Võ Nguyên Giáp was born in 1911 or 1912 in An Xá (Vietnam). He was a Vietnamese general during the Vietnam War and the Indochina War, winner of the Battle of Ðiện Biên Phủ.
At its simplest and shortest, General Vo Nguyên Giap entered military history and the military and strategic studies of political science during his lifetime, admired by his loyal friends and enemies, including French General Raoul Salan and American General William Westmoreland. Even after the unconditional capitulation of the French garrison of Ðiện Biên Phủ in May 1954, the French refused for a long time to confer the title of "general" on Võ Nguyên Giáp, the latter having not done any military academy and even less the School Military of Paris. He learned to make war by making it. A great intellectual, he blocked the relief "Xenophon" operation for Ðiện Biên Phủ, knowing that Xenophon was the general who commanded the "Retreat of the Five Hundred" of Alexander's army after the tour of India and Persia.
Born in 1911 in An Xá, in the province of Quảng Bình, Võ Nguyên Giáp is the son of a mandarin. From the age of 14, he began to campaign against the French presence. He received a French high school education and participated in the communist movement from the 1930s. He studied history, law and economics in Huế, then in Hanoi. In this city, the Reunionese poet Raphaël Barquisseau is his teacher. In 1937, Giáp himself became a history teacher at the Thang-Long school in Hanoi and joined the Communist Party in 1939.
The following year, it was declared illegal. He fled to China, where he became the protege of Hồ Chí Minh, who made him a solid military aide. In 1944, he founded the Vietnamese People's Army (VPA). After the Japanese coup of March 9, 1945, he took advantage of the disappearance of the French administration to intensify the recruitment of members of the Viêt-minh
Võ Nguyên Giáp becomes minister, in charge of the security forces, of the first Hồ Chí Minh government, and as such organizes "purges". In 1946, he was appointed Minister of National Defense of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. It is he who directs the military actions against the French. He is notably the winner of the battle of Ðiện Biên Phủ (May 1954), which will cause the French departure and which will earn him recognition and great esteem from his people and his army.
In 1960, the Vietnam War broke out against the Vietnamese and the United States. A fine strategist, Giáp played a decisive role in the independence struggles of Vietnam. He directs the operations of the People's Army of Vietnam and forces the Americans to leave the South of the country. He won the victory during the fall of Saigon thanks in particular to the "Hồ Chí Minh campaign" of 1975 during which Giáp launched his famous slogans to the communist soldiers:"speed, audacity and sure victory".
General Giap who, thanks to his often unconventional tactics, was a military genius with the reputation of never having known defeat, it is necessary to distinguish here the legend from the reality, in 1972 his troops suffered a serious setback during the battle of Kontum , the man by whom Gl Giap was defeated was an American civilian strategist (former Lt Colonel expelled from the army for his critical positions against the Westmorland strategy) and named John Paul Vann, he was killed on June 9 1972 in the crash of his helicopter.
In 1975, he participated in the reunification of Vietnam. He resigned from the post of Minister of Defense in 1980. In 1982, he was expelled from the political bureau of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), officially for reasons of age and health, but there is talk of differences with the two strong men of Vietnam, the general secretary of the CPV Lê Duẩn and the chief of the commission of organization of the CPV, Lê Đức Thọ. However, he remained deputy prime minister until 1991 and was rehabilitated at the 6th congress of the PCV in 1986. Võ Nguyên Giáp now lives in retirement in Hanoi, but speaks regularly about the political evolution of his country.
