People’s War, People’s Army; The Viet Cong Insurrection Manual For Underdeveloped Countries

By Vo Nguyen Giap

“Vo Nguyen Giap, Southeast Asia’s most successful Communist general, Minister of Defense and Commander in Chief of North Vietnam’s army, shares with Premier Khrushchev a conviction that the future holds many “just wars of national liberation.” This volume stresses the climate of Asia, Africa, and Latin American, torn today by anti-colonial, economic, and political upheavals. It is General Giap’s purpose in this book, originally published in 1962, to guide these struggles to the desired “socialist” victory. The speeches and essays that comprise this key document provide not only the tactical doctrine for effective insurgency operations, but also the political guidelines for enlisting the people in the insurgents’ side.”-Print ed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tannenberg Publishing
• Release date: Nov 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781786254931

Vo Nguyen Giap

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Text originally published in 1962 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

PEOPLE’S WAR — PEOPLE’S ARMY

The Viet Công Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries

GENERAL VO NGUYEN GIAP

FOREWORD BY Roger Hilsman

PROFILE OF GIAP BY Bernard B. Fall

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

FOREWORD By ROGER HILSMAN 5

Why Read This Book? 5

Who Is General Giap? 6

Why So Much Concern About Guerrilla Warfare? 7

Why Is Giap’s Challenge Important? 9

What Is Important About Giap’s Military Doctrine? 10

What We Can Do Toward a Realistic Strategy for the Villages? 12

VO NGUYEN GIAP—MAN AND MYTH By BERNARD B. FALL 17

PEOPLE’S WAR PEOPLE’S ARMY 23

PUBLISHER’S NOTE 24

THE VIETNAMESE PEOPLE’S WAR OF LIBERATION AGAINST THE FRENCH IMPERIALISTS AND THE AMERICAN INTERVENTIONISTS (1945-1954) 25

I — A FEW HISTORICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS 25

II — SUMMARY OF THE PROGRESS OF THE WAR OF NATIONAL LIBERATION 28

III — THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF OUR WAR OF LIBERATION 34

IV — THE FACTORS OF SUCCESS 38

PEOPLE’S WAR PEOPLE’S ARMY — Article written on the occasion of the XVth anniversary of the Viet Nam People’s Army. 41

I 42

II 47

III 53

THE GREAT EXPERIENCES GAINED BY OUR PARTY IN LEADING THE ARMED STRUGGLE AND BUILDING REVOLUTIONARY ARMED FORCES 55

I — OUR PARTY SUCCESSFULLY LED THE PREPARATION FOR THE ARMED UPRISING AND THE AUGUST 1945 GENERAL INSURRECTION 57

II — OUR PARTY VICTORIOUSLY LED THE LONG-TERM RESISTANCE WAR AGAINST THE FRENCH IMPERIALISTS AND U.S. INTERVENTIONISTS 65

III — OUR PARTY HAS SUCCESSFULLY LED THE BUILDING OF THE PEOPLE’S REVOLUTIONARY ARMED FORCES 77

DIEN BIEN PHU 96

OUTLINE OF THE SITUATION OF HOSTILITIES IN WINTER 1953—SPRING 1954 96

STRATEGIC DIRECTION 98

DIRECTION OF OPERATIONS AT DIEN BIEN PHU 102

SOME QUESTIONS OF TACTICS 105

OUR ARMY’S DETERMINATION TO FIGHT AND TO WIN 107

PEOPLE’S DEVOTION TO SERVING THE FRONT 109

THE WAR OF LIBERATION OF OUR PEOPLE WAS ONE LONG AND GREAT DIEN BIEN PHU BATTLE 111

APPENDIX 113

I—MILITARY SITUATION IN SUMMER 1953 113

II—THE ENEMY’S NEW SCHEME THE NAVARRE PLAN 114

III—OUR PLAN IN WINTER 1953-SPRING 1954, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE MILITARY SITUATION ON THE VARIOUS FRONTS 117

Liberation of Lai Chau. 118

Liberation of Thakhek and several regions in Middle Laos. 118

Liberation of the Bolovens Highland and the town of Attopeu. 119

Liberation of Kontum and the north of the Western Highlands of central Viet Nam. 119

