Free Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam by James A. Warren

engage in sustained conventional warfare.
    Truong Chinh, writing in
The Resistance Will Win
early in 1947, elaborated on the war strategy of the senior leadership, particularly on the thinking of Giap, who had co-authored with Truong Chinh a prominent book on the Vietnamese peasantry as a force in revolutionary politics. (Indeed, one finds passages in
The Resistance Will Win
that are virtually identical to Giap’s earlier writings.) Chinh embraced Mao’s doctrinal framework but took exception to his assertion that for protracted war to succeed, insurgents needed one vast sanctuary to develop regular forces and launch major multidivision (i.e., corps-level) campaigns. Vietnam was a small country, but its revolutionaries could compensate for its lack of terrain by developing a large number of small, isolated base areas through the kind of assiduous clandestine mobilization work that Giap’s guerrillas had been conducting within villages and districts since 1940.
    Mao believed that a successful insurgency could not rely on external developments or allies to win; revolutionaries ultimately had to build an army capable of defeating its adversary in conventional warfare using their own resources. Chinh joined Giap in believing that external factors, especially the growing strength of Communism in the world and the effect of prolonged military action on public opinion in France, could shape the direction of the war in all sorts of ways. Perhaps most significantly,
The Resistance Will Win
argued that in the end Vietminh military forces did not need to achieve clear superiority over French forces in order to achieve victory. Political factors within Vietnam and France, as well as international political trends, might very well result in French withdrawal. This could not be called a military victory in a conventional sense. But it would be a victory nonetheless, because it would mean that the war’s objective had been reached. 11
    During the next six years of the War of Resistance, Giap would further refine and adjust Mao’s theory of protracted war to reflect his reading of events on the battlefield, as well as the political and moral pressures at work on his own forces and those of the enemy. It is a remarkable tribute to Mao’s paradigm, as well as to Giap’s refinement of that paradigm, that the conflict, broadly speaking, followed the three-stage trajectory.
    The application of the Mao-Giap doctrine would have failed if Giap had been intimidated by the vast superiority of the military forces he confronted. What explains his audacity, his refusal to be daunted and discouraged? A speculative answer, which is really the best we can do withthe limited sources at hand, is that he saw the Revolution in almost religious terms and himself as the devoted apostle of Ho Chi Minh. He could brook no compromise and was always ready to die for the cause. A tireless exhorter and teacher as well as a general, he was also willing to give over the lives of his soldiers for the cause in ghastly numbers. He earned his reputation as a butcher, but he was a butcher who always believed that the ends of the Revolution justified horrendous casualties. After all, as Douglas Pike pointed out, Giap understood that people were his major weapon, not firepower. 12 And in war, one uses one’s weapons to maximum effect. Therefore, they are essentially expendable.
    Giap survived as the commander in chief of the PAVN by discerning with uncanny accuracy not only his own strengths and weaknesses, but also those of his adversary. For Giap, the three-stage model was no procrustean bed; it had to be applied to the war in Vietnam with confidence, discernment, and flexibility.
    THE WAR OF RESISTANCE: THE FIRST PHASE
    For the first nine months of the conflict, French operations were surprisingly restrained and cautious. FEF commander Valluy had only 40,000 troops at the outbreak of the war—too few in his view to undertake major offensives in the Viet Bac. There,