Vo Nguyen Giap

Vietnamese politician

• Born: August 25, 1912
• Birthplace: An Xa, Quang Binh Province, Vietnam French Indochina

As chief Vietnamese Communist military strategist and expert guerrilla warfare tactician, Giap was the architect of the Viet Minh victory over the French in 1954 (which ended French colonialism in Southeast Asia). Afterward he officially served as North Vietnam’s defense minister and directed the military campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s that led to final victory over US and South Vietnamese forces in 1975.

Early Life

Vo Nguyen Giap (voh new-yehn gyahp), whose first name means “force” and last name means “armor,” was born at An Xa in Quang Binh Province, a poor region of central Vietnam. The sixth of eight children, he was reared in a lower-middle-class family of high educational attainment. His mother, Nguyen Thi Kien, was the daughter of a member of an anti-French resistance movement. Vo Quang Ngheim, his father, an ardent anticolonialist scholar who supported the family by cultivating rice, was determined to have his son educated and scraped together enough money to send him to a private school, Quoc Hoc Secondary School, in Hue. It was run by Ngo Dinh Kha, the father of Ngo Dinh Diem (future president of South Vietnam and enemy of Giap).

Quoc Hoc Secondary School also had been attended by Ho Chi Minh, and there the young Giap began to read Ho’s pamphlets, smuggled into Vietnam from abroad. Giap also acquired anticolonial and nationalistic political ideas from Phan Bio Chau, a veteran revolutionary who was then under house arrest at Hue but who was allowed to chat informally with interested parties. While still a student at Hue in 1926, Giap joined the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association, known as the Thanh Nien, which Ho had helped to establish. At age fourteen, he was already becoming a bona fide revolutionary and disciple of Ho, and he read French translations of books by Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilich Lenin. He was expelled from Quoc Hoc school after organizing a student strike to protest unjust treatment of a fellow student.

Giap found a job as a reporter at the Tieng Dan newspaper, beginning a career as a journalist. He also worked for a short time as an accountant and gave private lessons in mathematics and French.

In 1930, at age eighteen, Giap was arrested by French security police as a supporter of revolutionary agitation. He had been helping lay the groundwork for the Indochinese Communist Party, which was organized by Ho that year with the help of members of the Thanh Nien in Hanoi, Saigon, and Hue (where young Giap was involved). Giap was sentenced to three years in a prison in the mountains near the Laotian border but was paroled after thirteen months. After his release from jail, he resumed his involvement in nationalistic anticolonial politics as well as the nation’s Communist Party, of which he became a recognized founding member.

Giap left Hue for Hanoi to study law at the French-run University of Hanoi. In 1937, he obtained a doctorate and went to work at Thang Long College, teaching history and writing articles in French and Vietnamese for nationalist newspapers and founding two newspapers of his own, Hon tre tap moi (soul of youth), and the French-language The Travail (the labor). Both were closed down by the French authorities; nevertheless, Giap managed to convert many fellow teachers and students to his political views. In 1939, Giap married Quang Thai, daughter of the dean of the faculty of letters at the college; together they worked to further the Indochinese Communist Party. Their life together was not a long one. In 1939, just before the Japanese occupation of Indochina, the party was outlawed. Giap went to China to get military help; while he was away, his wife was arrested by the French. She died in prison in 1941; their infant daughter, Hong Anh, was sent to Giap’s mother to be raised. Giap’s sister-in-law, arrested for terrorism, was guillotined in Saigon at the same time. Those events left Giap with profound anti-French feelings as he entered a new and intense phase of his life. Giap later married a second time, to Dan Bich Ha, with whom he also had children; Hong Ahn became one of the country’s leading physicists.

Life’s Work

As a teacher in Hanoi in 1937 and 1938, Giap developed a great admiration for Napoleon I, with whom, as a military leader, he later was said to identify. Decades afterward, former students recalled his lectures on Napoleon’s campaigns, how he recounted the battles in brilliant detail as though he were the great commander himself or preparing to become one like him. After 1939, Giap would spend much of his life practicing the same profession as the man whom history had taught him to admire so much. It is ironic that the profession was practiced against Napoleon’s homeland.

