The Military Art
of People’s War
The Military Art
of People’s War
Selected Writings of
General Vo Nguyen Giap
Edited and with an introduction
by Russell Stetler
New York and London
Copyright © 1970 by Monthly Review Press
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75–105317
First Modern Reader Paperback Edition 1971
Monthly Review Press
146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W
New York, NY 10001
To the memory of Dr. Pham Ngoc Thach,Minister of Health of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,who died in November 1968 at the front,in fulfillment of the highest duties of an internationalistand a revolutionary.
Acknowledgments
Many friends throughout the world helped in the preparation of this volume. While no one else bears any responsibility for the book’s shortcomings, many should share the credit for making it a more comprehensive volume. I am grateful to Mark Cook, Claude Henaff, Bruce Kuklick, Leonard Liggio, and Ray Ryan for helping to locate texts which could not be found in London. The staff of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the British Library of Political and Economic Science were efficient in providing texts and documents from their files and stacks. The most valuable cooperation and assistance came from the three London representatives of Vietnam Courier (Cuu Quoc), an information weekly of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. These three friends, Nguyen Van Sao, Nguyen Linh Qui, and Phan Due Thanh, gave generously of their time and repeatedly interrupted their busy schedules to see me to discuss the book. They furnished official translations of new texts very promptly, provided several photographs which we have reproduced here, and were an invaluable source of information for my introduction and footnotes. Another friend from the DRV, Colonel Ha Van Lau, took time out from his work in the Paris talks to discuss the early military history of the Vietnamese resistance and the genesis of General Giap’s thought, and I wish to express my full appreciation of his help.
I also wish to thank Wilfred Burchett, Madeleine Riffaud, and Roger Pic for permitting me to include their interviews with General Giap in this volume. Pic kindly provided photographs as well, and I am very pleased that we were able to use them in the book. My discussions with Pic and Burchett over a period of several years have helped to clarify many of my ideas about Vietnamese military strategy and have given me a more vivid understanding of its application.
All the translations used in this volume are official, with the exception of the three interviews, which were conducted originally in French rather than in Vietnamese. In these three cases, my own translations, from authoritative French texts, appear. In the case of official translations, the reader will find some variation in style and quality. Some were carefully prepared for publication in English-language journals originating in Hanoi; others were produced more hastily for limited mimeograph distribution and were not originally intended for publication in book format. With these latter texts, we have therefore made occasional alterations, so that the particular article or essay will be more readable and the book as a whole more uniform.
Finally, I must thank Lesley Churchill, Sarah Poulikakou, and Terri Raymond for helping to type portions of the manuscript.
Contents
The War of Liberation, 1945–1954
The Political and Military Line of Our Party
The South Vietnamese People Will Win
The Liberation War in South Vietnam
The War of Escalation: An Interview
American Defeats: An Interview
The United States Has Lost the War: An Interview
Their Dien Bien Phu Will Come: An Interview
Introduction
“In real life,” Mao Tse-tung once remarked wryly, “we cannot ask for ‘ever victorious’ generals.”1 This characteristic realism derives from decades of hard struggle, in which progress is measured not according to customary battle statistics or in terrain gained and held but in the persistence of the revolutionary forces, in their sheer capacity to survive over time. As in China, so, too, in Vietnam: the revolutionary forces have emerged the victors by showing their ability to endure protracted conflict. Vietnam has experienced nearly uninterrupted war since the mid-1940’s, and the insurgents have had an ever widening impact. Set in deeper perspective, Vietnam has fought for its independence for two thousand years. Her statesmen frequently refer to this long history of resistance warfare, and they do so for more than rhetorical effect. Out of this long history a distinctive military science has evolved, with direct relevance to the present situation.
In all their wars, the Vietnamese have confronted a more powerful enemy, whether numerically, as in the case of the ancient Chinese, or technologically, as in the case of their contemporary opponents. A strategy of passive defense, in which one relies on fortresses and treats material resources and terrain as ends in themselves,