The Legacy of Vo Nguyen Giap

(25 August 1911 – 4 October 2013)

Expanded and Revised Edition

Alfred G. Simbulan

Vo Nguyen Giap came from a revolutionary family. His father took part in two failed uprisings against the French colonial forces (1885 and 1888) and was arrested, tortured and died in prison in 1919. His older sister was also arrested and died from effects of torture after being released. Giap’s wife was also arrested and killed after he escaped to China in 1940 during a French crackdown on nationalists. This was how brutal the French occupation forces were.

Giap never had any formal military schooling until mid 1945 when he participated in the crash course given by the OSS Deer Team. This phenomena however is not unique in history. Some people in history devoted their life to military science without military schooling or a prior war experience, like Jomini (who unraveled Napoleon’s tactics and system besting Schlieffen and Clauswitz---the classic writers of Napoleonic modern warfare) Recognizing his unique abilities, Napoleon immediately gave Jomini a rank of Colonel and allowed to join his planning sessions.

Giap mastered the classic, Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” and studied Napoleon’s military campaigns (the father of modern warfare and regular mobile warfare) through pocket books, like Mao Zedong.

Ho Chi Minh played an important role in molding Giap’s military orientation. Having been schooled in Moscow’s revolutionary schools, Ho had been deployed to China by the Comintern during the Soviet sponsored, Koumintang-CCP alliance to act as Mikhail Markovich Borodin’s interpreter. Part of Ho’s stint in China was to be a lecturer in the Whampoa Military Academy. While in China, Ho Chin Minh saw how China’s Soviet Advisers Borodin and Otto Braun influenced the CCP with erroneous policies.

During Ho’s stint in China, Mao had ascended as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party since the Tsunyi Conference in 1935. Mao had been demoted for his “peasant ideology” having promoted a strategy and thinking that was opposed to the line of Comintern agent Borodin and the “28 Bolsheviks” in the Chinese Central Committee. In China, Ho Chi Minh picked up many of Mao’s ideas on people’s war and shared them with other leaders of the Vietminh. Ho Chi Minh also translated Mao’s monumental book work On Protracted War, from Chinese to French making this work available to the Vietminh intellectuals such as Giap.

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Running an army and employing them in warfare requires a lot of skills and knowledge that are generally embodied in general staff schooling. It requires knowledge in administration, the conduct of army maneuvers, and a deep exposure in specialized line military work --- that include sciences for the employment of artillery, and mortars (mathematics, algebra, trigonometry, geography etc,), recruitment and training, intelligence, planning and operations, logistics, medical work etc. Running a revolutionary army is much more complex because the rank and file fight and die for a cause often based on ideological and political beliefs, especially the guerrilla forces who often have to be self reliant. Thus, constant ideological and political work in keeping the morale of an army exceptionally high is one of the most important aspects in running a revolutionary army that is absent in bourgeois armies who rely on material compensation, punishments and the fear of authority to make their armies fight.

Giap was an indefatigable learner and had mastered all these in the course of the long protracted war in Vietnam. He sought technical advice especially from specialists from Eastern Europe and the socialist camp in solving complex problems starting in the 1950’s when socialist solidarity became possible.

It was only in the middle of 1945, when Ho Chi Minh had any form of military schooling when Ho Chi Minh negotiated with the US Office of the Special Services (the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA) for military training from American commando trainors who parachuted to Vietnam. Giap and 200 other military cadres of the Vietminh got a formal crash course military training. The short military course included commando operations, demolition, ambushes and arms training including the use of mortars. The OSS gave the Vietminh training so they could interdict the Japanese logistical lines that passed Vietnam to supply the Japanese forces in the Chinese war theater.

This was in contrast to China’s military cadres. Mao like Deng Xioping, Zhou Enlai, Chu Teh and Lin Biao graduated from the Soviet sponsored, Whampoa Military College during the Koumintang-CCP Alliance and participated in the Northern Expedition, a war to unify China by destroying the northern warlords who each established armed independent regimes with their own government, currency and army.

In his college years, Giap became an activist and was recruited to a nationalist youth organization founded by Ho Chi Minh. He joined Ho Chi Minh in China in May 1940, during a French crackdown against nationalists in Hanoi.

Ho Chi Minh did not immediately organize the Workers Party of Vietnam. Working in China for the Comintern, Ho organized a nationalist youth organization that took roots in Vietnam the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League, (Thanh nien) in 1925 as a preparatory organization targeting the youth who in turn would organize among the workers and peasants. In 1941, Ho returned from China to established the “League for the Independence of Vietnam” or Vietminh, a broad nationalist organization for independence. In 1942, Giap with 40 cadres took charge of organizing the tribesmen of the northern mountains of North Vietnam.

Major Contributions of Vo Nguyen Giap

With a core of 40 cadres, Giap slipped through Vietnam in 1942 and carried out organizing work among primitive cultural minorities in the northern mountains of Vietnam. This work was important in securing a strategic rear that would play an important role in their struggle, but presented a big challenge. It required patience and ingenuity because the tribal people of the northern mountains spoke different dialects which Giap did not understand and had no national consciousness.

From the very beginning it was clear to Ho Chi Minh and Giap that the first order of business in waging a revolution for national liberation in Vietnam was to arouse and organize the people nationwide before anything else.

