mother, Vo Quang Nghiem and Nguyen Thi Kien, worked the land, rented some to neighbors, and lived a relatively comfortable lifestyle. At 14, Giáp became a messenger for the Haiphong Power Company and shortly thereafter joined the Tân Vi?t Cách M?ng Đ?ng, a romantically styled revolutionary youth group. Two years later he entered Qu?c H?c (also known in English as the National Academy), a French-run lycée in Hu?, from which two years later, according to his own account, he was expelled for organizing a student strike. In 1933, at the age of 22, Giáp enrolled in Hanoi University.
Giáp was educated at the University of Hanoi where he gained a bachelor's degree in political economy and a law degree. After graduation, he taught history for one year at the Thang Long School in Hanoi. During most of 1930s, Giáp remained a schoolteacher and journalist, writing articles for Tien Dang while actively participating in various revolutionary movements. He joined the Communist Party in 1931 and took part in several demonstrations against French rule in Indochina as well as assisting in founding the Democratic Front in 1933. All the while, Giap was a dedicated reader of military history and philosophy, revering Napoleon I and Sun Tzu.
Vơ Nguyên Giáp was arrested in 1930 and served 13 months of a two-year sentence at Lao Bao Prison. During the Popular Front years in France, he founded Hon Tre Tap Moi, an underground socialist newspaper. He also founded the French language paper Le Travail (on which Pham Van Dong also worked). In 1939 he married Nguyen Thi Quang Thi, another socialist, whose sister had once been married to H? Chí Minh. When France outlawed communism during the same year, Giáp fled to China together with Ph?m Van Đ?ng where he joined up with H? Chí Minh, the leader of the Vietnam Independence League (Vi?t Minh). While he was in exile, his wife, sister, father and sister-in-law were arrested, tortured and later executed by the French colonial authorities.
He returned to Vietnam in 1944, and between then and 1945 he helped organize resistance to the Japanese occupation forces. When the Japanese surrendered to the Allies in August 1945, the Japanese decided to allow nationalist groups to take over public buildings while keeping the French in prison as a way of causing additional trouble to the Allies in the postwar period. The Vi?t Minh and other groups took over various towns and formed a provisional government in which Giap was named Minister of the Interior.
In September 1945, H? Chí Minh announced the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Unknown to the Vi?t Minh, President Harry S. Truman, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Premier Joseph Stalin had already decided the future of postwar Vietnam at a summit meeting at Potsdam. They agreed that the country would be occupied temporarily to get the Japanese out; the northern half would be under the control of the Nationalist Chinese and the southern half under the British.
After the Second World War, France attempted to reestablish control over Vietnam. In January 1946, Great Britain agreed to remove her troops, and, later that year, the Chinese left Vietnam in exchange for a promise from France that she would give up her rights to territory in China.
The First Indochina War
The Vi?t Minh at first negotiated with the French and played them off against the Chinese, preferring the return of the French to Chinese control of the country, as Vietnam had a long history of Chinese occupation. Sporadic fighting, which had begun in some areas late in 1945, became a general war between the Vi?t Minh and the French on December 19, 1946. The well armed and professionally trained French forces inflicted heavy defeats on the Vi?t Minh, but they did not have the manpower to spread out over all of Vietnam, or even all of the densely populated lowlands of Vietnam. General Giáp was able to regroup, and rebuild shattered units, in the highlands and in those sections of the lowlands (the most important being in Thanh Hoa, south of the Red River Delta) that remained under Vi?t Minh control. A period of stalemate followed.
This stalemate was broken after Mao Zedong and his communist army defeated Chiang Kai-shek in China. When Mao's army reached the Vietnamese border early in 1950, the Vi?t Minh began to receive substantial quantities of weapons and other military supplies. Also, Vi?t Minh troops got military training at bases in China, and some Chinese advisers arrived in Vietnam to work with Giáp's forces. The Vi?t Minh acquired a conventional warfare capability.