The man and his work
Born in 1911 in An Xá (Quảng Bình province), the son of a Francophobic 2nd class mandarin, Võ Nguyên Giáp studied history, law and political economy in Huế, then in Hanoi. Meanwhile, arrested in 1930 for subversive activities, he was sentenced to three years in prison but released on parole soon after. He became a history teacher at the Thang-Long school in Hanoi in 1937. In 1939, a member of the Indochinese Communist Party, he fled to China when war was declared, which saw the banning of the party linked to the Soviet Union, itself an ally of the Nazis in the German-Soviet pact. A convinced Marxist, he bears a real hatred for capitalism, which he holds particularly responsible for the death of his first wife who died in prison in 1941 and his sister-in-law guillotined in Saigon by the French Colonial Administration. He took part in the Congress of Tsin-Ti which saw the creation of the Việt Minh, then was charged by Hồ Chí Minh with the organization of the guerrilla warfare against the Japanese in Indochina. After the Japanese coup of March 9, 1945, he took advantage of the disappearance of the French administration to intensify the recruitment of members of the Việt Minh (League for the Independence of Vietnam).
Appointed member of the liberation committee, he was minister, in charge of the security forces, of the first Hồ Chí Minh government. As such, he practices bloody purges in the non-communist nationalist ranks. Commissioner of the Armies in May 1946, Minister of the Armies, then Minister of National Defense of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in November 1946, he is most likely directly responsible for the outbreak of the bloody coup of December 19, 1946 in Hanoi, on the Tonkin and Annam which results in a failure.
Subsequently, he led military actions against the French during the First Indochina War. He finally won in May 1954 at the Battle of Ðiện Biên Phủ.
Minister of Defense of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, he led, as Commander-in-Chief, the Second Indochina War or Vietnam War against the United States and their allies of the O.T.A.S.E (Treaty of Southeast Asia), until the final victory of 1975 which saw the reunification of Vietnam.
He resigned from the post of Minister of Defense in 1980, was expelled from the political bureau of the Communist Party in 1982 while remaining Deputy Prime Minister until 1991. He is the author of "People's War - People's Army" published in 1967 with François Maspero.
On March 8, 1946, General Raoul Salan, commander of the French forces in northern Indochina, received at his request, in Hanoi, Võ Nguyên Giáp, whom he did not know directly. He comes to discuss the conditions of application, under the military aspect, of the Franco-Vietnamese convention signed on March 6th. These discussions lead, on April 3, to the signing of an agreement between Raoul Salan and Võ Nguyên Giáp. Raoul Salan saw Võ Nguyên Giáp again on April 7, 1946 in the morning, when the latter came to his home to offer a small lacquered screen for his wife (their daughter Dominique had been born three weeks earlier), and, in the evening, during a dinner with Hồ Chí Minh, during which the disputes relating to the application of the March Accords come to light. Behind the bloody deeds of the warlord, there was the courteous and delicate man.
During the Đà Lạt preparatory conference, from April 17 to May 11, 1946, Raoul Salan, head of the French military mission, had Võ Nguyên Giáp as his main interlocutor, with whom he established personal relations during the evenings following the official sessions. . Giáp would then have gone so far as to offer Raoul Salan the command of the troops of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Much later, US General William Westmoreland paid tribute to him in a book he wrote with the title simply "Võ Nguyên Giáp".
He saw him again in Hanoi the following May 16, during an informal dinner, before accompanying Hồ Chí Minh by air to the Fontainebleau conference with Phạm Văn Đồng, the diplomat, who had remained in Paris as a reserve.
When Raoul Salan returned to Indochina on May 19, 1947, the war was there and his implacable adversary was Võ Nguyên Giáp until May 28, 1953, the date of his return to France. In July 1984, at Val de Grâce, a Vietnamese diplomat came to greet the mortal remains of General Salan on behalf of General Võ Nguyên Giáp who held him in great esteem, as loyal adversaries.
