Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (27 page)

Pacification has if anything gone backward. As compared with two, or four, years ago, enemy full-time regional forces and part-time guerrilla forces are larger; attacks, terrorism and sabotage have increased in scope and intensity; more railroads are closed and highways cut; the rice crop . . . is smaller; we control little, if any more of the population [than before]. . . . In essence, we find ourselves no better [off], and if anything, worse off.
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While Thanh waged war in the South, incurring frightful losses, Giap integrated Soviet and Chinese artillery, armor, and communications specialists into his army’s divisions in the North. He supervised the construction
of a vast array of new training camps, the writing of new military doctrines, and the curricula for specialist schools.

The development of military power in the North would have mattered little if that power, in the form of modern PAVN regiments and divisions, had not been able to penetrate the South. It is in this context that Giap’s work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the mid-1960s can be seen as one of his most important accomplishments. It was a stunning organizational effort. With the help of Soviet and Chinese engineers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese workers, many of them women, the trail became, in the words of historian Richard Stevens, “a massive labyrinth of hundreds of paths, roads, rivers, streams, caves and underground tunnels.”
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Despite numerous US/ARVN ground operations to cut the trail in Laos, and gradually more intensive and sophisticated air interdiction attacks, the flow of PAVN units and supplies increased steadily from 1965 through 1970, when an estimated 8,000 PAVNs and 10,000 tons of supplies arrived in South Vietnam
each month.
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Indeed, the trail, and the battles that swirled all around it, formed the fulcrum of the entire war. “Forged by man in the face of a hostile, unexplored nature,” writes historian John Prados, “the Trail became a true lifeline.”
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According to postwar accounts published by Hanoi long after the end of the war, the trail consisted of 12,000 miles of road—five main roads, twenty-nine branch roads, and hundreds of cutoffs and passes. About one million soldiers made the trip from the North in the course of the fighting. Perhaps 50,000 PAVN troops were deployed to defend the Revolution’s main supply line by 1968. Maintenance crews and bomb-disposal specialists defused 56,750 unexploded bombs and took 1,196 prisoners in the process. “By any standard of human endeavor,” writes Prados, “what happened on the Ho Chi Minh Trail must rank high among the works of men and women.”
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As Giap’s forces grew stronger in the North, signs of chaos and contradictions within what Giap called “the enemy camp” slowly but surely began to surface. He had predicted as much. The Saigon regime and its army began to lose what little respect they enjoyed among the populace of South Vietnam as the Americans assumed the burden of the fighting and the leadership of the conflict. South Vietnamese political culture, always factious and governed by byzantine familial and feudal relationships, was destabilized rather than strengthened by massive American intervention. Huge quantities of American consumer goods and development funds
earmarked for rural development programs were siphoned off by the urban elite that dominated the ARVN officer corps and the GVN administration. These same officers and officials refused to investigate corruption because they were its prime beneficiaries. The South Vietnamese charged with executing pacification programs in the nation’s various provinces and districts, writes historian Marc Jason Gilbert,

were college educated urbanites who often exhibited the worst characteristics of Vietnamese feudal elitism when addressing their overwhelmingly poor, illiterate, and rural rank and file soldiers and the masses of farmers from which the latter were recruited. The distribution of military, police, provincial and district assignments according to political and financial criteria of familial or feudal obligation not only impeded the government effort to defeat the Viet Cong [the PLAF] but also . . . condoned counterproductive behavior, from the taking of bribes to petty harassment for personal gain. These inequities turned the government’s officials into living propaganda for the Viet Cong.
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THE DMZ WAR

In July 1966 Hanoi initiated a bloody campaign in a theater where Giap’s main forces were fully equipped with modern Soviet and Chinese heavy weapons, including tanks: the DMZ. Several PAVN regiments infiltrated Quang Tri and Thua Thien Provinces, South Vietnam’s northernmost provinces. Here PAVN forces enjoyed the advantages of sanctuary and superior numbers against the United States Marines. The 324B PAVN Division fought a series of intense, bitter engagements from July through October, when the Marines finally drove them back into North Vietnam with heavy casualties, but the 324B was quickly rebuilt for even more extensive combat against a string of Marine strongpoints built across the DMZ from Khe Sanh, a few miles east of the Laotian border to Gio Linh near the eastern coast.

