Embers of War (26 page)

The same sense comes through in Ho’s notebook of the trip, a fascinating account not initially meant for public release. There are entries on international developments that matter to him, including the declaration of independence in the Philippines early in July and the U.S. atomic tests at Bikini Atoll (but curiously not France’s evacuation of Syria and Lebanon, marking the effective end of her colonialist claims in the Middle East), and on the stakes in the negotiations. But it is his admiration for France and the French that leaves the strongest impression. He records that on June 30 he wanted to take a walk in Monceau Park at six o’clock in the morning, only to find the gate locked. When the guard learned that he was a foreigner who had recently arrived in France, he let him in without knowing Ho Chi Minh’s identity: “It is just a small anecdote but it is enough to show that the French, in France, are courteous and respectful of foreigners.” Another section, titled “The Beautiful Qualities of the French,” comments on their attachment to lofty principles such as liberty and fraternity and their passion for intellectual argument and debate. Of the generally welcoming reception given him, he writes that “it was not because I was the president of a nation that they behaved that way; they just naturally showed friendship toward us.”
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The question looms: Did Ho’s Paris sojourn in mid-1946 represent the great lost chance for a genuine and far-reaching accord, one that could have defused the growing crisis before it devolved into large-scale war, one that could have prevented thirty years of indescribably bloody and destructive war on the Indochinese peninsula? What if the French had really put Ho’s conciliatory words to the test? He was not staking out a maximalist position, after all—he was not demanding full and complete independence. He sought compromise and indicated a willingness—maybe even a desire—to maintain an association with France. The French could have retained every important commercial, cultural, and political tie, losing only the outer trappings of colonial rule. In the event, his hosts couldn’t bring themselves to explore the proposition, certainly not at the highest levels. The opportunity was missed, but it was never close to being seized. Instead, the failure of the Fontainebleau talks allowed hard-liners on both sides to dig in, rendering a compromise settlement more remote than ever.

As Ho Chi Minh departed this country he loved, he had no illusions: The war clouds were gathering fast.

CHAPTER 6
THE SPARK

I
T WOULD BE LATE OCTOBER 1946 BEFORE HO CHI MINH ARRIVED
back in Hanoi. For reasons that remain murky, he chose to travel home not by airplane but by a French ship whose leisurely passage from Toulon to Haiphong took several weeks.
¹
He was away more than four months, during which time Vo Nguyen Giap led the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and worked feverishly to prepare for war.

It was an awesome responsibility for the young Giap, but he proved equal to the task. Of medium height and with prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes, he had about him a reserved and unassuming air that masked a steely determination. Not yet thirty-five when Ho departed for France, he would become a profoundly important factor in the revolution’s success—a largely self-taught military commander who oversaw the forces that took on first the mighty French and then the even mightier Americans. Only Ho himself was more responsible for the ultimate success of the revolution. Over the years, Giap would make his share of mistakes on the battlefield, but his record as a logistician, strategist, and organizer is nevertheless extraordinary and ranks him with the finest military leaders of modern history—with Wellington, Grant, Lee, and Rommel. He proved spectacularly adept, in particular, at using the often-limited means at his disposal as well as the terrain, which he knew better than his adversaries because it was his own.

He was born into modest circumstances, on August 21, 1911, in Quang Binh province in the narrow waist of central Vietnam, near the seventeenth parallel. The name Giap meant “armor.” His father, who instilled in the young boy a respect for education, died in a French prison after being arrested for subversion; an older sister died the same way. These tragedies fostered in Giap a hatred of the French, and he was further inspired to fight colonial rule after reading, at age fourteen, Ho Chi Minh’s
French Colonialism on Trial
. In short order, Giap became active in nationalist politics, and the French Sûreté opened a file on him. Imprisoned briefly at age eighteen for organizing a student demonstration, Giap was given permission to enroll at the French-run Lycée Albert Sarraut in Hanoi. He proved an exceptionally able and diligent student and continued on for a law degree at the University of Hanoi, another French institution, refusing a scholarship to study for a doctorate in Paris.

