Clik here to view.
An expression of defeat is revealed on the face of this officer of the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
by Ray Lyman
The last hundred years, the most violent in recorded human history, have been crowded with great military commanders who have shaped the modern world. A few of these commanders, five or possibly six, not only left a record of battlefield success but also were instrumental in the birth of independent nations or revolutionary states and achieved political aims commensurate with their military victories. This short list would include Michael Collins of the Irish Republican Army; Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the father of the modern Turkey; Karl Mannerheim of Finland; Leon Trotsky, founder of the Soviet Red Army; Mao Zedong of China; and Vo Nguyen Giap of Vietnam. While all of these are remarkable leaders who inspired millions of their countrymen and conquered in spite of the odds being stacked against them, General Giap stands out as what I consider to be one of the most influential military figures of modern times, casting a shadow over wars across the planet more than 30 years after being forced into obscure retirement by a successor generation.
Vo Nguyen Giap—who died on October 4, 2013, at the age of 102—was a product of the French colonial education for Vietnamese elites in the early decades of the 20th century. His impoverished mandarin father hated the French, who had conquered Indochina in the 1880s, but like all educated Vietnamese, he recognized that French culture, language, and education were the path to political power for the privileged natives of the French Empire. As a student at the Lycee National in Hue, the young Giap proved an apt pupil with an avid interest in history and developed a lifelong obsession with Napoleon and Napoleonic warfare. French became as smooth and effortless for him as his native tongue, and his ability to think as a European would later become an enormous asset in defeating European and other Western societies. Giap went on to study law in Hanoi and to become a teacher of history in the late 1920s. During this period he was converted to the two causes that would shape his life and absorb his energies for the next 50 years: Marxism and Vietnamese nationalism. It is impossible to say which cause he was more passionately dedicated to serving; for to Giap they were the same endeavor.
In 1930 Giap joined with Ho Chi Minh and other members of the Comintern International to form the Communist Party of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh had uniquely also been one of the founders of the French Communist Party in 1920 in Paris and had lived for a few years in Lenin’s Russia learning the skills of a professional revolutionary. The two central figures of the Vietnamese communist movement, Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, would dominate the long struggle for Indochinese independence and make Vietnamese nationalism almost synonymous with Communism. Not that all Vietnamese nationalists embraced Communism, but very few of those non-Communist nationalist emerged as serious leaders with strong popular support. Those who did often found the themselves in French prisons, more often than not betrayed by their Communist rivals.
The defeat of the European colonialists by the Japanese during World War II proved to be the death knell of the European colonial empires in Asia. The Japanese showed that the once-invincible Europeans could be humbled, taken captive in large numbers, and driven from their privileged enclaves. After the fall of France to Japan’s ally, Nazi Germany, in June 1940, the Japanese applied diplomatic pressure on the Vichy French to accept Japanese military bases in Tonkin, the northern part of Indochina. The following summer, eyeing the resource-rich lands of Southeast Asia, Japan’s militarist government moved troops into Annam and Cochin China, the central and southern parts of French Indochina. The United States and the Dutch East Indies responded with an embargo on the sale of petroleum to Japan, an action that sent the Imperial Japanese Navy on its fatal cruise to Pearl Harbor five months later. In Vietnam, the French and the Japanese, joint occupiers of a foreign land, lived uneasily next to each other, neither upsetting the status quo until March 1945 when the Japanese attacked the French colonial garrisons and briefly incorporated Indochina into its dying empire, soon to be extinguished by the mushroom clouds of the atomic age.
During the years of the Japanese occupation, Ho and Giap formed a national resistance army, the Vietminh, that prosecuted a low-level guerrilla campaign against the Japanese, who hardly noticed the guerrilla activity. The Vietminh’s only significant contribution to the Allied cause was to provide weather reports to U.S. bombers flying from Chinese bases, recovering the occasional downed Allied pilot from the jungle and playing host to an OSS team hoping to transform the Vietminh into a more effective anti-Japanese guerrilla force. Ho and Giap were happy to cooperate with the Americans and expected to have Vietnamese independence recognized by the United States in the postwar period. Most of the OSS people, particularly those in Asia, held left-of-centers views and were sympathetic to the ambitions of Ho and Giap for an independent and socialist Vietnam. They undoubtedly encouraged Ho in this belief.
