North Viet Nam: The Red Napoleon

(See Cover)

Strike to win, strike only when success is certain;

if it is not, then don’t strike.

—General Vo Nguyen Giap

The tangled jungle scrub of Cu Chi lies only 20 miles northwest of Saigon. For nearly two decades it has been the impregnable preserve of the Viet Cong —until one bright sunny morning when unexpected guests arrive. They are some 80 Armored Personnel Carriers of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division. Crashing through thickets, the APCs weave and crisscross, stitching the jungle with lethal, preplotted patterns of .50-cal. and M60 machine-gun fire. Grudgingly the Viet Cong give way, firing back carefully to conserve their slender hoard of ammunition.

The American attackers know no such frugality of fire. The APCs grind to a halt; there is a rumble from the rear; and volley after volley of 105-mm. shells whispers overhead to crash down among the enemy in an endless, earthshaking, invisible whiplash of steel. Then the U.S. warplanes arrive, diving just ahead of the APCs to rend the forest with their 20-mm. cannon and 2.75 rockets. The APCs move forward into the smoke, are stopped again by a pocket of fire. The U.S. commander barks into his radio. In response, five miles away a battery of huge 175-mm. guns elevates slowly, and systematically begins to destroy the remnant of resistance.

The APCs churn forward once more. In their wake comes a line of bulldozers. They level anything still standing. What was once a good-size jungle becomes a desert piled with brush. Occasionally, there is an enormous explosion as “the tunnel rats,” having excavated a Viet Cong burrow, blow it up. When it is all over, only the stench of cordite mingling with Cu Chi’s grey dust and the drifting blue smoke of bombs lingers over the desolation. Cu Chi will not soon harbor Viet Cong again, at least by day.

The Big Rear. Operation Kahuku, which cleared Cu Chi, was but one of some 60 major Allied search-and-destroy missions in the last 100 days. While the headlines were filled with South Viet Nam’s Buddhist-fueled political crisis, the Allies, running an average of 15 battalion-size-or-larger operations each week, have been methodically hunting down the enemy. From north of Hue to south of Saigon, from the Cambodian border in the Central Highlands to Binh Dinh on the South China Sea, spearheaded by the armor and artillery and airpower of the U.S., the Allies have been hitting the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese reinforcements where they live (see map), seizing enemy stockpiles of rice and salt and weapons. Even in the enemy redoubts where ground forces have not yet penetrated, the threat of the bombs from high-flying Guam-based B-52s, falling like rain from a silent sky, haunts the Communists’ sleep, keeps them on the move.

Last week U.S. officials disclosed that 16,000 Red troops had been killed in the first four months of 1966, nearly equal to the 19,000 that were infiltrated down the Ho Chi Minh trail from North Viet Nam in the same period. Down the trail must also come nearly all the ammunition to supply the Czech and Chinese weapons of the 30,000 North Vietnamese regulars now in the South. Whether by truck, oxcart, bicycles carrying up to 500 Ibs., elephant or pack, it is an increasingly perilous journey, taking three to four months at times, under daily U.S. bombing and strafing. Perhaps as much as 50% of the materiel intended for what Hanoi calls “the big front line” (as distinguished from “the big rear” in North Viet Nam) never reaches South Viet Nam, thanks to the relentless bombing of the route.

For the first time, Communist prisoners and defectors are reporting hunger as a problem in Red ranks. The Allies are capturing their rice hoards and denying them the rice harvest of the peasants. Defections under Saigon’s Chieu Hoi (open arms) amnesty program are running at a record 1,000 a month—and some 25% of them are officers. Above all, the massive infusion of U.S. troops, now some 275,000 strong, has taken the initiative away from the enemy. Not since the bloody battle of la Drang last November, when the U.S. 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) destroyed 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers, have Communist troops ventured out in regimental strength to do battle of their own choosing.

A Legend like Uncle. The relative quiescence of the Communists on the battlefield is less satisfying than it is annoying to U.S. commanders, who are spoiling for a fight they are confident they can win—and for an end to the suspense as to what the Reds will do next. The North Vietnamese eminence grise with the answer to that question is tiny, plump General Vo Nguyen Giap (pronounced Zhop), 55, Commander in Chief of the North Vietnamese army, Hanoi’s Defense Minister and Deputy Premier, who shares with China’s Mao Tse-tung a reputation as the world’s foremost practitioner of the dark art of insurgency warfare.

