Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnamese general, 19112013

By Jonathan Birchall

North Vietnamese defense minister General Vo Nguyen Giap, left, and vice-prime minister Pham Van Dong attending the celebrations of President Ho Chi Minh's return in Hanoi in January 1955

In December 1944, in the hills of northernVietnam, a former history teacher called Vo Nguyen Giap presided over a small military parade, wearing a dark civilian suit, a homburg hat and a revolver strapped to his side. While a ramshackle group of 34 soldiers equipped with old carbines and flintlocks stood to attention before a red flag with a gold star, Giap read a declaration, establishing the first armed propaganda team of the communist-led Vietnam Independence League, or Viet Minh. It was a modest military beginning for a man who came to be considered one of the greatest generals of the 20th century. General Giap, who has died in Hanoi at the age of 102, was the loyal right hand of modern Vietnams founding father, Ho Chi Minh. He became the chief architect of the defeat in Vietnam of two world powers: first France, which had colonised Vietnam in the mid-19th century, and then the US. Just 10 years after the modest jungle ceremony, Giaps peasant army inflicted a crushing military defeat on France at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the battle for which he will perhaps be most remembered. The defeat ended almost a century of French domination of Indochina. After the subsequent partitioning of the country at the Geneva peace talks, Giap went on to become leader of communist North Vietnams military forces, both conventional and guerrilla, for a period of more than 30 years, a unique record. In the 1960s, he directed the military campaigns that eventually led to the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, and to the final communist victory of 1975. Born in 1911, Giaps background was similar in many ways to that of his mentor, Ho Chi Minh, who was 20 years his senior. Both came from poor central provinces, and were

the sons of low-ranking scholar officials. Both attended Quoc Hoc private high school in Hue. In this city, the young Giap became involved in editing and publishing a leftwing nationalist newspaper, which led to his arrest by the French in the early 1930s. On his release, Giap travelled to Hanoi. He studied law, worked as a high-school teacher, agitated for language reform, and had joined the Indochinese Communist party by 1937. But the outbreak of the second world war and the Hitler-Stalin pact provoked a crackdown by the colonial power. In 1940, Giap fled Hanoi, heading for the border with southern China to join Ho. His young wife, Quang Thai*, was less fortunate. She was arrested and died later in prison. Giap was not to learn of her death for another three years an event which he once confided had destroyed my life. Giaps later development as a military leader was profoundly shaped by his polit ical education in the 1930s, which included studying the living conditions of Vietnamese peasants, monitoring the strategy of Mao Zedongs Chinese communists, and analysing the implications for Vietnam of Japan's challenge to the western colonial powers. For Giap, and for Hos communists, politics and military strategy were always inextricably linked, with the secret of success lying in the ability to predict events as they unfolded. The accurate, scientific forecast of how major situations are likely to develop in the future is of the utmost importance in revolutionary work, he wrote in 1961, and a true forecast is the work of genius. In 1944, with the foundation of the armed propaganda units in the northern hills, Giap and Ho awaited the appropriate conditions for action. With Japan's sudden surrender in August 1945, Ho seized the moment; the communists took control of Hanoi in August in a popular uprising, and Ho declared Vietnam independent on September 3, establishing a provisional government and holding elections before eventually being driven out by the returning French in 1946. Over the following years, Giap learned to be a general the hard way. In 1950, his forces cut off and wiped out French forces deployed along the mountainous Chinese border as they tried to retreat down Route Colonial 4. The defeat left 6,000 French troops dead and brought the colony close to panic. But in early 1951, Giap overextended himself; a series of offensives in the flat, open rice fields of the Red River Delta around Hanoi were repulsed by the French commander, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. Giap lost more than 6,000 men. Giaps military career could have ended then and there, but Ho and the party backed him, despite the blunder. The army fell back to its base areas and, in line with its Maoist principles, opted for a war of movement, shifting the focus from north to south, to Cambodia and into Laos, and awaiting the opportunity to strike harder. Then, in late 1953, a new French commander, General Henri Navarre, began to fortify a small village near the border with Laos called Dien Bien Phu. Navarre wanted to create a