U.S. recognition of Vietnamese independence was a pipe dream that ended with the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945. FDR loathed Western colonialism, regarding it as an anachronism that had outlived its time. He encouraged its rapid demise, frequently dismaying British Prime Minister Winston Churchill with his demands for the dismantling of the British Empire after the war. FDR had no such apparent problem with Soviet imperialism and never reproached Stalin for holding conquered peoples in subjugation. He never seemed to comprehend that Stalinist imperialism was far more oppressive and brutal than the British and French colonial empires in Asia and Africa, nor did he seem to care. His death from a cerebral hemorrhage, only three months into his fourth term, changed the fate of Vietnam.
When the Japanese capitulated in August 1945, British and Chinese forces entered Indochina and accepted the surrender of the Japanese garrisons, the French being still too exhausted to project their power back into Asia. On the same day the Japanese government signed the surrender document aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam in Hanoi, quoting Thomas Jefferson and lines from the U.S. Declaration of Independence to celebratory crowds waving U.S. and Vietminh flags.
In 1946 the French army under General Jacques Leclerc, the liberator of Paris in August 1944, returned to reclaim Indochina and occupied Haiphong and Hanoi. Next to Britain, France was America’s most important ally, a key nation in keeping the Russians out of Western Europe. The Vietnamese hardly counted in the big picture of the emerging postwar world. U.S. military aid flowed to France, making it possible for French naval units to transport a large force of men and equipment to her Asian colony. Naturally, it was all done in the name of democracy, and to some extent that was true. The French promised that the nations of Indochina would be granted autonomy and later quasi-independence as part of the French Union, a sort of commonwealth based on the British model that still exists in parts of Africa. French authorities negotiated for a few months with the Vietminh, but the negotiations soon broke down, as they always do when the viewpoints of the negotiators are irreconcilable. In November 1946, an eight-year war between the French colonial empire and the Vietminh erupted with the naval bombardment by the French heavy cruiser Suffren of insurgent positions in Haiphong. The First Indochina War would shape the postwar politics of both France and the United States and win Vo Nguyen Giap a reputation as the most formidable military strategist in the anti-Western Third World.
Revolutionary guerrilla warfare was not a new phenomenon in 1946. It had been a feature of the Irish revolution and civil war, the Spanish Civil War, Marshal Tito’s anti-Nazi resistance in occupied Yugoslavia, Mao’s civil war against the Nationalists in China, and the ongoing civil war between the Communists and Royalists in Greece. What made Giap’s style of revolutionary war so effective against conventional Western armies was his flexible three-phase strategy that borrowed much from the lessons of Mao. It utilized the tactics of terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and conventional armed conflict to wear down and outfight opponents who, on the surface, were much stronger and able to access far greater resources.
In 1946 General Giap was appointed Defense Minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), comprising the Vietminh-controlled areas of Indochina, a position he would hold for almost 35 years. The first phase of this war against the French administration was terror, and as V.I. Lenin wrote in 1917, “The purpose of terror is to terrorize.” That is precisely what the Vietminh under Giap proceeded to do in a systematic campaign of kidnapping, torture, rape, mutilation, and murder of village leaders, local officials, their family members, and anyone opposing the Vietminh ultimate goal of establishing a Communist Vietnam. The Vietminh executed an estimated 150,000 Vietnamese civilians between 1946 and 1954, which amounted to roughly one out of every five people killed in the war. It was the same program they initiated in South Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the same kind of success.
When civilians are not secure from retaliation, they never develop the kind of civic loyalties that a government needs to survive. In time the terrorizers become the only legitimate authority because their writ is enforced by the fear of savage violence. Terror is an extraordinarily difficult tactic for counterinsurgency forces to neutralize, and it can only be defeated at the local level by special forces living among the civilian population. For that reason, it has been repeated since the First Indochina War in Algeria, South Vietnam, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, Rhodesia, Angola, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali, and in countless other places by Marxist or Islamic insurgents with no moral qualms about ruthlessly killing the perceived enemies of their radical causes.
The French commander in Indochina, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the victorious commander of the French First Army in the last years of World War II, succeeded Leclerc after his dismissal for using harsh methods, including widespread torture, against the Vietnamese. Leclerc died in a plane crash in North Africa in 1947. Lattre de Tassigny prosecuted a conventional strategy of luring the Vietminh into battle against mobile units and then defeating them with the superior firepower and tactics of the French army. If it sounds familiar, it was essentially the same strategy employed by Generals Westmoreland and Abrams 15 years later in the Second Indochina War with similar results. The strategy works only if the enemy cooperates, and the enemy seldom does what you want him to do in any war.