The newly strengthened Vi?t Minh forces defeated the French at Lang Son and Cao Bang late in 1950, clearing French forces from the area along the Chinese border and thus making the flow of aid across the border from China much easier. Following this Giáp launched over-optimistic attacks on the French perimeter around the Red River Delta. These attacks were expensive failures. But over the next several years, the Vi?t Minh gained strength and skill at conventional warfare, while also making very effective use of guerrilla tactics. Giáp, having failed to take the Red River Delta by large conventional attacks in the first half of 1951, was able to take much of it a village at a time over the next three years.
When it became clear that France was becoming involved in a long drawn-out and so far not very successful war, the French government tried to negotiate an agreement with the Vi?t Minh. They offered to help set up a national government and promised that they would eventually grant Vietnam its independence. H? Chí Minh and the other leaders of the Vi?t Minh did not trust the word of the French and continued the war.
French public opinion continued to move against the war. There were five main reasons for this:
- Between 1946 and 1952 many French troops had been killed, wounded, or captured.
- France was attempting to build up her economy after the devastation of the Second World War. The cost of the war had so far been twice what they had received from the United States under the Marshall Plan.
- The war had lasted seven years and there was still no sign of an outright French victory
- A growing number of people in France had reached the conclusion that their country did not have any moral justification for being in Vietnam.
- Parts of the French left supported the goals of the Vi?t Minh to form a socialist state.
While growing stronger in Vietnam, the Vi?t Minh also expanded the war and forced the French into battles on unfavorable terms by attacking remote areas such as Laos. General Henri Navarre, the French commander in Indochina, was forced to redeploy large numbers of forces from their safe zones in order to protect Laos. In December 1953, Navarre set up a defensive complex at Đi?n Biên Ph?, which attempted to block the route of the Vi?t Minh forces trying to attack neighboring Laos. He surmised that in an attempt to reestablish the route to Laos, Giáp would be forced to organize a mass attack on the French forces at Đi?n Biên Ph?, where they would be crushed in a conventional battle.
Navarre's plan worked and Giáp took up the French challenge. While the French dug in at their outpost, the Viet Minh were also preparing the battlefield. Giáp brought up members of the troops from all over Vietnam. By the time the battle was ready to begin, Giáp had 70,000 troops surrounding the French positions, five times the number of French troops enclosed within.
Employing recently obtained antiaircraft guns and 105 mm howitzers from China, Giáp was able to restrict severely the ability of the French to supply their forces. The antiaircraft and artillery fire neutralized the French artillery, denied them the use of the airstrip, and forced them to inaccurately drop supplies from high altitude to the besieged troops. Instead of launching a frontal assault on the French, Giap chose to surround the outpost and ordered his men to dig a trench system that encircled the French. From the outer trench, other trenches and tunnels were dug inward towards the center. The Viet Minh were now able to move in close to the French troops defending Đi?n Biên Ph?.
When Navarre realized that he was trapped, he appealed for help. The United States was approached and some advisers suggested the use of tactical nuclear weapons against the Vi?t Minh, but this was never seriously considered. Another suggestion was that conventional air raids would be enough to scatter Giáp's troops. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, refused to intervene unless the British and other Western allies agreed. Churchill declined, claiming that he wanted to wait for the outcome of the peace negotiations taking place in Geneva, Switzerland, before becoming involved in escalating the war.
On 13 March 1954, Giáp launched his offensive. For 56 days the Vi?t Minh seized position after position, pushing the French until they occupied only a small area of Đi?n Biên Ph?. Colonel Piroth, the artillery commander, blamed himself for the destruction of French artillery superiority. He told his fellow officers that he had been "completely dishonoured" and committed suicide with a hand grenade. The French surrendered on May 7. Their casualties totaled over 2,000 men, 5,600 wounded and 6,500 taken prisoner. The following day the French government announced that it intended to withdraw from Vietnam.
Vietnam War
Giap remained commander in chief of the People's Army of Vietnam throughout the war against the United States. During the conflict he oversaw the expansion of the PAVN from a small self-defense force into a large conventional army, equipped by its communist allies with considerable amounts of relatively sophisticated weaponry, although this did not in general match the weaponry of the Americans. Giap has often been assumed to have been the planner of the Tet Offensive of 1968, but this appears not to have been the case. The best evidence indicates that he disliked the plan, and when it became apparent that Le Duan and Van Tien Dung were going to push it through despite his doubts, he left Vietnam for medical treatment in Hungary, and did not return until after the offensive had begun. Although this attempt to spark a general uprising against the southern government failed militarily, it turned into a significant political victory by convincing the American politicians and public that their commitment to South Vietnam could no longer be open-ended.