Once in China, Giap joined his political mentor, Ho, and became his military aide. When France was defeated by Germany in 1940, Ho, Giap, and Pham Van Dong worked out plans to advance Vietnamese nationalist goals. Crossing the border from China into Vietnam in January 1941, the trio prepared to organize the League for the Independence of Vietnam, a coalition of various exile forces dedicated to liberating their country from foreign occupation or rule. Better known as the Viet Minh, the league was created in May of 1941. At Ho’s direction, Giap also organized a Viet Minh army of liberation and trained it with China’s help. By December 1944, Giap’s army began to wage guerrilla warfare against the Japanese, who had completely overrun Indochina.

Described as a cynic in action, Giap first collaborated with the French when they were driven into the mountains by the Japanese. His commandos moved against Hanoi, the occupied Vietnamese capital, in the spring of 1945, but after the bombing of Hiroshima (early August, 1945), Giap made overtures to the Japanese, from whom he hoped to get arms. Giap’s brief collaboration with the Japanese paid off in late August, 1945, when they let his forces into Hanoi ahead of the Allies. The Allies were then put in the position of having to deal with Giap and Ho.

With the abdication of Emperor Bao Dai, Ho proclaimed Vietnamese independence in September 1945. He became president of the new nation, and Vo Nguyen Giap was selected as minister of defense and state. Unfortunately, Giap, who was already viewed as being Moscow-oriented, could not refrain from passionately expressing hatred for France at a time when Ho was trying to foster a favorable public image of his government, especially on the international scene. Giap, therefore, was dropped briefly from the cabinet. Ultimately, however, the French were unwilling to give up their claims to Vietnam by recognizing its independence. When frustrating negotiations finally broke down altogether, Ho declared a national war of resistance. Giap, still commander in chief of the army, returned to the cabinet as minister of defense.

Actually, it was Giap who issued the first call to arms on December 19, 1945 (the official starting date for the French Indochina War), as Ho was sick in bed at the time. Outnumbered and poorly supplied at times, Giap took his ragtag army into the northern Tonkinese Mountains, built it into a sixty-thousand-man guerrilla force, and prepared a plan of calculated harassment of the French. In Giap’s strategy, guerrilla resistance was to be the initial phase, preparatory to more conventional warfare that could culminate in a full-scale counteroffensive and final defeat of the enemy. Giap’s training manual, a refinement of Mao Zedong’s ideas, stressed the importance of surprise in guerrilla warfare. The feint, the ambush, and the diversion were important tactical elements. Though an army might be outnumbered ten to one strategically, careful use of guerrilla tactics could cause the opponent to disperse his force so widely that he then would become outnumbered ten to one at the point chosen for attack. Giap also taught the necessity of maintaining the allegiance and support of the peasantry.

General Giap began his drive against the French gradually by harassing the most isolated French garrisons, bottling up their defenders so as to leave the countryside open to the Viet Minh. As his strength increased, Giap accelerated the pace of his attacks and directed them against larger French garrisons. Sometimes the French would withdraw from positions, abandoning precious artillery, mortars, thousands of rifles, and thousands of tons of ammunition.

In 1951, Giap lost momentum by overstepping his own plans and attacking key sectors rashly and prematurely, aiming to dramatize his supremacy over the French. Yet after pulling back and learning from his errors, Giap’s forces regained the initiative and enjoyed success. By late 1953, the French were tiring of a war that had already cost them 170,000 casualties and $10 billion. Their commanders decided that Dien Bien Phu would become the mooring point from which they could stop Giap and inflict a stunning defeat on the Vietnamese that would end the war.

The French fortress of Dien Bien Phu was located in a valley 180 miles west of Hanoi. By early 1954, the French had parachuted more than twelve thousand men into the area. Not knowing that Giap had acquired one hundred American-made 105-mm howitzers, that he had spent three months deploying fifty thousand men at the site, and that the Viet Minh had dragged the artillery up to the heights above the valley, the French hoped to lure the Vietnamese general into battle there. (They need not have worried about Giap failing to engage them.) Equally important was the fact that of the thirteen-thousand-man French fighting force, only half were qualified for combat, a fact discounted by French leadership because of their arrogance and vanity. Giap’s army trapped the French within the bastion, and, after fifty-five days of bombardment, the few survivors surrendered to Giap, after four thousand had been killed and almost eight thousand were missing. Giap thus became the first military leader to defeat a major Western army on the Asian continent and was known as the Tiger of Dien Bien Phu.