Điện Biên Phủ. The historic meeting[edit]
Võ Nguyên Giáp was the commander-in-chief of the People's Army of Vietnam for thirty years and one of the main actors in the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ consulted numerous documents, both Vietnamese and Western, on this event. decisive in the Indochina War. Several published works affirm that Navarre, the commander-in-chief of the French expeditionary force, during Operation Castor, dropped its paratroopers on Ðiện Biên Phủ relying on intelligence which indicated the movement towards the northwest of units of the Vietnamese army having crossed the Da (Black River). For General Giáp, the occupation of Ðiện Biên Phủ during the winter and spring of 1953-1954 was intentional and succeeded "Operation Seagull" in the northern delta, which was to allow Navarre to have the hands free to be able to launch the Atlantean operation aimed at occupying the three free provinces of the V interzone, in the southern center. He considers that this was a reasonable action, a necessity in the execution of the Navarre plan and that, therefore, it was not, at least initially, a mistake.
Fifty years later, General Giáp recounted in particular how he succeeded twice in saving his troops, sometimes even abstaining from fighting and leaving Navarre to believe he was victorious. It was his Psychological Warfare. Volume III of the Memoirs of General Giáp does not only describe the battle of Ðiện Biên Phủ, it traces the entire history of the Vietnamese resistance. According to the author, if the Vietnamese emerged victorious from the conflict, it is because they were able, based on their ancestral tradition of combat and the thought of Hồ Chí Minh, to lead a real "people's war".
* "[...] The Battle of Điện Biên Phủ was a gigantic entanglement of lives and destinies. It was lost, on the French side, by the general staff. But won, on both sides, by men who sacrificed everything :the Vietnamese to obtain a decisive victory in the snatch; the French, the Senegalese skirmishers, the Moroccan tabors to end up prisoners, caught in the vice of a war which escaped them".
The most moving lines of Võ Nguyên Giáp, a general with an entirely socialist pen, concern the commando of the People's Army of Vietnam which, on May 6, 1954 around 11 p.m., blew up Eliane 2 hill after digging a tunneled under the French defenses and stuffed its innards with explosives. It was the 308 Infantry Division of General Vuong Thua Vu who gave the blow. The decision to engage in the Battle of Ðiện Biên Phủ was the most important of his life, with the help of Phạm Văn Đồng.
The two important books by Võ Nguyên Giáp are “People's War, People's Army. the experience of the Vietnamese people in the armed struggle” and the 3 volumes of “Memoirs”, in numerous editions and reissues, not to mention numerous books on him.
Võ Nguyên Giáp and Thomas Edward Lawrence
Beyond the myth, Lawrence of Arabia remains one of the most influential officers in the development of insurrectionary doctrine in the last century. In 1946, French General Raoul Salan conducted several interviews with Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp who planned and conducted military operations against the French until their defeat at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 and the Tết Offensive. in 1968. Salan was part of a negotiation mission created to finalize the return of French authority to Việt Nam. Later, he would command the French Expeditionary Force in Việt Nam from May 20, 1951 until May 1953, and he led the last successful military action against Hồ Chí Minh:an offensive named Operation Lorraine, on October 11, 1952, in which the Salan's forces swept through the Red River Valley and the jungles of North Vietnam. The following year, he handed over his command to General Henri-Eugène Navarre, who would preside over the disaster at Điện Biên Phủ. Giáp said:
* "[...] Lawrence combined wisdom, integrity, humanity, courage and discipline with empathy, the ability to identify emotionally with both subordinates and superiors".
During these 1946 interviews, Salan was struck by the influence of one man on Giáp's thought; this man was Thomas Edward Lawrence. Giáp said to Salan:
* "[...] T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom is my gospel of combat. It never leaves me."
The essence of the guerrilla theory to which Giáp refers can be found in two places. The first and most accessible is none other than the numerous editions of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, notably chapter 33. The second is an article bearing the title "The Evolution of a Revolt", published in October 1920 in the Army Quarterly and Defense Journal. Both are based on Lawrence's practical and thoughtful assessment of the situation facing Arab forces in the Hejaz region of the Saudi desert in March 1917.