During this time he married and, in order to support his wife and their young daughter, took a position teaching history at a private school in Hanoi. His lectures could be intoxicating. On the first day of class, one student recalled, Giap announced that he would depart from the usual curriculum, which covered France from 1789 to the mid-nineteenth century. “Look, there are a lot of books about this stuff,” he declared as he paced at the front of the room. “If you want to know about it, you can look it up. I’m going to tell you about two things—the French Revolution and Napoleon.” The students sat transfixed as Giap expounded on Marie Antoinette’s indulgences, on Robespierre’s life and Danton’s death, and—most of all—on Napoleon’s military campaigns. Right down to individual minor battles he would go, his admiration for Napoleon palpable, the students hanging on every word.
²

All the while he continued to immerse himself in nationalist literature, including that of Ho Chi Minh. In 1937, he joined the Indochinese Communist Party, and in 1938, he wrote a book,
The Question of National Liberation in Indochina
. ICP leaders took notice of this smart and educated comrade, who seemed to possess boundless energy. In 1940, they sent Giap and another young party member, Pham Van Dong, to China to make contact with Ho. (Giap’s wife wept as he bade her farewell; arrested soon thereafter by the French, she died in Hanoi’s Hoa Lo prison, though Giap would not learn the news for three years.) The encounter occurred in Kunming. At fifty, Ho was frail and hunched over, but Giap immediately noticed the piercing eyes. The three men launched into a lively discussion as they walked along the waterfront, and a bond was struck.
³
On Ho’s orders, Giap went to Yan’an, in northern China, to take part in military training with Mao Zedong’s Communist forces, then returned south in time to be present at the historic founding of the Viet Minh in the cave near Pac Bo in Cao Bang in May 1941.
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“Political action should precede military action,” Ho frequently proclaimed in these years. But armed struggle would surely come in the end, and preparations must be made. Giap was made head of the Military Committee for the Viet Minh’s General Directorate, in charge of building up and training the movement’s armed forces. On December 12, 1944, he presided over the creation of the National Liberation Army of Vietnam—thirty-one men and three women at the start, who between them reportedly had one light machine gun, seventeen modern rifles, two revolvers, and fourteen additional firearms of various kinds. Gradually the army’s ranks swelled, and it began to clear whole districts in the mountainous areas of Tonkin. By the time of the Japanese coup of 1945, the Viet Minh had a genuine base area.

Giap by now was one of Ho’s principal lieutenants, seldom leaving his side for long. He was there at Tan Trao in August 1945, when the party created the National Committee for the Liberation of Vietnam. Giap ran its military subgroup and signed the order to begin the general uprising. This committee effectively became the provisional government of the DRV on September 2, 1945. Giap served as minister of the interior in Ho’s first government and over time made himself more and more the indispensable man—capable and efficient and ruthless in equal measure. It surprised no one when he assumed leadership of the DRV during Ho’s sojourn to France.

Historian Stein Tønnesson notes an important difference between the deputy and the chief. Giap was the more cold and calculating of the two, a man who stirred awe and admiration in his underlings but not the kind of devotion Ho generated. When Giap speaks in his memoirs of the fabulously persuasive force of his master, Tønnesson remarks, he does not see the importance of Ho’s sincerity. “Uncle Ho had an extraordinary flair for detecting the thoughts and feelings of the enemy,” Giap writes. “With great shrewdness, he worked out a concrete treatment for each type and each individual.… Even his enemies, men who were notoriously anticommunist, showed respect for him. They seemed to lose some of their aggressiveness when they were in his presence.” Concludes Tønnesson: “In Giap’s rational brain, Ho’s charm is reduced to a tool.”
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II

SOMEHOW GIAP HAD TO DEVISE A STRATEGY FOR VICTORY. FRENCH
firepower would initially be vastly greater than his own, he knew, and he turned for guidance to his Yan’an experience and in particular to the theories of Mao Zedong, who in a succession of essays published in the late 1930s had maintained that successful revolutionary war strategy must pass through three phases: withdrawal, equilibrium, and general offensive. During the first phase, insurgents, facing a foe of superior power, avoid major engagements and rely on small-scale guerrilla tactics to sap the will and strength of government forces. They raid when possible and fall back when necessary. As the guerrillas build up their strength and achieve rough parity, they enter the second phase of the struggle, launching a mix of guerrilla and conventional operations to keep the enemy off balance. In this phase, a sense of futility begins to permeate the thinking of the government’s troops as casualties and costs mount, with no decision in sight. As the stalemate causes the enemy’s morale to plummet, the insurgents launch the general offensive, using conventional attacks with regular army units. Their goal in this third phase is to defeat government forces and exercise political control over territory.

