Just as he had said years previously, our Vietnam Liberation Army would have to go from north to south. After the triumph of the revolution, liberation troops emerged in every locality and in the first days of the revolution, when the French colonialists coming at the heels of the British troops started war in South Vietnam, many units of the Vietnam Liberation Army got ready to go south. These were not merely platoons of some dozens as before but thousands of young patriots from every locality who, responding to the appeal of the revolution, resolutely went south to fight the aggressors. Throughout the country, every day witnessed moving, encouraging scenes of these youths piling into long trains which took them to the southern part of their fatherland to fight together with their compatriots there for national independence. The soil in South Vietnam was thus soaked with the blood of the combatants of the Vietnam Liberation Army.
Then came the national resistance. All through that protracted and hard war, the Vietnam army enjoyed uncle’s solicitude just as it did at its inception when it was only a small armed unit in the liberated area. It may be rightly said that our army, which stems from the people, has been brought up according to the ideas and way of life of the Party and of Uncle.
He was used to prompt and timely decisions. In the winter of 1947, French troops parachuted into many localities of Viet Bac (northern Vietnam) with the aim of striking deep in our base. When the battle was raging, a report on the military situation was presented to the Standing Bureau of the Central Committee and to him, with the proposal to set up “independent companies” * in order to step up guerrilla warfare in accordance with the situation at the battlefront. The proposal was immediately approved.
When the Central Committee decided on the launching of the Cao-Lang border campaign in 1950, Uncle gave orders to the troops “only to win”; then he went straight to the front, visited nearly all the army units, and stayed at the front during the whole campaign. His living quarters, which shifted according to the movement of the battle, was a canvas tent set up in the open.
Again, when the northwest campaign started, Uncle gave instructions to issue the Eight-Point Order of the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to the troops entrusted with liberating the western area. Many cadres who took part in that campaign still keep fresh in their memory his presence at the conference which was to decide on the launching of the campaign. That was an unforgettable event. It rained heavily for days prior to the holding of the conference. Streams swelled, cutting the roads. He had to ford swollen and fast-running streams to come to the conference. He told us all that had happened and how resolute he was to get across the streams. Many local people who had come to the place before him and did not know what to do followed his example, and all succeeded in reaching the opposite bank. Knowing that fording swollen streams in rainy days was not an easy thing, and seeing that he came to the conference in time, all of us were moved by the solicitude he showed to the army. Moreover, we considered it a most valuable lesson for us before we went to the battlefront. That lesson was, as he often said, “Determination, determination; with determination one can do everything successfully.”
He is the incarnation of a great energy, an energy which possesses a great mobilizing force and of which nothing can stand in the way. On that very first day when I met him in Kunming I got an impression which I failed to distinguish, the impression of standing before a man endowed with a simple, lucid, resolute, and steady mind. And today, he is still that kind of man.
Several years ago, at the setting-up of the Vietnam Propaganda and Liberation Unit, he again and again advised us to be active, quick in taking initiative, to act secretly during the combat, to come unseen and to go unnoticed, and to go throughout the country from north to south. More than nine years later, when the revolutionary army had become a full-fledged and powerful fighting force, just when our troops had triumphed at Dien Bien Phu and enemy troops had capitulated, we received his message saying, among other things, “Though great is the victory it is only the beginning.”
Every piece of advice of his at a given time has its particular meaning. But there is one common thing we have found in his teachings, several years ago or at the time of the Dien Bien Phu victory, and that is the spirit inherent in them: consistency, calmness, firmness, simplicity, steadfastness, perseverance in the fight until victory, upholding the great spirit of the Party, of the working class, and of our people as a whole.
This memoir appeared under the title “President Ho Chi Minh, Father of the Vietnam Revolutionary Army” in the collection Days with Ho Chi Minh (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, rev. ed., 1962), pp. 179–228. It was not, in the strict sense, written by Giap, but his oral account was recorded and edited by those compiling the original volume.
* Despite the fact that Admiral Decoux, the French governor general in Indochina, had yielded to their ultimatum and signed an agreement granting Japan the right to establish three air bases and garrison six thousand troops in Vietnam, the Japanese launched an attack on the same day, September 22, on the cities of Lang Son and Dong Dang in northern Tonkin. Lang Son surrendered on September 24, and the following day all French resistance to the Japanese crumbled.
* Giap’s wife and infant, both of whom were to die during World War II.
* A member of the Central Committee, killed in July 1941 in a clash with the French.
† A veteran cadre and soldier; now an officer in the Vietnam People’s Army.
‡ Leader of the Dong Du (Go East) movement and of many other movements against the French from 1904 to 1925, when he was arrested in Shanghai. He lived under house arrest in Hue subsequently and died on October 29, 1941.
* A member of the Central Committee of the Indochinese Communist Party, executed by the French May 24, 1941.
* Following the agreement reached at Nanking by the Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang on September 22, 1937, the Red Army in the Yenan area was renamed the Eighth Route Army.
* An old nationalist who had lived in China since before World War I. The Kuomintang placed him at the head of the moderate nationalist coalition organized under their auspices during World War II (known as the Vietnam Cach Menh Dong Minh Hoi).
* The revolutionary traditions of Cao Bang go back to 1929, when the Young Comrades Association had many adherents in this region. When the Communist Party was founded the following year, a number of cells were organized in Cao Bang, and many were preserved during the most difficult years of the 1930’s. In the Popular Front period, numerous meetings were held there in support of the All Indochina Party Congress. In the repression which followed, the cadres were forced underground, but they maintained their political strength.
* Le Quang Ba is now commander of the air force of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Hoang Sam is now a general in the Vietnam People’s Army. Bang Giang is now a general in the Vietnam People’s Army, responsible for the conduct of military affairs in the Viet Bac zone.
† The Nung, Tho, and Man minorities (see below) are ethnic groupings who live traditionally in the mountainous Sino-Vietnamese border regions. These tribes were usually hostile to the ethnic