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The Face of the Enemy

Cecil B. Currey's biography of Senior Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap makes clear why he is one of history's great military figures. He may not have been a Saladin or an Alexander the Great or a Genghis Khan -- generals who influenced their political and cultural milieus. Nor can he be called a Napoleon, much as that comparison might please Giap. He is, if a parallel must be made, more of a 20th-century David.

David dispatched Goliath with a sling and a stone. As commander of the North Vietnamese troops, by the 1970s Giap had defeated the major efforts of the United States, a nation that spends more on its military than all the countries of the world combined. Up against an expeditionary army with superior resources, Giap created an army and marshaled a force of district militia, village self-defense units and ordinary citizens who fought everywhere and nowhere, overtly and covertly, and unremittingly. Consider Giap's foot soldiers: An old woman carries a covered basket that contains arms for a hiding Viet Cong. Kids try out a little English on a passing GI, learn which way his unit is moving, and pass the information on. American soldiers could not deal with this sort of enemy; they grew frustrated and guilty when forced to fight them, and so did the American public.

Giap provided his soldiers with more political indoctrination than military training, but their fanaticism was the element that prevailed against the rather inept American expeditionary army's effort to "win the hearts and minds of the people." Giap's strategy was nothing if not elegant, making the best of extremely limited materiel.

Born in 1911, the sixth of eight children, to a middle-class family in An Xa hamlet in the picturesque but infertile mountains of central Vietnam, Giap liked to study, particularly the history of Vietnamese heroes, and was encouraged by his father, a Confucian scholar. His reading expanded to Marx, Engel, Ho Chi Minh and others. He ranked at the top of his class at the French Lycee in Hue, a hotbed of radicalism attended -- according to Currey -- by Ho, Pham Van Dong and Ngo Dinh Diem. Giap was expelled after two years for his extremism. His first job was writing for the People's Voice. When he joined the Communist Party, he became a lifetime target of French Security.

All this is in Currey's book, from which there is much to learn. However, his approach does raise some concerns. He paints pictures that are sometimes difficult to believe: On Dec. 22, 1944, for example, according to Currey, Giap ceremoniously created a fighting unit that became the People's Liberation Army. It comprised 34 men equipped with two revolvers, one light machine gun, 17 rifles and 14 flintlocks, some of them last seeing service in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Two days later, Ho Chi Minh, seeking popular recognition for his nascent Vietminh league, ordered that ragtag army to attack two French outposts. They did so, Currey reports, overcoming and killing all the Frenchmen in them. In time the posts did fall, but not in two days. Currey's description is dubious, even in light of the impressive fact that within eight years, Giap succeeded in wearing down the French and finally defeating them at Dienbienphu.

Currey's pictures are often six pieces of a 10-piece puzzle: He writes, for example, "Even before the Japanese could sign a formal capitulation aboard the battleship Missouri, the French Mission in Calcutta dropped agents behind Japanese lines in Vietnam . . ." But he doesn't make clear that from 1940, when the Japanese took over Indochina, until VJ Day, the French maintained various forms of communications with their colony, including regular drops of their agents behind enemy lines. When dropping agents in North Vietnam, they would advise Gen. Claire Chennault because his Flying Tigers were responsible for all targets in North Vietnam. Once, the French chose not to follow clearance procedures: The Flying Tigers shot down two B-24 aircraft carrying French and British agents and supplies, believing them to be Japanese. Currey's account is simply incomplete.

And it can also be confusing. Currey goes on to write, "On 16 August 1945, de Gaulle . . . ordered . . . Leclerc [the commander-in-chief of French Far East forces] to deploy several infantry units to Vietnam . . . Giap was waiting at Gai Lam [the main airport in Hanoi] when Leclerc deplaned." One might reasonably assume from this that Leclerc and his infantry arrived in Hanoi in August. Had they done so they would have taken control of Hanoi and likely arrested Ho Chi Minh, who arrived in Hanoi on Aug. 28. And if that had come to pass, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam would not have come into existence on Sept. 2. In fact, Leclerc was at the Japanese surrender ceremonies in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, and did not lead the first French troops against the Vietnamese until October 1945.

Later, Currey writes, "Jean Sainteney -- commissioner for Tonkin and Annam, arrived in Vietnam by parachute on 27 August." In fact, Sainteney flew in with Capt. Patti on Aug. 22. I watched him board the aircraft. Pierre Messmer, the intended commissioner for Tonkin, who parachuted in near Hanoi on Aug. 22-23, was captured by Vietnamese guerrillas and released on the China border.

And then this: "The American government -- in October 1945 -- recalled its mission from Han Noi." Not so. U.S. Gen. Gallagher and his substantial staff remained. And a permanent OSS team of three arrived from Saigon. The U.S. Mercy Mission, which was staffed by the OSS, did leave, and its chief (myself) was charged by the French government with inciting revolution and killing its citizens.

Currey offers few insights into where the power lay, what the various conflicts among the leaders were, or the Viet Cong's relations with the Soviet Union and China. As a result Giap does not come alive. I wish, for example, that Currey had pursued an investigation into the relationship between Giap and Louis Marty, the director of political affairs of the French Security Police of Indochina. The police jailed Giap in 1930. When they released him, Marty went out of his way to get Giap into the University of Hanoi. I'd be willing to bet that Giap agreed to report the activities of his communist cell in exchange for the schooling. The fragment of official paper cited in Currey's text confirms that Giap was Marty's liaison with the Communist Party. On such evidence alone, a People's Court would have executed Giap. But Currey doesn't explore this. He merely observes that Marty, by helping Giap, inadvertently betrayed French colonial interests. Might Marty have been a secret anti-colonial, deserving of a Vietminh decoration for his help in educating Giap?

What Currey does contribute, if a little vaguely, is the fascinating theory that the Vietminh Communist Party, different from any other, had a truly collective leadership -- no Stalins, Titos or Maos. The charismatic Uncle Ho in his threadbare clothes and gentle disposition gave it his political savoir-faire; Giap contributed his military genius; and others, lesser known, worked together to inspire the Vietnamese to tireless and extraordinary lengths.

Despite the problems, Giap's story is a compelling one. Currey is resoundingly right about this: If we want to understand Vietnam and its remarkable victory over America, we should get to know their general.

Carleton B. Swift Jr. was an OSS officer in Hanoi in September 1945. He lives in Washington, D.C.