secure base from which to harry Giaps Viet Minh in the mountains of the northwest, and to protect neighbouring Laos. Giap turned Dien Bien Phu into a trap. Dien Bien Phu's defences consisted of a central complex of fortifications protected by three outlying artillery bases codenamed Beatrice, Gabrielle and Isabelle, supposedly named after the mistresses of the commanding French colonel. The forts were to support each other with artillery fire, while the whole base could be supplied by air from Hanoi. The surrounding forests and mountains were assumed to be impassable for the enemys heavy artillery, which would in any case be vulnerable to air attack. From the end of November, Giap began moving the bulk of his force into the surrounding hills. Engineers hacked out tracks and roads across the mountains, and porters used bicycles and mules to move in supplies, carrying 88mm and 105mm artillery pieces in sections up to the ridges surrounding the valley. By January, he had 55,000 troops positioned in the hills overlooking the French garrison of 13,000, with another 20,000 Vietnamese providing support. But poised for what? The initial plan, endorsed by Giaps Chinese military advisers, called for an early mass assault before the French could further strengthen their positions. On January 26, with six hours to go before the first attack was to be launched, Giap called it off, causing a near mutiny among his staff. We chose to strike and advance surely, he wrote later, and to strike to win only when success is certain. Giap redeployed his artillery to higher ground, ordering his men to begin steadily digging an extensive trench network towards the French positions where they could pick off the French forts one by one. At the same time, he continued diversionary movements into Laos and in the Mekong Delta, aimed at preventing Navarre from concentrating more of his forces on Dien Bien Phu. The fighting began in earnest on March 13 with a massive artillery barrage. We were all surprised ... how the Viets have been able to find so many guns capable of producing an artillery assault of such power, wrote one of the survivors. Fifty-five days later, as peace talks opened in Geneva, the red flag with the gold star was flying over the French command bunker. Giap went on to other battles against the Americans and their southern allies, including the Tet offensive of 1968 and the Easter offensive of 1972. He was minister of defence when the final push on Saigon came in 1975. He organised the invasion of Cambodia in 1979. He gave the Chinese a bloody nose in the same year when they invaded northern Vietnam to teach it a lesson over Cambodia; after a few months, and 30,000 casualties, China withdrew. But it was Dien Bien Phu which placed Giap firmly in the history books. In a biography, Peter MacDonald, a retired British brigadier, argues that Giap combined a strategic depth of vision with a mastery of guerrilla warfare and an outstanding grasp

of logistics, seen most dramatically in the creation of the Ho Chi Minh trail to supply the south during the American War. Giap had his critics, too, most notably over his willingness to suffer casualties which would be politically unacceptable in anything other than a war for national liberation. In the final analysis, victory in any war is determined by the willingness of the masses to shed blood on the battlefield, Giap once wrote. In military terms, the Tet offensive was a disaster for the communists. A series of open assaults across the cities of South Vietnam failed to produce a popular uprising as predicted, and the southern guerrilla forces who came out into the open to fight were decimated by the Americans. But Tet also struck a decisive political blow to morale in the US; Giap claimed after the fact that this had been the intention all along. In later years, he settled quietly in his elegant French colonial-era house in Hanoi, close to the square where Ho had declared Vietnam's independence back in 1945. Those who thought he might use his enormous prestige to political effect, as Vietnam's communist leaders failed to deliver the economic benefits of peace, were disappointed. He spent his last few years in poor health at the military hospital where he died. After Ho's death in 1969, Giaps influence within the leadership waned steadily. His role in the final victory of 1975 is largely ignored by official Vietnamese accounts. In the late 1990s, there was recurrent speculation that he supported internal party critics calling for democratic reform and an end to official corruption. That may have been wishful thinking. To the end, General Giap remained the partys faithful soldier. *This has been corrected from the original
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