• Given his victories in the field of battle, the legendary Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap was called the Red Napoleon by his enemies, and by his compatriots, Volcano under the Snow
A press report from Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, notes that the
legendary General Vi Nguyen Giap, one of the most eminent figures in Vietnamese
history and a great friend of Cuba and revolutionary causes, died at the age of
102 on October 4.
Ge Luo means Volcano under the Snow; the name given by his
compatriots to this exceptional man, who defeated the Japanese, then the French
at Dien Bien Phu and, decades later, forced the U.S. army to flee from Saigon,
thus completing the reunification of Vietnam.
His life is indissolubly linked to the struggle for national
liberation, to the history of the training, growth and development of the
Vietnam People’s Army. For his victories the French themselves nicknamed him the
Red Napoleon.
Vo Nguyen Giap was one of so many sons and daughters of campesinos
who became figures thanks to socialism, not without much personal sacrifice. In
1926 he became a member of student organizations involved in the underground
struggle. He joined the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) and quickly grew close
Ho Chi Minh, a personal friend.
At the end of 1941, Giap left for the Vietnamese mountains in
order to create the first guerrilla groups. There he established an alliance
with Chu Van Tan, the leader of Tho, one of the fighting formations created by a
national minority in northeast Vietnam. At Christmas 1944 he captured a French
military post, after having trained the first battalions of his armed
forces.
By the middle of 1945 he already had 10,000 men under his command,
and could move onto the offensive against the Japanese, who had invaded the
country.
The French police arrested his wife and sister-in-law, using them
as hostages to put pressure on Giap and force him to surrender. The repression
was ferocious: his sister-in-law was guillotined and his wife sentenced to life
imprisonment. She died in prison after three years as a result of torture. The
French also killed his newborn son, his father, his two sisters and other family
members.
But Giap was resolute. He defeated the French during the Dien Bien
Phu campaign, which was the first great victory of a colonized and feudal
people, with a primitive agricultural economy, against an experienced
imperialist army sustained by a vigorous and modern military industry. The most
eminent French generals (Leclerc, De Lattre de Tasigny, Juin, Ely, Sulan,
Naverre) failed one after the other facing troops who were poor campesinos, but
determined to fight to the death for their country and for socialism. Vietnam
was divided and Giap was appointed Minister of Defense of the new government of
North Vietnam which, while the people’s war continued, made every effort to
build a new socialist society.
As the Commander of the new people’s army, Giap led the struggle
in the Vietnam War against the U.S. invaders in the south of the country, a
struggle which, once again, began as a guerilla war. The first U.S. soldiers
died in Vietnam when, on July 8, 1959, the Vietcong attacked a military base at
Bien Hoa, northeast of Saigon.
Four U.S. presidents, one after another, fought against Vietnam,
leaving behind a bloody trail of 57,690 dead American troops. In 1975 the
country was reunified, when a tank of the revolutionary army charged the
protective barrier of the U.S. embassy, while the last imperialists fled
precipitously in a helicopter from the roof of the building.
General Giap was not only a maestro in the art of directing
revolutionary warfare, but also wrote a number of valuable books about it, such
as his famous work People’s War, People’s Army, a manual on guerilla war
based on his own experience. In the manual, he established three basic
fundamentals which a people’s army must possess to attain victory in the
struggle against imperialism: leadership, organization and strategy. The
leadership of the Communist Party, an ironclad military discipline and a
political line adapted to the country’s economic, social and political
conditions.
He defined the people’s war as "a war of combat for the people and
by the people, while the war of guerrillas is simply a method of combat. The
people’s war is a more general concept. It is a synthesized concept. It is
simultaneously military, economic and political." The people’s war is not just
made by an army, however popular this might be, but is one made by all the
people because it is impossible for a revolutionary army, alone, to achieve
victory against reaction. All of the people have to participate and help in a
struggle, which necessarily, must be prolonged."
As a good guerrilla fighter, Giap knew that military success, when
there is such a large disproportion of forces, is based on initiative, audacity
and surprise, which demands that a revolutionary army has to constantly displace
itself. He stood out as a genius of logistics, capable of constantly mobilizing
troop contingents, following the principles of the war of movement. He acted in
this way against the French colonialists in 1951, infiltrating an entire army
across enemy lines in the Mekong Delta and again by bringing forward the Tet
offensive in 1968 against the U.S. forces, when he placed thousands of men and
tons of provisions for a simultaneous attack on 35 strategic centers in the
south.
Both his followers and adversaries considered Vo Nguyen Giap as
one of the great military strategists of history.
Marcel Bigeard, the most decorated general in the French army, who
was his prisoner, has said of the Vietnamese military chief: "Giap victoriously
commanded his troops during more than 30 years. This constitutes an
unprecedented feat (...) He extracted lessons from his errors and never repeated
them"
William Westmoreland, commander in chief of the U.S. army in
Vietnam and an adversary of Giap, stated that the qualities which make a great
military chief are the aptitude to make decisions, moral strength, capacity for
concentration, without forgetting the intelligence which unifies all of the
foregoing. Giap possessed them all. (SE)
October 09, 2013
