Julian Abram Wainwright/European Pressphoto Agency
Vo Nguyen Giap, the relentless and charismatic North Vietnamese general
whose campaigns drove both France and the United States out of Vietnam, died on Friday in Hanoi. He was believed to be 102.
The death was reported by several Vietnamese news organizations, including the respected Tuoi Tre Online, which said he had died in an army hospital.
General Giap was among the last survivors of a generation of Communist revolutionaries who in the decades after World War II
freed Vietnam of colonial rule and fought a superpower to a stalemate.
In his later years, he was a living reminder of a war that was mostly
old history to the Vietnamese, many of whom were born after it had
ended.
But he had not faded away. He was regarded as an elder statesman whose
hard-line views had softened with the cessation of the war that unified
Vietnam. He supported economic reform and closer relations with the
United States while publicly warning of the spread of Chinese influence
and the environmental costs of industrialization.
To his American adversaries, however, from the early 1960s to the
mid-1970s, he was perhaps second only to his mentor, Ho Chi Minh, as the
face of a tenacious, implacable enemy. And to historians, his
willingness to sustain staggering losses against superior American
firepower was a large reason the war dragged on as long as it did,
costing more than 2.5 million lives — 58,000 of them American — sapping
the United States Treasury and Washington’s political will to fight, and
bitterly dividing the country in an argument about America’s role in
the world that still echoes today.
A teacher and journalist with no formal military training, Vo Nguyen
Giap (pronounced vo nwin ZHAP) joined a ragtag Communist insurgency in
the 1940s and built it into a highly disciplined force that ended an
empire and united a nation.
He was charming and volatile, an erudite military historian and an
intense nationalist who used his personal magnetism to motivate his
troops and fire their devotion to their country. His admirers put him in
the company of MacArthur, Rommel and other great military leaders of
the 20th century.
But his critics said that his victories had been rooted in a profligate
disregard for the lives of his soldiers. Gen. William C. Westmoreland,
who commanded American forces in Vietnam from 1964 until 1968, said,
“Any American commander who took the same vast losses as General Giap
would not have lasted three weeks.”
General Giap understood something that his adversaries did not, however.
Early on, he learned that the loyalty of Vietnam’s peasants was more
crucial than controlling the land on which they lived. Like Ho Chi Minh,
he believed devoutly that the Vietnamese would be willing to bear any
burden to free their land from foreign armies.
He knew something else as well, and profited from it: that waging war in
the television age depended as much on propaganda as it did on success
in the field.
These lessons were driven home in the Tet offensive of 1968, when North
Vietnamese regulars and Vietcong guerrillas attacked scores of military
targets and provincial capitals throughout South Vietnam, only to be
thrown back with staggering losses. General Giap had expected the
offensive to set off uprisings and show the Vietnamese that the
Americans were vulnerable.
Militarily, it was a failure. But the offensive came as opposition to
the war was growing in the United States, and the televised savagery of
the fighting fueled another wave of protests. President Lyndon B.
Johnson, who had been contemplating retirement months before Tet,
decided not to seek re-election, and with the election of Richard M.
Nixon in November, the long withdrawal of American forces began.
General Giap had studied the military teachings of Mao Zedong, who wrote
that political indoctrination, terrorism and sustained guerrilla
warfare were prerequisites for a successful revolution. Using this
strategy, General Giap defeated the French Army’s elite and its Foreign
Legion at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, forcing France from Indochina and
earning the grudging admiration of the French.
“He learned from his mistakes and did not repeat them,” Gen. Marcel
Bigeard, who as a young colonel of French paratroops surrendered at Dien
Bien Phu, told Peter G. Macdonald, one of General Giap’s biographers.
But “to Giap,” he said, “a man’s life was nothing.”
Seth Mydans contributed reporting.
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