Liberation of Phong Saly and the Nam Hu river basin, the push forward towards Luang Prabang. 120

Our successes in the enemy rear in the Red River delta, the three provinces of Quang Binh, Quang Tri, Thua Thien, and Nam Bo. 120

IV—THE HISTORIC DIEN BIEN PHU CAMPAIGN 121

First phase: destruction of Northern sub-sector. 123

Second phase: Occupation of the hills in the East and encirclement of the Central sub-sector. 124

Third phase: Annihilation of the enemy. 126

FOREWORD By ROGER HILSMAN{1}

Why Read This Book?

To understand tomorrow, Americans must face up to the realities of the struggle for freedom in Southeast Asia. This book by an Asian Communist general is, therefore, worthwhile reading for thoughtful Americans today.

This is a peculiar book, as the reader will see for himself. People’s War, People’s Army is not a well-organized book but, rather, a collection of papers; and a lot of it is simply lies. Yet with all its obvious shortcomings, this book can help us to appraise our opponents more accurately.

The basic value of this book at this time is that it may aid us in appreciating the importance and the special nature of a battle that is difficult to define or describe. Thousands of men in Southeast Asia are now engaged in this shadowy conflict, which may yet rank as one of the decisive battles of world history. We may call it the battle for the villages.

This war—and it is being fought as a hot war today—is different from the war of the future, which has cast a nightmare shadow over the world ever since Hiroshima. In recent years, we have become aware-and we should remain aware—of the destructive potentialities of massive weapons of warfare, but the future of many millions may not be decided by such weapons. Both sides are reluctant to use these weapons, even where there are suitable targets, as the military define targets. Much of the world’s terrain does not present concentrated targets; most of the world’s people live in villages.

To understand the basic elements of the physical and spiritual conflict called the battle for the villages, it is most important to see the villages, and not merely the nations as depicted on our maps. Although different colors on maps indicate different nations, it is essential to realize that in Southeast Asia—as in much of Africa and other parts of the world —there is no pervasive national spirit as we know it.

These new nations are struggling toward maturity, toward freedom, and toward democracy. But in the villages of these nations, men live isolated from the men in the next village, as their fathers and grandfathers before them have lived for thousands of years. They, like most of the world’s people, are not connected by any network of mass communication such as the industrialized world has created. They are almost never in close touch with their national government; often they are not in touch at all. In many cases, they have just started to build up some lines of communication, but the human beings in the back country still feel no deep loyalty to a government that seems much further from them than our government is from us-although the physical distance from the national capital in our country is often much greater.

In the village world, we cannot win through H-bombs or through television networks. Even in the day of the missile and the bomber, the Southeast Asian fighting is frequently hand to hand. To counter it, we must understand the elements of man-to-man war as practiced by Lawrence of Arabia, Tito of Yugoslavia, or the raiders and rangers of American history.

And in the peaceful war of ideas, concepts of education and freedom can be transmitted only by people meeting face to face and mind to mind. If freedom is to win out, lasting victory can be achieved only through answering basic human needs. The villagers of Asia do not express their needs in a formal program, but they want to help themselves, and they are willing to be helped. They need communications. They need schools. They need land reform. They need medicine and public-health measures. They need technical help of all kinds. They need what many a pioneer American village needed a hundred years ago-a school, a hospital, a few good bridges, some all-weather roads, a sewage system.

As the world is beginning to realize, this is a very large order. General Giap’s book makes clear that we shall have to work on these long-range goals while fighting a ruthless enemy. Today the forces of freedom can see that it takes years to build a bridge—but an hour’s work can blow it to bits. In Southeast Asia today, we are faced with countless long-range social problems and with another direct and cruel problem—the problem of internal war.

The Communists have developed a new kind of aggression in which one country sponsors internal war within another. Communist-sponsored internal war is clearly international aggression, but a form of aggression that frequently eludes the traditional definitions of international law. It means the use of native and imported guerrillas to serve the interests of Communist nations. It is a war of sabotage and harassment, a hit-and-run war, a war of shadows in the night.