At Geneva, Switzerland, in July, 1954, the Vietnamese and French signed an official cease-fire agreement. Representatives of world powers also concluded that Vietnam was to be divided at the seventeenth parallel, into northern and southern sections. The Communist government of Ho Chi Minh would rule in North Vietnam (officially called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam), while the French would have some voice in a South Vietnamese government until the Vietnamese people themselves, voting in a 1956 national election, would decide the fate of their entire country. Those elections were never held, and gradually the United States replaced the weary French as the Western power in South Vietnam.

Despairing of ever reunifying Vietnam through legal means, nationalists in South Vietnam went underground and formed the so-called Viet Cong guerrilla force, which began conducting an armed revolt against the US-sponsored regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. On the division of Vietnam in July 1954, General Giap had become deputy prime minister, minister of defense, and commander of all the armed forces of North Vietnam. He began sending aid to the Viet Cong, and the United States reciprocated with aid to South Vietnam. This mutual intervention escalated into full-fledged war in 1965. Giap sent whole divisions of North Vietnamese regulars into the south to fight alongside the Viet Cong and assigned his associate, General Nguyen Chi Thanh, to direct operations in the south. Giap and Thanh often disagreed over the conduct of the war, and when the latter was killed in action in 1967, Giap took direct control of Communist military operations in the south.

Giap’s masterstroke of 1968 was his execution of the Tet Offensive, in which he led the Americans to believe that he was planning a Dien Bien Phu–type attack on the Marine outpost at Khe Sanh. Then, during the Tet (lunar new year) holiday, while Americans were concentrating on Khe Sanh, Giap launched a sweeping offensive against cities as well as military and government compounds throughout South Vietnam with a Communist force of more than thirty-six thousand troops. Though his losses numbered some fifteen thousand, Giap’s bold move was regarded as a moral and psychological victory, demonstrating that the Viet Cong, with the help of the peasantry (which Giap had advocated for many years), could strike at will all over South Vietnam against the world’s mightiest military power. The Tet Offensive also reminded the world of Giap’s brilliance and strength of will. Giap’s next massive campaign, the 1972 Nguyen Hue Offensive (called the Easter Offensive by US forces), also cost legions of casualties and failed to establish a secure base of operations in the South. General Van Tien Dung replaced Giap as commander in chief in 1974; Giap remained as defense minister and directed the final campaign to unite the country.

From 1976 (when the two Vietnams were finally reunited) to 1980, Giap continued to serve as Vietnam’s national defense minister and was confirmed as the united country’s deputy prime minister. He was a full member of the Politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party until 1982, when a power struggle led to his forced retirement. An attempt to regain his membership in 1986 failed.

Giap is now retired with the rank of senior general. He holds the Gold Star, the highest decoration awarded by Vietnam; the Ho Chi Minh Order, the nation’s second-highest decoration; and the Resolution for Victory Order. In 1991 he was presented an award from an association of Vietnam’s journalists honoring his work as a newspaper reporter and editor.

In 1995, Giap met with his US counterpart during much of the Vietnam War, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara was in Hanoi to promote an international conference on the war, which he had come to believe should never have been fought. The meeting was cordial, and Giap contributed to McNamara’s effort by revealing a key, long-disputed fact: the second attack by Vietnamese gunboats on US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 had not taken place. The incident was used by President Lyndon B. Johnson to justify the military buildup in South Vietnam. Giap died on October 4, 2013, in Hanoi.

Significance

Throughout the long years of his military service, Giap came to be seen as indispensable to the cause of an independent, unified Vietnam, even in the face of resentment from some Vietnamese. His successes boosted him to a position of popular hero second only to Ho but at the same time displayed the great brutality of which he was capable. In 1969, he admitted that North Vietnam had then already lost half a million troops against the United States and South Vietnamese regime, but he would have his forces continue to fight for another fifty years if necessary. Twenty-five years earlier, as he led his liberation army into the Dinh Ca Valley and liquidated government officials as well as wealthy farmers, he gave cruel force to his oft-repeated slogan: every minute one hundred thousand men die all over the world; life and death of human beings means nothing.

