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

under the watchful eye of Giap, the Vietminh were busily engaged in building up their military and political infrastructure. Meanwhile, Valluy contented himself with ousting the Vietminh from the towns and cities in the most populous regions of Tonkin—the Red River Delta and the coastal lowlands—and gradually re-establishing administrative control in the villages. This was called pacification. In the south, guerrilla fighting was the order of the day and continued to be so with a few exceptions throughout the war. The Vietminh never had the strength there to launch sustained campaigns by regulars.
    Pacification operations in Tonkin were conducted by the “oil slick” method, meaning that French control extended outward from a central point, usually a city or a large town, in an irregular pattern. On a map, the areas of French control appeared something like an oil slick gradually expanding on top of the sea over time. Pacification operations worked as follows: Mobile units would clear out Communists from a particular district, set up small defensive posts, then move on and repeat the process inadjoining areas, leaving indigenous (and notoriously unreliable) Vietnamese troops under French control to man the district on a permanent basis.
    The core purpose of pacification was to deny the Vietminh guerrillas and propaganda teams access to their critical sources of strength: the people and their provisions, particularly rice. As Mao famously put it, the “fish had to be kept out of the sea.” The guerrillas had to be kept out of villages, away from the people.
    In Cochinchina, French pacification efforts worked very well, as Giap’s forces were weak and had only small sanctuaries from which to mount operations. In Tonkin and northern Annam, it was another story entirely. French gains were far more limited, and even those gains proved tenuous. Inside the Red River Delta and along the central coast, the nights belonged to the Vietminh, as cadres and soldiers alike crept silently into the village centers and began to do their proselytizing and recruiting. In this political work, they had been trained up to the highest standard, and they achieved impressive results. The percentage of territory under Vietminh control expanded slowly but steadily between 1947 and 1950, in large part due to the ever-growing number of guerrillas and political cadres coming down from the Viet Bac, many of whom had just finished their training in southern China.
    France’s response to the insurgency, much like that of the Americans who came after them, suggests a general failure among those at the highest levels of command to grasp the
political dynamics
of the war and the nature of the adversary. By 1948, the French, aware of their lack of popularity and legitimacy in the eyes of the population, had cobbled together an “independent and free” government under the former Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai. The old emperor was presented in French press releases and briefings as a legitimate alternative to the Vietminh. True, Bao Dai was an ardent patriot. But he had little of the common touch. He was dissolute, a playboy who loved wine, women, and the luxuries of Parisian life. His interest in the welfare of the peasantry of Vietnam was entirely perfunctory. Thus, the “state” of Vietnam, its seat of government in Saigon, had precious little legitimacy in the eyes of the population, or indeed, in the eyes of the world powers.
    The French colonial administration itself made no serious effort to address the needs of the peasantry, or to provide them with some measure of political participation in their own affairs. Indeed, the people were exploited by French officers, abused by enlisted soldiers, and often madeto feel like prisoners in their own villages. The best the ordinary peasant could hope for from the French colonial government, its civil or military arm, was indifference. The French reaction to advocates of political reform and progressive