Lattre de Tassigny’s most notable success was the Red River Delta campaign of 1950–51, near Hanoi, when Giap did challenge French conventional forces with regimental-size Vietminh formations. The French had a 16-to-1 superiority in artillery and total air superiority with U.S.-supplied ground-attack F8F Bearcats dropping prodigious quantities of napalm and high explosives. They inflicted heavy losses on the Vietminh, which led Giap to break off the engagement and fall back on phase two guerrilla tactics. The war remained a stalemate, increasingly unpopular in France, and the Vietminh still dominated the rural areas, leaving only the cities under secure French control. Lattre de Tassigny fell ill in December 1951 and went home to France, where he died a month later. He was succeeded as commander of French forces in Indochina by General Henri Navarre, a capable commander who maintained the status quo with no change in strategy and continued to slowly lose the war to Giap.
The great British strategic thinker Basil Liddell Hart once came up with a theory that the course of battles, campaigns, and even wars is best understood through the minds of the opposing commanders. In the jungles and mountains of Indochina, Giap fought a war of mental jujitsu against Navarre, doing the unexpected and the unorthodox to upset the best French plans. Navarre knew that with the Communist victory over the Nationalists in China time was not on his side and that he had to find some way to force Giap into a conventional battle in which all the French advantages could be brought to bear to inflict a decisive defeat of the Vietminh. The place chosen for this decisive battle was a remote valley near the Laotian border called Dien Bien Phu.
In November 1953, some 4,500 French paratroopers were dropped into the valley of Dien Bien Phu to set up a base in the heart of Vietminh territory. French paratroopers, regular army troops, colonials, and Foreign Legionnaires were the elite strike force of the French Empire, among the best soldiers of their kind in the world. They built two airstrips so that French supply planes could bring in reinforcements and heavy weapons, while a series of nine fortified strong points were constructed along an eleven-mile-long, three-mile-wide stretch of the narrow valley. For the next five months, the French reinforced the base with men, tanks, guns, and mountains of ordnance as a permanent challenge to the authority of Ho’s DRV.
The perimeter of the Dien Bien Phu base extended for some 30 miles, reinforced to include a garrison of some 13,200 French, Moroccan, Laotian, Vietnamese, and Algerian soldiers of the French Empire, along with quite a number of former Wehrmacht and Waffen SS veterans of the Russian front in the ranks of the Foreign Legion. The French commander was Colonel (later Brigadier General) Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries, one of the bright stars of the French army. A dashing, confident figure, Castries had achieved some celebrity at home as a race car driver, horseman, and inveterate womanizer who had named his nine fortified strong points from Gabrielle in the north to Isabelle in the south after former paramours. As a professional soldier, Colonel Castries had escaped from a German POW camp in 1941 and fought with the Free French in North Africa, Italy, and southern France, earning most of the decorations for valor awarded by the French republic.
After Mao’s conquest of Mainland China was completed in October 1949, Ho and Giap established contact and opened a communications route to China through the hills and jungle trails of northern Indochina. This supply trail had turned into a highway for supplies from Communist China and Soviet Russia. Tens of thousands of foot-bound coolie bearers trudged southward carrying parts of disassembled heavy weapons, mortar and artillery shells, jerry cans of fuel, boxes of ammo, cases of rations, and all the stuff required by a modern army. General Navarre, the French commander in Indochina, believed that French and perhaps U.S. airpower and French tactical superiority would negate the massive flow of aid coming from a Communist bloc that now spanned all of Eurasia from Hainan Island to Trieste. He was wrong in this assessment, and in a few other assumptions that would prove fatal to French aims.
The two most egregious false assumptions by the French were that there would be no concentrations of heavy artillery on the hills surrounding the narrow valley and that all French supplies could simply be flown into the base and unloaded at the airstrips. On the very first day of the siege, March 13, 1954, it was apparent that hundreds of 105mm and 75mm guns, most of them captured from the broken U.S. Eighth Army during the Chinese 1950–51 winter offensive from the Yalu in Korea, were deployed in the hills on both sides of the French perimeter. From that first day, both of the airstrips were rendered unusable, and all further supplies and reinforcements had to be dropped by parachute. As the perimeter shrank with the fall of one strong point after another, more and more of the supplies and brave, if foolhardy, volunteers from headquarters in Hanoi fell behind Vietminh lines and into eager Vietminh hands. It was a classic example of the best-laid plans of mice and men going awry.