Beginning already in the spring of 1946, Giap had sought to create two large military base areas from which to wage the first phase of the struggle. To these bases, he could withdraw his principal forces as necessary for rest and refitting, and recruit new troops to be trained. The more important of the two would be the area of northern Tonkin known as the Viet Bac, comprising the provinces of Bac Kan, Cao Bang, Lang Son, Ha Giang, Tuyen Quang, and Thai Nguyen. Giap and his aides knew this region well: It had been a main area of operations for them in 1944 and 1945. Its many limestone caves could be used as offices and workshops; its terrain—for the most part heavily forested and mountainous, and poorly suited to food growing—was relatively easy to defend; and its sparse population was broadly sympathetic to the Viet Minh cause. The second base area was more problematic, Giap acknowledged. This was the region made up of the provinces of Thanh Hoa, Nghe An, and Ha Tinh, to the south of the Red River Delta. It was far less well prepared, far more exposed to enemy attack. The attraction here was the greater proximity to Hanoi and Haiphong, and to the sea.
⁶

In other respects too, Vo Nguyen Giap used the spring and summer months to strengthen the Viet Minh position. In May the Chinese forces under Lu Han began to withdraw across the Sino-Vietnamese frontier. The French sought to move in quickly but were for the most part stymied. It was the wet season, and Giap’s troops were nimbler at navigating the difficult conditions and establishing control of the evacuated areas. Adept at sabotaging roads and bridges, they continually frustrated the road-bound French, delaying them long enough to take scores of important towns and villages out of play. Inevitably, there were military clashes. At Bac Ninh, a village nineteen miles northwest of Hanoi, for example, a Viet Minh unit’s ambush of a French truck convoy on August 4 led to a fierce nine-hour battle involving machine guns, mortars, and grenades. Casualties were heavy on both sides, with the French suffering 12 men killed and 41 wounded. Tensions rose.
⁷

Meanwhile, those rival nationalist groups that had depended on Chinese support—notably the VNQDD and Dai Viet—now found themselves squeezed by both the Viet Minh and the French. Giap, seizing the opportunity, used scattered guerrilla outbreaks as an excuse to mercilessly crush these groups, often with French blessing. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of non-Communist rivals were killed. More and more the Viet Minh, who had previously had genuine legitimacy in calling themselves a broad-based nationalist front, was synonymous with the Communist movement. Northern Vietnam, recalled one Dai Viet member of this period, was being transformed into a police state. Many non-Communist Vietnamese suddenly felt squeezed: There seemed to be no real way of resisting Communism except by the unpalatable means of accepting French control or the formation of a government inspired by and beholden to the Paris master.
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All the while Giap sought to maintain the official cease-fire with the French. Notwithstanding periodic clashes that continued to occur in the early autumn, he still wanted to delay the outbreak of major hostilities. The cease-fire still held as Ho Chi Minh reentered Hanoi in late October, but neither he nor any other close observer could mistake the heightening animosity. Both sides girded for war. In the north a DRV government continued to sit in Hanoi, and the Viet Minh held effective control in much of Tonkin and northern Annam, while the French, though they had occupation forces in Hanoi, Haiphong, and other garrisons in the north, still sought a toehold. In many northern municipalities, French-language shop and street signs were replaced by Vietnamese ones. (The few exceptions were, interestingly, in English, such as the large sign for a “Pork Butcher Specialist” that hung in a window on a busy Hanoi street.) In the south, meanwhile, France had solidified her hold on major urban areas, and in Saigon there now operated a French-installed government that showed some semblance of authority, at least intermittently. In the countryside of Cochin China, however, this government had minimal power, and French military control generally extended no farther than the rifle range of the units on patrol.
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