Giap was regarded as Vietnam’s most important modern military leader, theoretically and practically. He was universally recognized as an authority on and practitioner of modern guerrilla warfare. Giap’s brilliance as a military strategist and tactician not only led to the end of the French colonialist regime in Vietnam but also was responsible for driving the Americans from the country and bringing about the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. Giap’s genius lay in his ability to articulate and carry out the relationship of communist ideology to military strategy. He was able to animate a conservative society and turn a group of peasants into an army capable of defeating world powers.

Without question Giap was unbending on matters of duty. A veteran French officer of the first Indochinese War once summed up the tiny general (he was only five feet in height) succinctly when he said he was an implacable enemy and would follow to the end his dream and his destiny. Giap was more like Napoleon than the French themselves realized.

Bibliography

Curry, Cecil B. “Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap Remembers.” Journal of Third World Studies 20 (2003): 49–92. Print. This lengthy interview in question-and-answer format covers Giap’s childhood, education, newspaper career, and work as a revolutionary until 1945, correcting errors and filling gaps in the standard biographical information available about him.

Curry, Cecil B. "The Story of a Book." Journal of Third World Studies 29.2 (2012): 221–230. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Dec. 2013.

Curry, Cecil B. Victory at Any Cost: The Genius of Viet Nam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap. 1997. Dulles: Potomac, 2005. Digital file. A well-researched biography of Giap, with information drawn from interviews and letters. It carefully explains Giap’s successful battle tactics, war-fighting strategy, and inventive logistics.

Gerassi, John. North Vietnam: A Documentary. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Print. Written by a reporter and member of the first investigating team for the International War Crimes Tribunal, this book is a collection of documents (along with the author’s observations) prepared by the North Vietnamese concerning US aggression in North Vietnam. Its value for a study of Giap is its presentation of some twenty pages of material eloquently written by Giap detailing the United States’ violations of the 1954 Geneva Agreements. The book is polemical in nature in that it is antiwar.

Gregory, Joseph R., and Seth Mydans. "Relentless General Who Ousted France and U.S. from Vietnam." New York Times 5 Oct. 2013: A1–A16. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Dec. 2013.

Huyen, N. Khac. Vision Accomplished? The Enigma of Ho Chi Minh. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Print. A native of Indochina, Huyen lived under Ho’s regime for seven years. Though not specifically about Giap, the work nevertheless presents, in thorough fashion, the important association and points of contact between Giap and Ho the twin pillars of Vietnamese nationalism. It is virtually impossible to understand Giap thoroughly without understanding something of his connection with Ho.

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Viking, 1983. Print. Perhaps the finest single volume on the history of war in Vietnam. Karnow does an excellent job of tracing Giap’s role in fighting the first and second Indochinese wars against the background of the whole history of the country.

McCain, John. "He Beat Us in War but Never in Battle." Wall Street Journal, Eastern Edition 7 Oct. 2013: A15. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Dec. 2013.

Military Institute of Vietnam. Victory in Vietnam. Trans. Merle Pribbenow. Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 2002. Print. This is the official history of “the great patriotic war” by the People’s Army of Vietnam. It explains important strategies and setbacks in the war and provides a counterpoint to American histories of the war.

Roy, Jules. The Battle of Dienbienphu. Trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Harper, 1965. Print. This outstanding work discusses what some consider to be Giap’s greatest success victory over the French. The most significant aspects of the book are not the details of the battle itself but the motives and reasoning of the leaders of the two sides. Giap’s ability comes through clearly in this well-written account.

Vo Nguyen Giap. Banner of People’s War: The Party’s Military Line. New York: Praeger, 1970. Print. This short book written by the general constitutes a statement on Communist political and military strategy in the Vietnamese war against U.S. intervention. An important theme in Giap’s text is that the Vietnamese Communist Party’s military ideology is part of the two-thousand-year history of Vietnamese resistance to foreign aggression. He sees the struggle as a just war of national liberation against a bully.

Vo Nguyen Giap. General Vo Nguyen Giap: The General Headquarters in the Spring of Brilliant Victory. Hanoi: Gioi, 2002. Print. Giap relates the final phases of the Vietnam War from his point of view, a narrative that mixes together history and his analyses, which sometimes have a pronounced ideological slant.

Wambu, Onyekachi. "The Tactics of Terror." New African 533 (2013): 106. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Dec. 2013.