This book to some extent tells the story of that warfare as the Communists see it; in it, a successful Communist general gives us a glimpse of his methods. The value of this book lies not only in what it tells us about this kind of war, but in what it tells us, by inference, of the kind of world in which we must live and, perhaps, fight.

Who Is General Giap?

We cannot win the battle for freedom by adopting General Giap’s methods, which include everything from brazen lies to cowardly assassinations. But we cannot win in the short run if we do not understand his methods. We cannot win in the long run if we do not understand the world in which he fights. Behind him lie many years of success. We must know why.

Vo Nguyên Giap is a general, schooled in formal military tactics and particularly in guerrilla warfare. He is also a Communist political leader and propagandist. In this collection of papers, we have at some points rather factual descriptions of military measures and at other points distortions or the expression of Communist fantasies. The reader must distinguish between what may be worthwhile as observations on military tactics and other passages that have value only as examples of beliefs Communists hold or statements Communists wish us to believe.

Though far less ambitious, the book can be compared with Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which expressed a distorted view of history as seen by a fanatical personality. Nevertheless, Mein Kampf contained useful clues toward understanding pre-war Germany and fascism. In another way, the Giap book may be approached like General de Gaulle’s early writings, in which De Gaulle theorized, quite correctly, about the use of armor in future wars. Far more aptly, this book may be compared with the recent book by Che Guevara, the Cuban guerrilla leader, in which he has written out his conception of the realities and theories of guerrilla tactics. This is not to compare General Giap’s book on its merits with any of these books, for it is far inferior to any of them in its scope and insight. This book was not, in fact, written as a book but was simply collected—presumably by Communist leaders or by the original publishing house, a Communist organ—to demonstrate how General Giap and his forces had achieved victory.

Despite its limitations, this book is important for Americans, because it presents the thinking of a successful Communist who displays insight into the dynamics of the battle for the villages. How much the Communist gains are due to the concepts enunciated in this book may be debated. It is unquestionable, however, that Giap’s ideas are provocative enough to lead us to some rethinking about ourselves, our strengths and weaknesses.

General Giap led the successful battle that humiliated the French at Dien Bien Phu. He has since built up the armed forces of Communist-held North Vietnam to an estimated quarter of a million men—the largest armed force in Southeast Asia. General Giap has fought against such well-known French generals as De Lattre de Tassigny, Raoul Salan (later leader of the OAS underground in Algeria), and Henri Navarre. Today, General Giap is a Vice-Premier and the Defense Minister of the North Vietnamese regime, a member of the Politburo of North Vietnam’s Communist Party, and one of Asia’s outstanding military tacticians.

In this book, General Giap is a propagandist as much as he is a guerrilla-warfare tactician. In his way, he is trying to teach. The American publisher has performed an unusual service in recognizing that in our way we can learn from General Giap.

Why So Much Concern About Guerrilla Warfare?

In later sections, we will review more fully the strategic importance of guerrilla warfare, but here we must say a brief word about its practice, past and present. Obviously, such warfare is suited to a world of villages, to difficult terrain, and to subversion. But there is something about it that appeals deeply to man’s courage and nobility; it is a way in which one man or a few neighbors can take up primitive arms and seek to change their world. This instinct to direct and personal action is older than armies.

Guerrilla warfare goes much further back in history than what we call conventional warfare. The action of individuals or small bands of individuals who rove the countryside, who look for targets, who probe for soft spots or weak points in the lines of communication, who live off the country as best they can, who travel constantly and never sleep twice in the same place-stories and legends of such combat are told in the earliest records of mankind.

Our ancestors learned it from the Indians in the French and Indian Wars. General Braddock and. his conventional British troops were dismayed by American skill in individual unconventional action. We had learned it in battles that had no battlefields. In American history, one generation of Americans, like our troops on Guadalcanal, had to learn again what the Green Mountain Boys under Ethan Allan had known about forest patrols, concealment, sniping, and movement in small groups. Historically, the average American was predisposed to the kind of war that called for individual action, self-reliance, improvisation, ingenuity, surprise—and teamwork in small groups. In modern times, many Americans once more have mastered guerrilla warfare—in the Philippines and in World War II—demonstrating that the basic principles of self-reliance and improvisation are ingrained in the American temperament.

