Military Art of People's War. Vo Nguyen Giap

and Chiang Kai-shek. He assembled a formidable group of émigrés in Kunming, and they were to be particularly important in the organization of the Vietminh’s first military units. They lived for much of the time in the Sino-Vietnamese border regions, inhabited by the same ethnic minorities on both sides of the arbitrary demarcation. When the alliance between Mao and Chiang foundered, the Vietnamese communists were harassed by the Kuomintang and often crossed back into Indochina—only to return when the French conducted a sweep on their side of the border.¹¹

      The bulk of the Central Committee exposed itself to great danger by remaining in Vietnam throughout World War II. Truong Chinh, who replaced the executed Tran Phu as secretary general, risked his life daily by staying on in the vicinity of Hanoi. France fell in Europe in 1940, and the Vichy government soon capitulated to Japanese demands on the strategically important Indochinese colony. When the French garrison at Lang Son was relieved by the Japanese, the local montagnards of Bac Son revolted spontaneously in September 1940.¹² Other nationalist uprisings of a spontaneous character followed in Do Luong and My Tho. In October, a high-level meeting was held in Kweilin to discuss the new situation in Vietnam, indicated by the arrival of some thirty-five thousand Japanese troops and by the nationalist reaction. Across the border in Bac Ninh, the Seventh Meeting of the Central Committee agreed that the Party should support the Bac Son maquis. Tran Dang Ninh, who later organized logistics at Dien Bien Phu, was sent there for this purpose. The Kuomintang, moreover, were vaguely contemplating some intervention in Indochina. Under the leadership of two Kuomintang officers, Truong Boi Cong and Ho Ngoc Lam, a small Vietnamese military force was already being organized in the town of Tsingsi, twenty miles from the Vietnamese border. The Vietnamese communists in China made contact with this group, which already included newer communist refugees in its ranks. Giap, Pham Van Dong, and other top-level cadres organized a course for some forty of the new arrivals who were working with Truong Boi Cong, in anticipation of the imminent need to return to Vietnam. To effect closer coordination between the exiles and their comrades in Vietnam, Ho returned to Vietnam for the first time in decades to preside at the Eighth Enlarged Meeting of the Central Committee, held in Pac Bo in May 1941.¹³

      This meeting marked the re-emergence of Ho Chi Minh’s influence in the Party and of national liberation as the dominant theme in Party policy.¹⁴ It was agreed that the Party should organize a broad patriotic front, called the League for the Independence of Vietnam (or Vietminh), whose purpose would be to unite “all patriots, without distinction of wealth, age, sex, religion or political outlook, so that they may work together for the liberation of our people and the salvation of our nation.”¹⁵ The Party then decisively moved toward armed struggle. Since its formation, it had accepted armed struggle as the necessary means of liberation. This perspective was outlined as early as May 1930 in the Party’s first constitutive documents, but the first military activities awaited the decisions of 1941. Phung Chi Kien, a veteran cadre who had been trained in the Whampoa military academy and who served as head of a unit of the Chinese Red Army in Kwangsi from 1927 to 1934, was assigned the task of reorganizing the guerrillas of Bac Son into an Army of National Salvation. Half of this group was soon decimated; the remainder held on for some eight months before being obliged to disperse.¹⁶ A more successful start was made in Cao Bang, a mountainous province along the border, where the armed bands of the ethnic minorities traditionally defended local rights and autonomy. The head of an important Nung band, Chu Van Tan, traveled to Kwangsi in 1942 for discussion with the Vietminh representatives. He agreed to collaborate with the Vietminh, and Giap worked with him in Cao Bang. Both were barely thirty, but were men of exceptional ability. They worked painstakingly and with great success across a large area of northern Tonkin.¹⁷

