The Man Behind the Offensive

THE man who directs North Viet Nam's unprecedented offensive never went to military school or even trained formally as a soldier."The only military academy I have been to," he once boasted, "is that of the bush." By now, of course, Hanoi's Defense Minister, General Vo Nguyen Giap, is a figure of legend. Along with Mao Tse-tung, he pioneered the art of modern guerrilla warfare. Giap probably stands behind only Ho Chi Minh in the history of North Viet Nam, where he is known quite simply as "the organizer of the victory"--meaning the long campaign that culminated in the triumph over the French in 1954.

At 60, Giap is small (5 ft.), somewhat corpulent, and possessed of a mind that one French acquaintance calls "very orderly, logical, Cartesian" and a manner that another describes simply as "eloquent bluntness." Once again, he is trying to organize a victory--one that he hopes will retrace the lines that led to Dien Bien Phu 18 years ago. As the creator of the Viet Minh army in 1941, Giap has long been a proponent of a kind of warfare that would be a political as well as a military enterprise. The merits of Giap's 1968 offensive, in which 60,000 Communist lives were lost, will be debated for years, but for Giap himself it may have been enough that it set the American withdrawal in motion. As early as 1970, when the Nixon withdrawal plan was well under way, the North Vietnamese Politburo had begun to plan what Giap was openly describing as a step up to "regular warfare." The object: annihilation of Saigon's burgeoning military forces.

The present offensive, as one Pentagon general says, "has Giap's stamp on it." Among the trademarks: the skillful use of ambushes and roadblocks, assaults mounted from unexpected directions and the shrewd manipulation of farflung battlefields in order to exhaust and overextend Saigon's much more numerous forces. There is even a Giap precedent for the startling switch from a small-arms war to one of missiles and tanks. At Dien Bien Phu, Giap's men opened up with scores of heavy guns that they had secreted high up in the mountains; in less than two months, the guns killed or wounded about half of the 13,000-man French garrison. Back then, Giap's surprise weapons--mostly American-made howitzers that he had obtained from China--were hauled uphill piece by piece, reassembled and hidden away in caves until ready for use. Now, Giap has done it again. Many of the Soviet-made guns and tanks whose appearance so surprised the U.S. command had been hauled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in pieces, hidden under tarpaulins in the beds of trucks; at secret staging areas in Laos and Cambodia, the pieces were reassembled. Some of the tanks were simply driven down the trail over roads that were covered with leafy trellises to foil American reconnaissance pilots.

Giap's trademark tactics have not always worked brilliantly in the current offensive. As usual, the Communists are fighting meticulously prepared, preset battles. Only when everything is in place --from tanks to troops to missiles and ammunition supplies--do the North Vietnamese even begin to move. Most often, things have gone well; on other occasions, the plans have been upset by the unexpected, and the Communists have lost valuable opportunities. In the early days of the offensive, for example, enemy artillerymen rained deadly accurate fire on the South Vietnamese army's fixed bases but fumbled badly when the ARVN began moving around. Says one American artilleryman: "They hadn't planned for it and weren't flexible enough to change."

Neither Giap nor his troops have had experience in large-scale conventional warfare, and they are not fighting a true war of maneuver. Typically, they have used their big Soviet tanks, as rolling gun platforms, with little effective coordination with infantry. Another problem is momentum. Locked into preset plans and dependent upon prepositioned supplies, the Communists are tied to a stop-start pattern. U.S. military men were startled that the Communists who overran Tan Canh last week stopped to regroup, when they could have rolled straight on to Kontum. Giap is "out of his element when he gets to conventional war," says one officer. Says another: "Giap is not Patton." But Giap only has to be better than the South Vietnamese--and on the evidence of the offensive so far, he is.

Before he joined Ho Chi Minh's revolution, Giap was a Hanoi schoolteacher. The son of an impecunious landholder, Giap studied history and law, making him the best-educated member of the nine-man Politburo. Old school chums remember Giap as an avid student of Napoleon, able to chalk his battles on a blackboard from memory. In recent years, it seems, Giap's memory has been etched most deeply by his own experience with the French. Six years ago, when the big U.S. buildup was still under way, he told a journalist: "The day that the Americans see that they cannot win the war, they will stop it."

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