promptly surrounded the French position
with 80,000 men and painstakingly brought up
100 heavy cannons—literally piece by piece—
onto the mountains surrounding Dien Bien
Phu. The French, who had considered such a
move militarily impossible, suddenly found
themselves bombarded and cut off by land
and air. Throughout a 55-day siege, waves of
Vietnamese peasants sacrificed themselves
against French fortifications while slowly
wearing down the garrison. Giap’s established
disregard for heavy losses was never more
manifest. But on May 7, 1954, the Viet Minh
scored a resounding victory when Navarre’s
men capitulated, which signaled the end of
French efforts to dominate Vietnam. Viet
Minh losses were estimated to number 25,000
dead and wounded, but the toll was willingly
paid by the Vietnamese communists to liber-
ate their country.
By the terms established by the 1954
Geneva Peace Accord, Vietnam was free of
French control but now divided into two
countries. North Vietnam was controlled by
the communists while South Vietnam re-
mained an independent republic. This
arrangement evolved through the insistence
of the United States, which gradually sup-
planted France as the leading Western power
in Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, no sooner
had Ho and the Communist Party consoli-
dated their hold on North Vietnam than they
commenced a campaign of subversion and
guerrilla war against the South. Giap at this
time functioned as commander of the newly
created People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN),
which over the years was increasingly com-
mitted southward on behalf of the Vietnamese
communists, or Vietcong, in the South. By
1964, the communists were posting such
gains throughout the South that its fall
seemed imminent, and the United States felt
impelled to intervene directly. Giap and his
guerrilla hosts now faced off against one of
the richest and most powerful nations on
earth.
A realist, Giap told the politburo that it
would take years of sacrifice and hundreds of
thousands of deaths before unification could
finally be achieved. However, he was deter-
mined to make the Americans pay heavily for
their interference. Commencing with the Bat-
tle of Ira Drang in 1965, Vietcong and PAVN
units met the new invaders head-on and suf-
fered excruciating losses. Some historians al-
lege that Giap deliberately sacrificed thou-
sands of his men simply to gauge how the
Americans fought and thereby draw up appro-
priate countermeasures. American naval
forces under Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt also
took to the rivers and deltas of the South in a
successful effort to interdict Vietcong activi-
ties with gunboats and hovercraft patrols.
Thereafter, North Vietnamese infiltration was
almost totally reliant upon the Ho Chi Minh
Trail ranging the Cambodian border, which
was lengthy and arduous but almost impossi-
ble to interdict. Moreover, when Giap’s con-
frontational tactics failed, he reverted to guer-
rilla warfare to disperse and confuse his
enemies.
By 1967, it appeared that the Americans
had finally gained the upper hand. Gen.
William C. Westmoreland waxed triumphantly
that a corner had been turned and that the
communists were either defeated or on the
verge of collapse. But the United States, for
all its massive firepower, proved no more suc-
cessful than France in containing the wily Vi-
etcong. Giap underscored this reality in Janu-
ary 1968, when he launched the ambitious Tet
offensive (so named in honor of the Viet-
namese New Year). Over 100,000 Vietcong
guerrillas and PAVN regulars stormed out of
the jungles and attacked villages, hamlets, fire
bases, and even the American embassy in
downtown Saigon. U.S. forces quickly over-
came their initial surprise and fought back vi-
ciously, inflicting horrific losses that nearly
wiped out the Vietcong and its cadre. Again,
the impetuous Giap had miscalculated; even
though suffering a tactical defeat, he acquired
a strategic victory—the Americans had grown
weary of the war. It is probably no small coin-
cidence that Giap, having decimated the Viet-
cong’s leadership at all levels, could now re-GIAP, VONGUYEN