Peace talks between representatives from the United States, the Republic of Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the NLF began in Paris in January 1969. President Richard M. Nixon, like President Lyndon B. Johnson before him, was convinced that a U.S. withdrawal was necessary, but five years would pass before the last American troops left South Vietnam.
In October 1972, the negotiators came close to agreeing to a formula to end the conflict. The plan was that the last U.S. troops would withdraw from Vietnam in exchange for a cease-fire and the return of American prisoners held by Hàn?i. It was also agreed that the governments in North and South Vietnam would remain in power until new elections could be arranged to unite the whole country. Although the Nguyen Hue Offensive during the spring of 1972 was another costly failure, PAVN was able to gain a foothold in territorial South Vietnam from which to launch future offensives.
Although U.S. troops would leave the country, PAVN troops could remain in their positions in the south. In an effort to put pressure on both North and South Vietnam during the negotiations, President Nixon ordered a new series of air raids on Hà N?i and H?i Pḥng. The DRV accepted the terms of the agreement and, on 27 January 1973, Nixon agreed to sign the Paris Peace Accords that had been proposed in October.
End of the Vietnam war
The last U.S. combat troops left in March 1973. Despite the treaty, there was no letup in fighting. South Vietnamese advances against the Vietcong inspired the communists to change their strategy. In March, communist leaders met in Hanoi for a series of meetings to hammer out plans for a massive offensive against the South. In June 1973, the U.S. Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment to prohibit further U.S. military involvement, so the communists were able to prepare logistically without fear of U.S. bombing.
South Vietnamese President Nguy?n Van Thi?u appealed to Nixon for continued financial aid. Nixon was sympathetic but the U.S. Congress was not, and the move was blocked. At its peak, U.S. aid to South Vietnam had reached $30 billion a year. By 1974 it had fallen to $1 billion. Starved of funds, Thi?u's government had difficulty even paying the wages of its army, and desertions became a problem. On the other side, the PAVN received billions of dollars in new equipment from the Soviet Union.
The spring of 1975 saw the launching of a series of limited PAVN offensives under the command of General Van Tien Dung, who had replaced Giap at commander in chief of the NVA and PAVN armies in early 1974. The success of these drives (launched on a limited scale to test whether the U.S. would once again come to the aid of the Thieu regime) prompted Hanoi to attempt to seize all of South Vietnam before the onset of the monsoon season. The Ho Chi Minh Campaign was a massive conventional operation that utilized armor and heavy artillery. After important areas such as Da Nang and Hue were lost in March, panic swept through the ARVN and its high command. President Thieu attempted to abandon the northern half of the nation while pulling his troops back to defensive positions in the south. It did not work.
PAVN forces captured the capital of Saigon on 30 April 1975. Soon afterward the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was established. In the new government Giáp maintained his position as Defense Minister and was made Deputy Prime Minister in July 1976. He was removed from this post at the Defense Ministry in 1980 and was also removed from his position in the Politburo in 1982 and has since retired.
General Giáp has also written extensively on military theory and strategy. His works include Big Victory, Great Task; People's Army, People's War; "Đi?n Biên Ph?; and We Will Win. The historian Stanley Karnow described him as ranking with "Wellington, Grant, Lee, Rommel, and MacArthur in the pantheon of great military leaders," though according to General Westmoreland—his American counterpart—when commenting on Giap's costly tactics, "such a disregard for human life [i.e. Giap's own men] may make a formidable adversary, but it does not make a military genius."
In 1995, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara met Giáp to ask what happened on 4 August, 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin. "Absolutely nothing," Giáp replied. The incident, that served President Johnson as a pretext to step up U.S. involvement in the conflict, perhaps was fabricated.
In Fiction
General Giáp appears as a character in the Tom Clancy novel Without Remorse, in his role as commander of the PAVN.
External links
- Fall 2003 by Currey, Cecil B
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