Another French assumption to be proven invalid was the intelligence assessment that Giap would never be able to assemble a force of more than 10,000 fighting men in such a remote area. Always a master of logistics and organization, Giap was able to concentrate 40,000 Vietminh fighters, along with another 30,000 laborers, who were soon building wide roads through the jungle from the Chinese frontier that would carry Russian trucks to the battle front. Another 2,000 or so French reinforcements were dropped by air during the siege, but their fate was already sealed by Giap’s coup of closing down the airstrips.
French airpower, the ace in the hole on which Navarre and Castries pinned their hopes, was negated by the monsoon weather and by the Russian multibarreled antiaircraft guns that shot down a staggering number of the best French fighter-bombers, the F8F Bearcats, and C-47 Dakota transports from the skies. The French defenders at Dien Bien Phu had only one real chance: an early breakout that might have saved many, if not most, of the elite troops from death or captivity. This option was considered but rejected because it would have meant leaving the wounded and medical personnel behind. That choice would not have been compatible with the honor of a French army still recovering from the stigma and lost glory of the 1940 debacle.
Never underestimate the ferocity and tenacity of doomed men with nothing to lose. History is full of examples, from the Roman legions of Varus at Teutoburg Forest to the last stand of the Cathars at Montsegur castle in 1244 during the Albigensian crusade to the farmhouse siege of the French Foreign Legion company of Captain Jean Danjou at Camerone, Mexico, in April 1863 to the Nazi diehards fighting in the ruins of Berlin in April 1945. Doomed men, fatalistic about their prospects and facing certain death or cruel and humiliating captivity, will fight harder and more courageously than any other soldiers on earth. Nowhere was this better demonstrated than at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
General Giap was never renowned for exercising patience. The first instinct of this former history teacher was to use his vastly superior numbers to overrun the French strong points and crush Dien Bien Phu without a long siege. His tactics were human wave attacks similar to those that the Chinese had employed in Korea. The entrenched French defenders stopped these attacks cold with mortar and heavy machine gun fire, leaving hundreds of Vietminh bodies hanging on the barbed wire entanglements. It was a repeat of the failed frontal assaults of World War I with the same result. An estimated 8,000 Vietminh were killed in these human wave attacks of late March. Giap was never overly concerned about high losses and shrugged off the setback. The flexible Vietminh commander reverted to methodical siege tactics from time immemorial, using sappers to advance trench lines a few yards each day until a French trench or bunker could be taken in a quick rush by assault squads armed with automatic weapons, grenades, and flamethrowers. The process was slow and far less costly, and it wore the French down day by day.
The end came on the afternoon of May 7, 1954, with the capture of recently promoted General Castries and the surrender of the last French holdouts at strong point Isabelle. A last-minute breakout had been attempted with a few hundred men slipping through the Vietminh lines. Nine thousand soldiers of the French Empire were taken prisoner and another 2,200 were dead, with at least 2,000 deserters, mostly Laotian and Vietnamese colonial troops, missing. In this war and the next, Giap regarded POWs as propaganda pawns to be exploited and kept alive at only a marginal level of existence. Fewer than 3,000 French POWs returned home after the war ended. The rest died in long death marches or from tropical diseases and ill treatment in fetid jungle camps. Some spent a decade or longer in DRV prisons until they were ransomed by the French government or succumbed to natural attrition.
It was not the end of the war. Less than 10 percent of the French military forces in Indochina had been lost at Dien Bien Phu. Giap and the Vietminh were still as incapable of liberating Hanoi and Haiphong as they were of taking Paris. What Giap had achieved was the demoralization of the French, both the military in Indochina and the war-weary civilians at home. There was simply no stomach for a continuation of the war after Dien Bien Phu. Negotiations were begun in Geneva, and a peace accord was signed by all parties in July that granted independence to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; established a temporary division of the country at the 17th Parallel; and promised a national election in 1956, which most experts assumed Ho Chi Minh would win. And he would have if Diem and Eisenhower had allowed the election to take place.