Beginning in February 1967 the PAVN conducted several World War I–style conventional sieges against such Marine bases as Con Thien, forcing Westmoreland to divert more and more of his limited maneuver battalions from the three military corps to the south of I Corps to the embattled Marines near the DMZ. The campaign in I Corps against the Marines fell outside of Thanh’s area of command. Here it appears Giap planned
operations and commanded PAVN forces directly. In April the American Marines beat back sustained assaults against hill positions protecting their base at Khe Sanh. Both sides took extremely heavy casualties. MACV began to suspect Giap was planning either another Dien Bien Phu against that base, or perhaps a full-blown invasion of South Vietnam’s northernmost provinces with a view to seizing several provinces all of a piece. Accordingly, Westmoreland ordered a reluctant Marine command to build a continuous line of strongpoints, mine fields, and sensors just below the DMZ across the entire width of South Vietnam, the “McNamara Line,” to discourage major PAVN offensives and cut down on infiltration. General Lewis Walt, commander of the Marines, objected strenuously to the plan. Walt had long favored the “ink blot” or “oilslick” strategy of gradually expanding enclaves rather than a search-and-destroy strategy, or a static defense of the entire DMZ.

As it happened, the McNamara Line project soon proved an exercise in futility and was abandoned well before completion. It failed to halt infiltration across the DMZ. Several company-size Marine patrols protecting the construction workers were badly mauled by superior PAVN forces, and the Marines and Seabees building the fortifications were often forced to work under punishing PAVN artillery bombardment.

THE IRON TRIANGLE AND THE HIGHLANDS BATTLES

While the Marines were battling regular PAVN units, the US Army launched its largest operations to date against the NLF stronghold north and northwest of Saigon—in the Iron Triangle and War Zone D. In Operation Cedar Falls (January 1967), 30,000 US and ARVN troops swept into the Iron Triangle. US forces uncovered several large supply depots and tunnel complexes. Where these were found, the civilian population was removed en masse, and Agent Orange was sprayed all across the area of operations to destroy the forests, thereby denying the Communists cover should they attempt to return. Cedar Falls was declared a victory by Westmoreland. Most historians (wisely) disagree. In fact, Giap had ordered the vast majority of the Communist forces there to retreat to Cambodia. The elusive PLAF units that remained sustained only light casualties. Within a few months, the PLAF had returned to the Iron Triangle and rebuilt its base of operations to threaten Saigon. The results were essentially the same in Operation
Junction City, mounted later in 1967 against the Communist forces in War Zone C.

In November 1967, two months after a public opinion poll showed that for the first time more Americans opposed the war than supported it, Giap launched another offensive in the Central Highlands. Again he drew off US forces from fighting the PLAF units operating in the populous coastal areas, where the fight for hearts and minds was being waged, and lost, by the United States. Giap’s troops isolated and nearly succeeded in annihilating the American garrison at Dak To. In an effort to open the main road to Dak To, the Americans had to root out well-dug-in PAVN units on Hill 875 in a battle that became a kind of symbol of the futility of Westmoreland’s strategy among American grunts and, of course, an increasingly skeptical American public.

For several days the PAVN units held out against repeated ground assaults. After intensive air strikes, including a costly bombardment of American infantry units by the US air force—friendly fire was a chronic problem for the United States in Vietnam—the two PAVN regiments defending the hill slipped away at night into sanctuaries in Cambodia. Almost 300 American soldiers died for a piece of ground that was for all intents and purposes strategically irrelevant.
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The two PAVN regiments engaged in combat were found to be refitted and engaged in operations in the Highlands several months later. These sorts of engagements hardly buttressed lagging support for the war among the American people. Indeed, they seemed to deepen the feeling of exhaustion, even despair, over the war. But their effect on Hanoi, on the Communist-controlled population, was negligible. In fact, information about lost engagements and horrific casualties was suppressed from the population and, officially at least, within the PAVN.

