BATTLE OF INDO-CHINA: Comrade Van

BATTLE OF INDOCHINA

One day in 1946 a French officer in Hanoi saw a moon-faced little Indo-Chinese looking at a book the Frenchman had left on his desk. “May I borrow the book?” the little man asked politely. “As soon as I have finished reading it myself,” the Frenchman replied. The book: War in the Rear of the Enemy.

Last week the little man who had asked for the book (and who got another copy later) was somewhere in the jungle-clad mountains northwest of Hanoi directing the operations of a Communist guerrilla army which had just delivered a smashing attack on the French rear and was now withdrawing before French counterattacks. His name: General Vo Nguyen Giap (pronounced Yap). Since the husky voice of Communist Leader Ho Chi Minh disappeared from the Viet Minh propaganda radio two years ago, the French have come more & more to believe that Giap is their chief antagonist in Indo-China.

Rumors continue to circulate that the 60-year-old Ho is dead as a result of 1) tuberculosis, 2) an assassin’s bullet, 3) a French bombing raid, 4) a Red purge. The announcers who speak in Ho’s name are impostors.

Jails & Joining. The existence of Giap is all too evident: as commander of 100,000 Communist regulars and 200,000 Viet Minh partisans, he has in six years 1) tied down 200,000 French Union troops, killing or capturing 30,000, including 1,124 officers, 2) cost the French $6 billion and the U.S., $2 billion in military aid.

General Giap is a frail little man whose dark, bulging eyes burn with fanaticism. He was born in Annam 40 years ago. His entire family is believed to have lost their lives in the struggle for national independence. When 18, Giap was jailed by the French for a few months and then allowed to study at the top French academy in Hanoi, where he took a doctorate in political economy. A teacher remembers him as: “passionate and sentimental.” Somewhere along the line he got a Marxist education too. When the Popular Front brought left-wing parties together in 1936-39, he played along with the Socialists, but as soon as war came, he skipped across the border into South China to join the Communist Party.

Death Means Nothing. World War II brought a Japanese occupation to Indo-China, but left the (Vichy) French with a few threads of authority. Under the name of Comrade Van, Giap became Ho Chi Minh’s right-hand man and organized a Communist underground army of liberation (i.e., liberation from both Japanese and French). In Hanoi, the French threw his wife into jail, with a sentence of 15 years, and there she died. When Giap led his “liberation” troops into the valley of Dinh Ca in 1944, his merciless liquidation of government officials and wealthy farmers gave cruel force to his oft-repeated slogan: “Every minute 100,000 men die all over the world—the life and death of human beings means nothing.”

A cynic in action, Giap collaborated with the French when in 1945 they were driven into the mountains by the Japanese, but after Hiroshima he made overtures to the Japanese from whom he hoped to get arms. The Japanese paid off Giap’s brief collaboration by letting his forces into Hanoi ahead of the Allies at surrender time. His presence there forced the Allies to deal with him: they settled for a nationalist coalition government with Ho Chi Minh as President and Giap as Defense Minister and Secretary of State.

Force of Arms. To get British, Japanese and Chinese Nationalist troops out of Indo-China as soon as possible, Ho and Giap agreed to have the French army back. A French officer, whose family had been killed by the Germans during the occupation of France, expressed the hope that French and Indo-Chinese would now work together. Said Giap: “I hope so, but you of all people should know what my feelings are.” The next day he delivered a fiery speech: “The revolution will triumph only by force of arms.” Nine months later his guerrillas tried to seize Hanoi, but the French, dragging their soldiers from the cinemas and cafes, gave battle, drove Ho, Giap and his guerrillas into the mountains. It was the start of the war.

French officers, who have been pitting their brains against Giap ever since, attribute his military talent to hard work, and constant study of geography and history. French Commanding General Raoul Salan says that Ho Chi Minh taught Giap the technique of guerrilla warfare, but that Giap has also been strongly influenced by British Colonel T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Giap masterminds his operations from secret headquarters 20 to 50 miles behind the fighting. When he goes up to the front he exchanges his four-star steel helmet for civilian clothes. After a military success, he distributes decorations freely and issues hortatory communiques: “Exterminate the colonials! Liquidate the traitors,” etc. His first big success was the capture of a string of French outposts on the China border in 1950 and the defeat of a 4,000-man French column south of Caobang. His big failure was his tangle with the late Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny at Vinhyen, where in open country De Lattre cut up his forces with napalm and artillery. Defeated again by De Lattre at Dongtrieu and the Day River, Giap decided to return to guerrilla tactics and terrorism in the rear.

Implacable Enemy. Last week, as the French advanced in two strong columns northwest of Hanoi, the Communists appeared to melt away into the airproof jungles and vast mountain ranges, leaving behind them only scorched earth. By not exposing his forces to a decisive battle, and with a constant stream of military supplies coming in from Red China, General Giap’s strategy was obvious: to bleed the French white. In Paris last week, where talk of abandoning Indo-China has become more insistent, a French officer gave a fatalistic appreciation of Giap: “An implacable enemy . . . he will follow to the end his dream and his destiny.”