      As the Vietminh moved cautiously toward insurrection in Tonkin, many forces were at work abroad which would shape Vietnam’s destiny for more than two decades. America was already arrogating to herself the prerogative of determining Vietnam’s future. Beside her stood lesser powers who were also concerned to safeguard their interests in Indochina. Thus, political developments relating to Vietnam during the middle years of World War II were extremely complex. Allied policy-makers all attached importance to Indochina, at least in a negative sense. They saw the value of its raw materials and regarded its location as strategic, but their primary objective in the early stages of the war was to deny the Japanese access to these bases and resources rather than to attempt to seize them for Allied purposes. This was accomplished by the successes of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific.¹⁸

      Political objectives were necessarily more intricate. Roosevelt was angry at the Vichy French for yielding Indochina to the Axis and at the time was unsympathetic toward de Gaulle. American policy in Asia clashed with that of the British, and de Gaulle’s close association with England caused United States policy-makers often to regard him as little more than an instrument of long-term British objectives in the Far East. Roosevelt voiced his now well-known declarations on the desirability of ending French rule in Indochina in this context.¹⁹ Reports of such declarations certainly reached the Vietminh during the war, and they were often transmitted by unsophisticated Western sympathizers of the Vietminh who embellished them or placed their own optimistic interpretations upon ambiguous phrases. Giap, Ho, and others in the leadership who understood something of the ambivalent heritage of the Western democracies, in which the ideals of liberty coexisted with racism and social injustice, studied these developments with great interest, especially in the light of the collaboration of the Anglo-American powers and the Soviets.²⁰

      The cornerstone of America’s Asian policy was Nationalist China. Washington policy-makers vainly hoped to establish Chiang’s China as a great and entirely loyal Pacific power after the war. Hence, Roosevelt’s first concrete move in regard to Indochina was his proposal at the Teheran Conference that Chiang Kai-shek should look after it following the war. Only after the generalissimo had declined such responsibility did Roosevelt put forward the idea of a trusteeship, leading to independence in thirty years, which received the endorsement of Chiang and Stalin.²¹ Throughout the war Chiang continued to have his own, slightly different, policy. Ironically, it was characterized by a higher degree of realism than Roosevelt’s. While he paid lip-service to all the American proposals, he pursued his own interests and objectives without hesitation. In 1942, he ordered the arrest of Ho Chi Minh, whose final release in late 1944 is generally attributed to Allied pressure. Some have argued that Chiang’s arrest of Ho resulted from his resentment of the Vietminh-OSS collaboration in the recovery of American pilots downed in Japanese-held areas. But the political motivation was surely deeper. Chiang knew of the Vietminh’s potential and was seeking to revive a Vietnamese nationalist party styled after his own. In fact, Ho’s release was made conditional on his undertaking to collaborate with the new nationalist group. All this intrigue had little effect on Vietnam’s internal development in the middle years of the war. It was not until 1945–1946 that the Chinese intervention was of substantial importance.²²

      The intrigues worried the French, however. The Gaullists were naturally alarmed at their exclusion from Big Power discussions on the fate of their lucrative colony. From the autumn of 1944 onward, they responded with a rash of propaganda in Foreign Affairs²³ and in other scholarly journals widely read in State Department circles. There were two essential messages. The first was a catalogue of the benefits French colonialism had brought to the natives of Vietnam, in the manner of classic racist apologetics. The second was to show that Gaullist intentions for the colony’s future conformed to America’s now explicit interests and inclinations. The French were undertaking, in these unofficial policy indicators, to open the territory to broader economic penetration and to guarantee independence after a suitable period of adjustment. Unhappily for the French, a third message was often gratuitously inserted. Sensitive to the accusation that the French apparatus had willingly collaborated with the Axis, the Gaullists began to claim that this collaboration was purely tactical, dictated by the futility of resistance without American and British support in 1940. They argued that the French colons were in their hearts disposed to the Allied cause and would rise up against the Japanese at a more opportune moment in the progress of the war. If the Americans were largely unmoved by the two main points of the argument, the Japanese were profoundly impressed by the last. In consequence, they staged a lightning coup d’état on March 9, 1945, and incarcerated the main elements of the French apparatus in