The Communists also have a traditional interest in guerrilla warfare, stemming from a different source—their historic interest in subversion in other nations. Generations ago, Karl Marx was fascinated by guerrilla warfare and specifically advocated it as a means whereby a minority, a small force of partisans, or a weak nation could hope to defeat a more powerful force over a period of months or years. Marx had been impressed with the work of Spanish guerrillas against Napoleon between 1808 and 1813 and by the actions of the francs-tireurs against the Prussians in 1870 and 1871. This Marxist doctrine was, of course, applied in the Russian Revolution itself, when in the years 1917-21 the followers of Lenin used it against the more organized and regimented reactionary forces.

Today, guerrilla warfare has become a marked feature of all the conflicts in Asia involving Communists. In Malaya, some 8,000 partisans were subdued only after a ten-year struggle requiring forces of 65,000 men from the United Kingdom and from colonial units. In Indochina, there were some 335,000 native rebels, including more than 100,000 guerrillas, who over period of eight years ( 1946-54) so harassed colonial troops that in the end the French withdrew and Indochina was partitioned.

At present, the issue is in doubt in other areas of Asia.

The issues are also complicated when the struggle is between Asians and Asians—as in South Vietnam. The Western nations—and the U.N.—find it difficult to cite as clear-cut international aggression outbreaks of warfare practiced by marauders who are sometimes more like bandits than soldiers. And, of course, the people most concerned—those under attack —find it difficult to make progress toward a peaceful and stable society. In the isolated villages, the bloody raids of guerrillas raise a thousand rumors. The new governments are criticized for a dozen reasons-for being weak, for being ruthless, for neglecting to build for war, for neglecting to build for peace. Today, however, the villages of the new countries of Southeast Asia are awakening to what the Giaps of the world would like to do, once they succeed in winning after years of harassment. In the past, the villagers gradually became aroused against governments established by Western imperialists. Today, the villagers are awakening to the menace of aggression from a Communist tyranny that is a new kind of imperialism.

Another main lesson of this book, then, must be that we are in competition with the Communists even where we are not in conflict. The terrain and tactics of this conflict are always changing but Americans have traditionally been able to find fresh solutions for new conditions.

General Giap, and his world, are challenging us here with something new—aggression through internal war. Our first step must be to see this clearly and know it well.

Why Is Giap’s Challenge Important?

Before turning the reader over to General Giap himself, let me refer briefly to what our own leadership has said of this challenge. It must be emphasized—as Giap himself emphasizes—that we face a struggle not for months but for years ahead.

The new nations need time. No magic of science can transform their way of life overnight. The Communists’ use of violence threatens our entire program of non-military aid. It threatens all of Asia’s hopes for the future. It is unfortunate but true that we simply cannot depend upon the slow processes of education and growth in the new nations, not when they are attacked by the new imperialism. Our plans should not be dominated by military considerations, but at the present time in Southeast Asia, no major plans can be realistic unless they face up to the facts of violence.

The Communists carry this war to the most remote and isolated villages. Men, women, and children need protection. As we shall discuss later, from this need grew the concept of the strategic village. Through such means, we hope to save lives and buy time. Freedom needs time to grow and mature.

We sometimes tend to forget that our positive goals of helping to build strong, viable entities among the new nations of the world are more difficult to achieve than the limited destructive aims of the Communists.

Communism and violence feed on turmoil. Peaceful construction does not. Immature political institutions, serious economic problems aggravated by population pressures, and social tensions among the new nations offer fertile ground for fomenting unrest. Our unspectacular but constructive efforts to build for economic progress on a firm basis of political freedom are clearly essential for the realization of the aspirations of the people in the villages. But their vision of the future is obscured by the blood and flame of the present. It is most important to recognize that in many areas the villagers do not now identify themselves with their government, with the Communists, or with any ideology. They have no collectives and no capital. They want to be

Reviews for People’s War, People’s Army; The Viet Cong Insurrection Manual For Underdeveloped Countries

[garrison0550 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Attention comrades, this book bites, I repeat, this book bites. (Mabye the last half of it doesn't, I don't know, I couldn't make it that far.)