Giap earned his reputation with victory against the French in 1954, when he became the first modern commander to drive a white European nation out of Asia. Then he was largely unknown, except to his French adversaries, who dismissed him with St.-Cyr-bred contempt as a sometime schoolmaster who had been awarded his general’s stars by Communist bush politicians. But Giap’s native army defeated his far-better-equipped foe by entrapping a French force of 12,000 in the mountain fortress of Dienbienphu and liquidating it, thus destroying the will of the politicians back in France to fight on. It made Giap nearly as much of a legend throughout Viet Nam as Uncle Ho, and if Giap was underestimated by the French, he is possibly overstudied today.

Still, he is a rewarding study, for Giap is a general with a problem, and that problem is the deployment of U.S. troops with all their mobile force and firepower in South Viet Nam. Scarcely a year ago, Giap, as he looked southward, could see victory in his grasp. Both Phase 1 (grassroots political organization) and Phase 2 (guerrilla warfare, terrorism, sabotage) in Mao’s handbook of insurgency had long since been accomplished in South Viet Nam. Late in 1964, Giap apparently decided that the time had come for Phase 3—an escalation of the conflict into conventional war, attacking in large numbers for the kill. In preparation, he began to move the first North Vietnamese regular army units down the Ho Chi Minh trail to reinforce the Viet Cong soldiery.

The New War. The year 1965 was billed by the Communists as the year of victory, and it very nearly was. By May of last year the black-pajama-clad Viet Cong were roving the South with impunity. Giap’s forces owned the Central Highlands. South Viet Nam’s army was bloody, reeling and exhausted, its strategic reserve destroyed, and eleven of its maneuver battalions in need of complete rebuilding before they could fight again. To Giap, it seemed only a matter of time until Saigon was forced to the conference table, where he could dictate the terms: reunification and the Communist engorgement of South Viet Nam.

That time never came. In July 1965, President Johnson announced that the U.S. would come to South Viet Nam’s aid in full force. Within four months, in the swiftest mobilization of large forces in history, the U.S. deployed 100,000 men into position in Viet Nam some 8,000 miles away. American officers smoothly engineered the switch from their status as advisers to a native army to that of members of an American army in the field. The original concept of the use of American troops to guard enclaves of vital government real estate and plug the holes in Vietnamese defenses, reacting only when the Vietnamese had found and fixed the enemy, was soon expanded. The Americans were out on their own, looking for kills.

Giap, for his part, was unconvinced that U.S. intervention would be able to slow his momentum. In October, he launched an assault on the Special Forces border camp of Plei Me, 30 miles south of Pleiku, intended as the opening of a concerted drive to cut Viet Nam in half from the Cambodian border to the South China Sea. His technique was a carbon copy of past successes at the camps of Due Co near Pleiku and Dong Xoai, northeast of Saigon, earlier in the year: to attack an isolated camp and then ambush the South Vietnamese force charging to the camp’s rescue.

But at Plei Me, it was the newly arrived 1st Air Cavalry that came charging—and by rotors not roads. In the month-long battle that followed, Giap’s soldiers at first stood their ground and fought ferociously, sending the U.S. death toll up to 240 in one week, the highest of the war. But Communist losses were far higher, owing in large part to the 1st Air Cav’s helicoptered artillery, rocket-firing choppers and tactical air support. Giap’s men finally broke and ran, and the 1st Air Cav relentlessly pursued them in a campaign culminating in the battle of la Drang Valley, where the slaughter of 2,262 of his men was a hideous revelation to Giap of the new kind of war and enemy that he faced.

