Vietnam’s General Giap Dies at 102 – Commander of the Tet Offensive

Master of Guerrilla Warfare Dies

GIAP_VN_WARVo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who outmaneuvered American and French forces, has died at 102.

Although General Giap admitted at the end of the Vietnam war that he never won a battle with American forces, he knew that it never mattered…

He would win the war.

Giap was born a peasant in the central Quang Binh province of what was then French Indochina. When he was 14 he joined a clandestine resistance movement. In 1938 he became a member of the Ho Chi Minh Indochinese Communist Party before the Japanese invasion of Vietnam.

The Vietnamese General was successful in ending French colonial rule in the region. But he would be faced with a far more determined foe in the United States. The first American soldier to die in Vietnam was technically Lt. Col. Peter Dewey, who died on September 26th, 1945. Dewey ran a road block manned by Viet Minh soldiers, who confused him for a Frenchman and fired on him. The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial officially begins listing those killed in the conflict as November 1st, 1955. This was when President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed a Military Assistance Advisory Group to train the South Vietnamese military. The Department of Defense does not recognize this date, saying they were only there for training.

58,209 US soldiers died in Vietnam.

Giap famously employed the tactics of Sun-Tsu against US forces, opting for a guerrilla campaign and engaging successfully in attrition. American political leaders were not prepared to fight an enemy that did not use its forces in a traditional manner. U.S. forces attempted to capture territory, and measured victories by kill counts. Giap could exploit this strategy by shrinking from fighting U.S. forces head on. He employed tactics similarly used by the American Colonials when they fought British forces in their War for Independence. His strategy was “surviving to fight another day”. Many Viet Cong troops had tattoos that read “Born in the North, to Die in the South.” They were fully committed to winning. Giap once stated, “We were not strong enough to drive out a half-million American troops, but that wasn’t our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American government to continue the war.”

1101720515_400In 1968, Giap organized one of the largest mass-attacks in history, the Tet Offensive. While feinting that there would be a traditional cease-fire over the Lunar New Year, he secretly positioned his armies in more than 40 provincial capitals in order to coordinate a simultaneous mass offensive while the rest of the nation was having celebrations. The general transported supplies and materials through vast underground networks that forced American troops to climb into holes filled with death and terror, until 1969 when B-52 bombers were allowed to attack North Vietnam. Some of the tunnels of Củ Chi still exist today.

Tet was a tremendous success initially, catching the U.S. military by surprise and inflicting heavy casualties. The North Vietnames even captured the U.S. embassy in Saigon for a short time. But failure to effectively manage the disparate armies led him to eventually be routed, and the war would go on to last until April 30th, 1975.

Later in his life he warmed to the United States. In 1995 the two nations re-established ties and have become close trading partners ever since. The American government now looks to Vietnam’s military as a possible buffer if there is a conflict with China.

“We can put the past behind, But we cannot completely forget it.” Giap said. 

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