In this period, they put stress in organizing and propaganda work nationwide under a united front nationalist organization for independence, the Vietminh. Armed struggle was not to be employed as the main form of struggle in this period. It was to be limited and calibrated to protect organizing work. Self Defense Units were formed within mass organizations to protect its leaders and the mass organization in their semi-legal activities. Leaders had to be protected in their activities for their neutralization would have serious organizational consequences on the life of mass organizations. Protest rallies and mass actions had to be protected from violent dispersals, agent provocateurs and their mass leaders had to be shielded from being arrested.

It was only in 1943, that Vietnamese Workers Party decided that it was a time to start the armed struggle against the Japanese occupiers. The first small unit was formed by mid-1944.

Uniting the Revolutionary Forces in Vietnam

The Vietnamese communist movement had been split into three groups when Ho was in China. These parties engaged in never ending polemics. Ho and Giap refrained from this divisive undertaking when they arrived in Vietnam to organize. At that time their forces were concentrated in the North while the two other parties held Central and Southern Vietnam respectively.

Ho and Giap demonstrated the first quality of revolutionary leaders: they unite and not divide the progressive and revolutionary forces.

The main contradiction confronting the Vietnamese people, was the issue of French colonialism (the Vichy government) who had collaborated with the Japanese occupation forces.

Ho established the Vietminh the unifying organization for all parties, associations and organizations. All socialist and progressive forces in Vietnam united under this banner against French colonialism and the aspirations for national independence.

Having been cut off from the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, Ho and Giap opened all possibilities to build a real fighting revolutionary army.

They made contact with the US to help them strengthen the Vietminh militarily during the Anti-Japanese War. They hid the Marxist Leninist character of their party and projecting the Vietminh aspirations for independence. After their training and receiving a shipment of arms and ammunition from the OSS, the duo requested the OSS personnel to stay for a while Ho and Giap convened a meeting of reunification with all Marxists groups in Indochina. The other groups seeing the OSS personnel stationed near the meeting place became convinced that Ho’s group had the full backing of the allied powers with an initial shipment of arms. This easily convinced them to unite under its leadership.

In a 1969 interview Giap had this to say about the episode:

In 1945, some Americans parachuted into our war zone [for a] meeting [with] our late President Ho Chi Minh. ... Back then, President Roosevelt's attitude was that the U.S. did not want to see events like the war with France coming back to Indochina, but later this attitude was changed. After the August Revolution in 1945, the relationship between Vietnam and the U.S. could have been good, and we wished that it had been good.

The Thesis for a Political-Military Strategy

Can a nation with a small population, a small area and a backward agricultural economy defeat much a bigger and stronger colonial aggressor?

This was the first question Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap settled when they embarked on an armed resistance against foreign aggressors that oppressed and exploited their nation.

Giap believed they could and bared a universal principle that was relevant to the colonized peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.

“…in our time, a people even though small, without vast territory, large population or developed economy, but united and determined, having a correct revolutionary line, creatively applying Marxist-Leninist principle of nation-wide uprising and people’s war to their specific conditions and enjoying the assistance of the socialist camp and progressive mankind, are fully capable of overcoming a much bigger and stronger aggressors, including the leading imperialist power, the United States. “

To unite the Vietnamese people, the basic alliance of workers and peasants had to be forged as its basic core and its orientation based on Marxist-Leninist principles.

Giap bared the secret that governed the “law of revolutionary violence” necessary to defeat powerful adversaries which is the “combination of political and armed forces, of political struggle and armed insurrection and revolutionary war.” He advocated the use of “all forms of struggle, combining attacks and uprisings, applying a strategy of offensive in all three strategic areas (highlands, the plains and urban areas, with a view of destroying the enemy, seizing and maintaining power, overthrowing the rule of colonialism and its lackeys, defeating the aggressive war of imperialism.”

Mastering the Art of Insurrection:

Vietnam’s August Revolution

The second major brilliance of Ho and Giap was their leadership in winning the August Revolution.

As war was closing to an end, a famine struck Vietnam killing more than 1 million of its population. The people wanted to rise up against the foreign powers in Vietnam: the Nazi collaborationist, Vichy colonial government and the Japanese forces. This created a revolutionary situation. But the core of the revolutionary forces were small. The Indochinese Communist Party according to Kolko had no more than 2,000 members in 1944, while the Vietminh guerillas had only 5,000 armed guerrillas. But the Vietminh had a large following and influence running to millions in the whole of Vietnam.

At the core of these forces were military cadres who had been trained armed and equipped by the Office of the Strategic Services (OSS).

The Japanese occupying forces had imprisoned officials of the Vichy French colonial government fearing they would switch allegiance with the developments in Europe. But after nuclear bombs were dropped in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan announced its intention to surrender, and in Vietnam the Japanese forces were awaiting the forces of the Koumintang and Great Britain to enter where they would formally surrender.

Ho and Giap amidst the chaotic and confusing situation saw this as a strategic moment to achieve independence.

Before the allied forces could enter Vietnam, they negotiated with the Japanese forces in Vietnam. The Japanese forces agreed to surrender their 25,000 weapons that included artillery and tanks to the Vietminh instead of the allies, persuaded by the fact that the Vietminh would give the allied forces a major headache.

With this secret agreement, the Vietminh launched a bloodless insurrection. Millions of Vietnamese all over Vietnam took over public buildings in most cases without any resistance. The Revolution took only 16 days (Aug. 14-30). Giap’s guerrilla force gave symbolic military actions and the surrendered arms from Japan gave them the opportunity to immediately form a full fledged army.

On Sept. 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh formally proclaimed independence the same day that Macarthur met the Japanese leadership and accepted Japan’s surrender aboard the US Battleship, USS Missouri.