* Algebraic, Biological and Psychological
Up to this time, Lawrence had spent more than a year on the side of the Bedouin Arabs against the Turks. He drew from this experience two theorems of guerrilla warfare that form a theoretical basis and a starting point for the rest of his ideas related to the conduct of an insurrection. Lawrence first asserted that irregular troops are incapable of defending a position against conventional forces, and that they are equally incapable of effectively attacking a strongly defended position. If these theorems are correct, Lawrence wondered, then what value can his irregular forces have? This became the basic question he first sought to illuminate.
Turning inward, Lawrence realized that like any other officer educated in Western military thought and traditions, his attitude toward war was dominated by the dogma of annihilation:an obsession that " the principle of modern warfare is to seek out the enemy army, the center of its power, and destroy it in battle." But it appeared to Lawrence that despite the absence of any battle of annihilation, the Arabs were win the war:
* "[...] as I thought about it, I realized that we had won the Hejaz war. We occupied 99% of the territory. The Turks were welcome in the rest. [...] They were sitting quietly [in Medina]; if we took them prisoner, they would cost us food and guards in Egypt.... From all points of view, it was better that they remained there, that they insisted on Medina and want to keep it. Let them go!"
Lawrence then wondered if there weren't other wars, different from the wars of annihilation that French generals like Ferdinand Foch and other contemporaries praised and spoke of with such enthusiasm. He concludes, after a reminiscence of his study of Clausewitz, that there was indeed more than one type of warfare, that the determining factor was the objective for which the war was initially waged. It was simply not within the scope of Arab interests, nor within their capabilities, to annihilate the Turks. The Arabs' objective was geographical:to occupy as much of the Arab Middle East as possible. Now, if the Arabs' objective was geographical interest rather than the destruction of enemy forces, it shed an entirely new light on the role of the irregulars. Given the validity of these two theorems, what role did the Arab insurgent have in a war of occupation?
In order to answer this question, Lawrence developed a simple conceptual framework, nothing more than a kind of mental hole chart to hang concepts and ideas in relation to each other, but with sufficient structure. to think of all ideas as a whole. Lawrence's chart included three concepts or categories of analysis, conceptual hooks he called the algebraic, the biological, and the psychological.
The Physical Element of Military Power Relations and Material Power.
By “algebraic” Lawrence meant those space-time factors that are subject to calculation. He thus began to calculate the size of the sector the Arabs would have to conquer and how many Turks it would take to defend it. Lawrence determined that at least 600,000 troops would be needed to provide an adequate defense. The Turks had only 100,000 men and most were concentrated in and around Medina. Lawrence also recognized that the Turks, with their mental baggage full of ideas about battles of annihilation, would approach rebellion from the perspective of all-out war. But that would be a mistake, because waging war "against a rebellion is slow and chaotic, like eating soup with a knife".
The attrition factor of Wanting.
The “biological” was the second element in Lawrence's conceptual framework. Later he used the term "bionomics" to represent the idea of attrition and friction within a military system. Lawrence came to the conclusion that instead of destroying the Turkish army, the Arabs simply needed to wear it down. Exhaustion, not destruction, would cause this, through direct attacks on enemy materiel:"the death of a Turkish bridge or railway, a machine gun, a cannon or explosives was more profitable to us than the death of a Turk." Thus, the weakness of the irregulars - their inability to face the regulars face to face in battle - could be rendered moot as soon as the Arabs attacked accessible enemy equipment. But the key to such a strategy was the availability of nearly perfect intelligence. Lawrence, himself an intelligence officer, noted that knowledge of the enemy had to be "flawless, leaving no room for risk. We have made more effort in this area than any other staff that I saw".
The popular support factor in a “People's War”.
The last factor of analysis was the psychological. Lawrence understood that in an insurgency, the real battle was in the minds of the opponents. To be victorious, the Arabs had to "arrange their minds in battle order, as carefully and formally as other officers lined up their corps". It also meant that moral support among the populace had to be mobilized for the rebellion.