General Vo Nguyen Giap On Guerrilla Warfare and its Success in Vietnam.

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General Vo Nguyen Giap On Guerrilla Warfare

‘The war of liberation of the Vietnamese people proves that, in the

face of an enemy as powerful as he is cruel, victory is possible only

by uniting the whole people within the bosom of a firm and wide national

united front based on the worker- peasant alliance’.

-General Giap (The Military Art of People's War, p. 97-98)

It is clear that the French were defeated by the Viet Minh in the period of 1946-1953, and it is usual to attribute this to several factors - poor support for the war from France, an overstretched CEFEO, supplies of equipment from Communist China and the USA to the insurgents, the impossibility of fighting an elusive opponent in difficult terrain...But what were the actual tactics and stratagems used by the VM in their fight against the French?

  General Vo Nguyen Giap was the mastermind behind the VM military effort, and he laid down principles underlying VM actions, based on guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla Warfare is a method of war that can be traced back as far as the 3rd century B.C. when Fabius Maximus utilized this form of warfare against Hannibal's forces during the Second Punic War. Ever since then, the phenomenon of Guerrilla Warfare has surfaced again and again throughout history when low intensity confrontation is the only tool that can be utilized against an unpopular foreign regime or modern army which is more powerful on the conventional battle field.

  Vo Nguyen Giap was born 28 August 1911 in Quang Binh Province. His revolutionary tendencies were already known and in the files of the French security service by the time he was 13 years old. Giap graduated from university with a degree in law and political economics but was forced into exile in China in 1940 due to the ban against the Communist Party. During his exile, Giap met Ho Chi Minh, immersed himself in the study of Mao Zedong's and other military strategist doctrines and attended a political/ guerrilla warfare school. Giap was given increasingly important leadership roles in the Indochinese Communist Party and once the decision was made to actively fight the Japanese and French forces in China, he was named commander of the Viet Minh forces. It was during these early years that Giap tested the strategies and operational doctrine on the battlefield, analyzed his successes as well as failures and then developed his own kind of revolutionary warfare which followed Mao Zedong's On Guerrilla Warfare in many aspects.

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Giap's "new model" of Guerrilla Warfare incorporated three phases1 consisted of:

1) Stage on Contention (predominantly organization and guerrilla warfare).

2) Period of Equilibrium (complex mix of guerrilla and mobile warfare).

3) Stage of Counteroffensive (mobile warfare with conventional forces including some positional warfare in late stages).

  First, the movement must establish strong bases in country where the enemy cannot easily attack them. Here they can train their soldiers, and build political strength amongst the surrounding villages. It also gives the military a supply base and headquarters, and somewhere to fall back on in difficult ...

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