Speed & Surprise. North Viet Nam’s first major surprise was the 1st Air Cav’s ability to airlift its 105-mm. howitzers over trackless jungle and keep the guns supplied with shells. The division moved its guns 67 times during the campaign —and only once overland. Some 33,000 shells were fired, 6,500 alone during a single, intense 24-hour engagement. The 1st Air Cav’s battalions were shifted 40 times by helicopter, and 13,257 tons of supplies were airlifted to its men before the remnants of the Communist forces scuttled to safety in Cambodia. It was a stunning defeat for Giap’s forces. Thanks to the helicopter, the U.S. had found a way to overpower the guerrilla fighter with his own methods: speed and surprise.

Snow on the Volcano. Nothing in Giap’s experience or theoretical manual of strategy had prepared him for the quality or magnitude of the U.S. intervention. Though Vo, his family name, means “force,” and Giap, his given name, means “armor,” the architect of North Viet Nam’s army was born near the city of Vinh, the son of a bourgeois landowning family that had fallen into penury. By the time he was 14, he was a member of a clandestine, anti-French sect; four years later the French clapped him in jail for political agitation. It proved a fortuitous incarceration. Behind bars he met Fellow Militant Minh Thai, who became his first wife. And the French police commissure for Vinh took a liking to the brilliant, angry young Giap, got him out of prison, and sent him off to one of the best French schools in Indo-China. He won his baccalaureate, and for four years taught history at a lyceum in Hanoi.

Giap was an accomplished lecturer in French history who “could step to a blackboard and draw in the most minute detail every battle plan of Napoleon,” one of his former students recalls. A passionate ascetic who could veer abruptly from violent emotion to icy control, he was early dubbed “The volcano and the snow” by his associates. “We were all intrigued,” says one, “by his passion for Napoleon and the French Revolution. And we used to tease him when he railed against the French, by asking ‘Are you sure you don’t want to be Napoleon?’ ” Giap did, in his own way: he was already a member of the Communist Party.

When the party was banned in 1939, Giap fled to China. His wife stayed behind, was arrested by the French, and died in prison. Under the aegis of the Chinese Communists, the Viet Minh was founded, with Giap a 1941 charter member along with Ho Chi Minh. Ho ordered the little professor to specialize in military affairs, and the career of the Red Napoleon began. His first self-education was in guerrilla operations against the Japanese who then occupied Viet Nam. The OSS supplied Giap with American weapons to that end, but Giap was looking to the future: he cached most of them for use in the resumed struggle against the French. On Aug. 15, 1945, as the Japanese surrendered, he led his guerrillas into Hanoi and took over the city for Ho Chi Minh, and the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam was born.

When the French returned, Ho ordered Giap as Commander in Chief of the North Viet Nam army to meet General Jacques LeClerc at the airport. Giap flew into a towering rage, ranting that he would never shake hands with any Frenchman. Uncle Ho listened for a while and then said: “You have two hours before his plane arrives, so why don’t you go into the corner and cry your eyes out. But be at the airport.” Giap went. But such emotional outbursts led Ho to leave Giap at home when he went off to Fontainebleau to negotiate with the French. While Ho was away, Giap was virtual dictator, and he used the time with ruthless efficiency to execute hundreds of nationalist—but non-Communist—leaders. He had always been opposed to a negotiated peace with the French. When the Fontainebleau talks failed, Giap was delighted, and his eight-year war against Paris got under way.

He had already remodeled his guerrillas along Communist people’s army lines, with political commissars seeded through the ranks and political indoctrination as much a part of a soldier’s training as bayonetry. He had even recruited Japanese jungle-warfare instructors from the retreating enemy he had just fought, and had carefully collected every weapon the Japanese left behind. It took four years to get Phase 1 and Phase 2 going well enough to launch Phase 3—the first of his major offensives against the French forces.

Myth Enhancing. He scored some successes but more signal defeats, largely because he lacked artillery to compete with the French in set-piece conventional battles. After a stinging series of losses in 1951, Giap admitted that he had tried to push into Phase 3 too soon; he retreated into the hills and paddies to reassemble his forces. The chance for annihilation came at Dienbienphu, when the French, thinking Giap still had no heavy artillery, dropped paratroops into a valley, hoping to draw Giap into combat. But Giap had obtained over 100 American 105-mm. howitzers from the Red Chinese, carted them through the jungle and over the mountains, and pounded the French forces to pieces in the valley below. In fact, at Dienbienphu he annihilated only 4% of the French force in Viet Nam, but it was psychologically the end for the French. They were thoroughly fed up with the eight-year war that had cost them $10 billion and 172,000 dead or missing.