Only three months after the Geneva Conference concluded the First Indochina War, a new revolutionary guerrilla war, inspired by Giap’s victory in Asia, erupted across the Mediterranean in Algeria, a French North African possession that was legally an integral part of metropolitan France, or as much a part of France as Lille, Metz, and Marseilles. In Algeria the French paratrooper regiments, colonial troops, and Foreign Legion won all the engagements and suppressed the insurgency (as the American General David Petraeus would in Iraq 50 years later) but lost the war to demoralization and radical agitation at home that undermined those empty victories over the leftist insurgents. The Algerian insurgency would prove to be the death knell of the French Fourth Republic, paving the way for the return to public life of Charles de Gaulle in 1958. France’s overseas empire, the second largest of 19th-century colonial empires in Africa, did not survive the Algerian war. In a psychological sense, the loss of Algeria was for France what the loss of Alaska or Hawaii would be for the United States. It nearly ignited a civil war in France and left scars that endure to this day.
In October 1955, Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, with Washington’s blessing, used a national referendum to force the abdication of the Annamese Emperor Bao Dai and establish the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam. When the Catholic Diem, fearing a Communist electoral victory, reneged on the promise of a national election to unify Vietnam, the stage was set for the Second Indochina War, which would rage from the late 1950s to May 1975. General Giap began to immediately support an insurgency in the south, using the same tactics of terror and assassination at the village level to control the countryside. The first of more than 58,000 Americans to die in country were killed in July 1959, the last in May 1975.
By 1960, an elaborate network of trails and roads extended through the Laotian panhandle and the frontier regions of Cambodia that became famously known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The early decision by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson to limit the war to South Vietnam left this supply route as a safe sanctuary from which Giap could escalate the war at any time it seemed opportune. And he did so on four occasions between 1964 and 1975 in general offensives aimed at toppling the Saigon government, the last one in 1975 succeeding. The outrageous fiction that Laos and Cambodia were neutral nations without much of their territory occupied by North Vietnam was perhaps the most successful Communist propaganda lie of the war, accepted as reality by neutrals, peace activists in the United States, and even by some of America’s oldest allies. When President Nixon did make halfhearted efforts to strike at Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos in 1970 and 1971, he received a firestorm of approbation for widening a war that had already been widened for a decade by Hanoi. In any event, it was all too little and too late, which is the most common reason that nations, even great ones, lose their wars.
Giap won his greatest triumph on April 30, 1975, when the Soviet tanks of North Vietnamese armed brigades rolled into Saigon. The post-Watergate U.S. Congress had voted to cut off all military aid to Vietnam more than a year earlier, even as military resupply on a massive level from the Soviet Union poured into the port of Haiphong. In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, the beleaguered Republic of Vietnam, stripped of its rich patron, lacked essential fuel for its still substantial air force, which was its only possible salvation, and the Americans, demoralized by 12 years of frustrating war, were not about to send the B-52s and carrier strikes that might have turned Giap’s blitzkrieg into a massacre. The ultimate goals of Giap’s public life had been achieved, and his Vietnam was united under the Communist Party politburo in Hanoi, much to the detriment of all Vietnamese.
When General Vo Nguyen Giap was honored in a funeral procession through Hanoi a few months ago with hundreds of thousands of mourners present, there was little notice taken in the West of a figure who had long since disappeared from the headlines, but perhaps there should have been. Vo Nguyen Giap had set the template for how a Third World nation or a totalitarian movement might defeat a major Western power or a government materially supported by the West. The formula has been used time and again by Marxist and Islamic revolutionary movements in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, and the Middle East, and it has had an unfortunately high rate of success. It is why history will very likely conclude that we lost both of our post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For Giap understood that a revolutionary movement willing to accept manpower losses of 10 or even 20 to 1 to achieve its aims will almost always emerge the victor in any conflict that is decided by attrition. How many uneducated peasants or ill-trained religious fanatics are worth the life of a Western soldier or pilot with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in his education and training and a family at home to mourn his passing? In geopolitical terms, there is simply no way to make this an even exchange.
This puts Giap on my short list of the most influential military leaders of modern times. His legacy continues to cast a long and dark shadow over the 21st century.
Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, during which he authored Paladin’s popular line of military history calendars. Another function he so ably filled was chief historian and fact checker. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical, political, military, or current events question. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role for Paladin.