PAVN TACTICS AND CULTURE

While US Army and Marine units unquestionably inflicted very heavy casualties on the increasing numbers of regular force units in 1966 and 1967 and almost always defeated Giap’s forces in combat in mobile operations, the PAVN’s “hit, run, hide” style of operation frustrated Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy strategy, limiting its effectiveness and preventing the destruction of entire Communist units that was its core aim.

As Giap initiated mobile and conventional warfare in selective theaters, the guerrilla war remained by far the dominant form of combat in the war in general. Throughout the entire period of escalation, thousands of small-unit actions by guerrilla units, both companies and platoons, proved enormously frustrating to American infantrymen. Guerrilla tactics are largely timeless, and we have discussed them at length earlier in the book. Suffice it to say here that PLAF guerrillas across South Vietnam, like their Vietminh predecessors, were masters of the tactical doctrine that has been nicely summarized as “four fast, one slow.” What this came down to in thousands of actions from the Cau Mau Peninsula in the Mekong Delta to the DMZ was “fast advance, fast assault, fast clearance, and fast withdrawal—all based on slow preparation” of the attack.
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As the American soldier patrolled week after week, month after month in a difficult climate and typically hostile territory, encountering booby traps and an elusive enemy, morale problems inevitably set in on a major scale. For all their bravery and skill, the US forces were unsuccessful in uprooting the Communist infrastructure in Vietnam. PAVN headquarters were located underground in vast tunnel complexes. The vast majority of these complexes survived numerous attempts at destruction. Nor did American or ARVN units inflict fatal damage on the Communist guerrillas
as a whole,
even granting their success by the criterion of “the body count.” Giap’s war against the Americans, when all is said and done, was a small-unit war supported by big-unit operations. As military analyst Thomas Thayer writes, most Communist actions against Allied forces

took the form of standoff attacks, harassment and terrorism which did not involve direct contact between their ground forces and those of the allies. The communist ground assaults where their troops came into contact with allied forces accounted for less than five percent of the total actions during 1965–1972. More than 95 percent of those assaults were attacks by communist units smaller than a battalion. Incessant small unit actions truly was [
sic
] the name of their game.
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What were the distinguishing characteristics of the PAVN soldier and the culture in which he operated? The typical regular soldier who made his way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail was particularly well trained in concealment and night operations. He was disciplined and tenacious. He traveled light. He had to, for the life of a PAVN soldier was a life of constant
movement, of setting up camps and fortifications in one place, only to rest briefly before moving on and repeating the process time and time again. By design, PAVN units marched endlessly and fought rarely. Like the guerrillas, the main-force units benefited greatly from superior ground intelligence, often obtained from operatives who served within Saigon’s armed forces, or from sympathetic civilians in close contact with American units working as cooks, in maintenance, delivery, and laundry service.

In preparing his campaigns and operations against the Americans, Giap had to come up with creative solutions to logistical and tactical problems that were far more challenging than what he had encountered against the French—and those had been formidable. American infantry soldiers and Marines developed a great respect for the caliber of their adversaries in the field. Former US Senator James Webb of Virginia, a highly decorated company commander and battalion intelligence officer with the fabled Fifth Marine Regiment, saw heavy combat in I Corps. He describes his adversaries as

good soldiers. . . . The NVA [North Vietnamese Army] had great fire discipline and good marksmanship skills. They built excellent fortifications, incredibly impressive trenches and emplacements. They used a “grab and hold” tactic: Their ideal scenario was to wait until we were so close to them that we couldn’t use supporting fires for fear of hitting our own men. That required tremendous fire discipline on their part—to hold off until we were so close. They were able to spring very effective and sizeable daytime ambushes in the trenches and tree lines adjacent to wide rice paddies. . . . When the NVA could control the terrain or when we stayed too long in one spot they were deadly; when we could use maneuver and fire support again, we did a number on them.
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