Afterward, Giap proudly wrote that “guerrilla warfare relies on the heroic spirit to triumph over modern weapons.” It is a myth-enhancing statement, but it does not quite fit the facts of his triumph over the French. In the decisive turning point at Dienbienphu, it was not the heroic spirit of Giap’s soldiers but their massive artillery in the hills that carried the day.

As he sits in his office in the buff-colored onetime French colonial-ministry building in Hanoi and contemplates his war maps, Vo Nguyen Giap today confronts a far more difficult situation. Unlike his ill-fated French predecessors, who were told to make do with the troops on hand, U.S. Commander William C. Westmoreland has been promised everything he needs to win the war—and has been getting it. Allied troops already outnumber Giap’s forces in the South by over 4 to 1, and there are more to come: an estimated 100,000 more U.S. fighting men to be added to the 275,000 who are now “in-country” by the end of this year. Until the U.S. buildup began last summer, Communist and Allied casualties had been rising at roughly equal rates. Then the ratio shifted dramatically, and ever since the Communists have been losing three to four soldiers for every Allied loss. In the new war that Giap confronts, it is his own men who are being gnawed, harassed, hounded and hunted by day and night. Such sanctuaries as Zone C and Zone D near Saigon, bases in the highlands, underground village bastions on the coastal plain—all are being hit for the first time in years, keeping Giap’s men off-base, off-balance and increasingly cut off from their supplies.

Who’s in Charge? Nor are his men any longer swimming comfortably in the seas of population spelled out by Mao Tse-tung as the necessary environment for guerrilla warfare. Whatever dubious benefits the Viet Cong might once have brought South Vietnamese villagers, now they bring, by their presence, bombs from the omnipresent fleet of 1,000 U.S. planes wheeling through the Viet Nam skies. As a result, in many a village the Viet Cong are no longer welcome, and some 900,000 villagers have fled V.C.-controlled areas. The Reds have been forced to step up taxation, rice levies and recruitment in areas they control, reaching down even to 14-year-olds to keep up their 3,500-men-a-month draftee rate in South Viet Nam. Once there was a kind of care free banditry to Viet Congmanship; increasingly, it is a grim way of life in which a village youth will very likely get killed. Increasingly, the Viet Cong are being forced to rely on terror and assassinations to keep their own village areas in line.

For the Viet Cong of the South, there are other problems. One of the biggest is the presence of the 30,000 North Vietnamese regulars that Giap has sent down the Ho Chi Minh trail in the past year. Regional distrust and dislike between northerners and southerners in Viet Nam is centuries old, and, says one expert in Saigon, “the southern Viet Cong have long been afraid of a Red Napoleon.” They now have one: half the main-force Viet Cong units not tied down to static defense are led by North Viet Nam officers, and there have been major seedings of Viet Cong into North Vietnamese regiments, most of which arrive under strength owing to disease, casualties and desertion from the long march south. More and more, Hanoi has turned the war into one primarily between the U.S. and North Viet Nam—and the Viet Cong, who were fighting for four years or more before the North Vietnamese arrived in force, resent it.

Unlike the fight against the French, whom he took on largely within what is now North Viet Nam, Giap today must wage war by remote control, with every foot of the long line of command under potential attack day and night. He must wield the most cumbersome logistical system since Hannibal brought his elephants over the Alps, winding down through the mountains and jungles of Laos and Cambodia. Captured diaries of infiltrators tell harrowing tales of the journey. Marchers carry 70-lb. packs up 40° slopes, cope with insects, snakes, mud, hunger, disease and even, occasionally, the attacks of wild animals. “Five of the men have died of malaria,” observed one diarist. “Food situation getting critical,” noted another, “will have to cut ration below 500 grams. The word tonight is that there is no rice stored at the next two stations.” And once Giap’s men arrive, he must keep them supplied by the same tortuous, 800-mile route. Every pair of 81-mm. mortar rounds fired by Giap’s men in the South represents a three-month hike down the trail by one man.

Guitars & Tennis Rackets. Unable to view or even get close to the battlefield itself (unlike Westmoreland, who tours his commands four times a week), Giap must rely on reports from his commanders in the field that he cannot check —which probably leads to a rosier picture of the war than is justified by facts. While Hanoi, thanks to the careful targeting of the U.S. bombers, as a population center is probably safer than any place in South Viet Nam today, its atmosphere is hardly conducive to clearheaded armchair generalship. Bomb shelters are everywhere: at 8-ft. intervals between sidewalks and curbs sit concrete, barrel-sized holes for individuals to jump into, pulling manhole covers atop them. Slit trenches deface Hanoi’s lovely leafy parks, where the flame trees last week were still in bloom, trunks neatly whitewashed.

Along the streets, under billboards depicting exploding American aircraft and vicious, monkey-faced American soldiers bayoneting pregnant women, flow two sorts of traffic: myriads of bicycles and camouflaged military trucks, Uncle Ho’s yellow star embellishing their radiators. Creaky old French trams still clatter by in trains of twos and threes punctually every ten minutes—unless stopped in their tracks, as happens ever more frequently when U.S. planes demolish a nearby power source.

In some ways, Hanoi is even prospering. A good rice crop after two mediocre ones has put more food in the shops, and people look well-fed. Uncle Ho’s austere example in private dress is losing emulation: Hanoi women are beginning to blossom in bright, gaily patterned blouses, and modest but earnest suits are replacing the peasant tunics of the men. “The State Store,” once an elegant French department store, offers secondhand violins, guitars, and there are tennis rackets, jerseys and soccer boots for the boys who still gambol under the Red River Bridge. But there are also shortages, and some inflation, notably in the price of fish, shrimp, fruit and vegetables.

The situation is far starker in the countryside. Hanoi and the port of Haiphong are islands surrounded by a sea of discriminate destruction as the U.S. Air Force and Navy jets hammer in ever larger sorties at North Viet Nam’s capacity to fuel the war in the South. From May to October of last year, the number of strikes increased 1000% , and after the bombing pause early this year, the number soared again, until Ho’s land is now receiving 1,500 times the amount of bombing as was the case just a year ago. The Air Force has destroyed more than 300 bridges in North Viet Nam and damaged 800 more; Ho’s highway system has been cut in more than 2,000 places; the two rail lines running northwest and northeast out of Hanoi have been splintered in more than 200 places.

That anything moves at all overland in the North is due to the continuous, primitive efforts of some 225,000 laborers conscripted into repair duty. But U.S. flyers have so interdicted and harassed the lines further to the South that lately, in desperation, the trucks are rolling again by day—and providing fat targets once again. Nearly 10% of Hanoi’s truck fleet of 15,000 has been destroyed since the first of the year. The nation’s major power plants are hit time and again, but only 20% of North Viet Nam’s power supply has been knocked out at any one time. The reason: the vast majority of generators are built into flood-control dams in the Red River valley, and dams and levees are still proscribed targets.

The measured use of American airpower is aimed at making it simply too costly for Giap to keep supplying the war effort in South Viet Nam. The U.S. military would like to increase the pressure, mine the port of Haiphong where some supplies come in, and hit the “source targets” of gasoline that keep the trucks running. So far, Defense Secretary McNamara and the White House are holding back. Their argument: the present balance of terror in the air war is sufficient, and most supplies come in overland anyway from China. Mining Haiphong would risk Russian and British ships that call, also civilian life, as would bombing the source targets. The Air Force would also like to hit Giap’s ammunition factories, but there are none, save for Haiphong, which is one big ammunition factory.

Propaganda Prisoner. For all the difficulties in his command and logistics, General Giap is still sending infiltrators down the trail, though the rate has dropped back to 3,500 a month from its peak of 7,000 last March. But what he will do with the force he has assembled in South Viet Nam remains the real question.

The best U.S. intelligence is that the Conqueror of Dienbienphu finds himself in a real dilemma. For one thing, he is the prisoner of his past tactics and a prisoner of the loneliness of the long distance away. Red-initiated battles are set-pieces, with every move plotted out in advance. Support areas are built up in advance with food, ammunition, medical supplies and, in some cases, even hospitals. Escape routes are hacked out, the terrain studied, the battle plan rehearsed in a sandbox. The Allies’ ubiquitous harassment has made such set-pieces all but impossible; if one part of the plan goes awry, the whole action must be called off because enemy communications—and Giap dogma—do not permit enough flexibility to work around the flaw.

Giap’s other nightmare is U.S. mobility—embodied in the helicopters of the 1st Air Cavalry, which has killed more of his men than any other U.S. unit. Helicopter squadrons are being added now to all U.S. infantry units in Viet Nam. That mobility and the omnipresent U.S. attack aircraft mean that battle almost always signifies horrendous losses these days, and for seven months Giap has prudently chosen not to engage his forces in strength. This has led some observers to wonder if he has any choice but to abandon the counteroffensive of Phase 3 in South Viet Nam.

But can Giap afford that, either? Having brought his twelve regiments down from the North with the promise that they were about to liberate South Viet Nam from the “neocolonialist U.S. aggressors,” Giap cannot for too long let them sit idle. Deserters already are reporting a declining faith in ultimate Red victory, which needs bolstering by massive intervention from North Viet Nam or Red China. Moreover, the arrival of the northerners has whetted the southern Viet Cong’s expectations of early victory. Not to fight now would hit Viet Cong morale hard, dampen revolutionary zeal, and heighten southern fears of betrayal by Hanoi.

So, sometime in the July and August monsoons, the U.S. expects Giap’s men to surface again in numbers to seek a series of “Dienbienphus”—dramatic victories over sizable U.S. units—in the hope of crushing U.S. determination in the same way France’s will was destroyed. If the American mood is hardly that of the French in 1954, Hanoi seems aware of the fact. It leaps on every antiwar demonstration, draft-card burning and Fulbright speech as indicative of a national defeatist psychology.

If Giap strikes, the most likely targets are the U.S. bases in the Central Highlands north of Saigon or the isolated Special Forces camps along the Cambodian border. The major U.S. units like the 1st Air Cav at An Khe are confident that they can handle anything Giap can throw up, but the Green Beret camps are indeed vulnerable. Even going after them, the Communists may be in for some nasty surprises. Six of the camps most likely to be attacked have been protectively “adopted” by F-4 Air Force squadrons at Cam Ranh Bay. Each squadron watches over one camp, and its pilots overfly it protectively when returning from their daily strikes elsewhere.

Spoiling Tactics. The monsoon offensive this year may well come off—but may end up being conducted by the U.S., not Giap. Last week in Kontum province north of Pleiku, the U.S. 101st Airborne struck into the heart of Giap country, where some 7,000 Communist troops are in hiding. They struck pay dirt, flushing an estimated two regiments of North Vietnamese regulars for some of the fiercest combat of the long war. “This is a battle at our instigation,” said a U.S. officer, “we call this the conducting of spoiling tactics—to hit the enemy before he hits you.”

Hit him the Airborne did. In five days of bloody battle, U.S. fighter-bombers flew hundreds of sorties on the North Vietnamese L-shaped bunkers and tunnels dug into a hill covered with bamboo thicket. B-52 bombers hit the Red supply areas ten miles behind their redoubt, and the Airborne’s artillery and mortars laid a curtain of steel down the hillside. Some U.S. units were hit hard by Giap’s “human wave” mass attack: Company Commander William Carpenter (see THE NATION) heroically called down napalm strikes on his own position when Communist troops overran it. But at week’s end the Airborne and Vietnamese forces had killed an estimated 700 North Vietnamese.

They may well have killed more than men, breaking up the rehearsal for one of the Red Napoleon’s coveted set-piece strikes. If so, as is happening with increasing regularity to Giap’s best-laid plans, another timetable must be destroyed, and all the meticulous, delicate structure of insurgency tactics be reassembled. It is General Vo Nguyen Giap’s own aphorism that he may only attack when success is certain. Even more than his rice and his bullets, that certitude is in scarce supply in the new war the men from the North must endure in South Viet Nam.