UNFORGETTABLE MONTHS AND YEARS THE CORNELL UNIVERSITY SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM The Southeast Asia Program was organized at Cornell University in the Department of Far Eastern Studies in 1950. It is a teaching and research program of interdisciplinary studies in the humanities, social sciences, and some natural sciences. It deals with Southeast Asia as a region, and with the individual countries of the area: Brunei, Burma, Indonesia, the Khmer Republic, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The activities of the Program are carried on both at Cornell and in Southeast Asia. They include an undergraduate and graduate curriculum at Cornell which provides instruction by specialists in Southeast Asian cultural history and present-day affairs and offers intensive training in each of the major languages of the area. The Program sponsors group research projects on Thailand, on Indonesia, on the Philippines, and on linguistic studies of the languages of the area. At the same time, individual staff and students of the Program have done field research in every Southeast Asian country. Publications relating to Southeast Asia which may be obtained on prepair order directly from the Program are listed at the end of this volume. Information on Program staff, fellowships, requirements for degrees, and current course offerings will be found in an Announcement of the DepCII'tment of Asian Studies, ebtainable from the Director, Southeast Asia Program, 120 Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853. ii UNFORGETTABLE MONTHS AND YEARS (NHUNG NAM THANG KHONG THE NAO QUEN) by Vo Nguyen Giap Translated and with Introduction by Mai Van Elliott Data Paper: Number 99 Southeast Asia Program Department of Asian Studies Cornell University, Ithaca, New York May 1975 iii C CORNELL UNIVERSITY SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM 1975 International Standard Book Number 0-87727-099-6 iv FOREWORD The name of General Vo Nguyen Giap is well known to many Westerners, Americans and the French in particular. For most of them, however, that familiarity begins with the series of Vietminh military victories over the French, especially that at Dien Bien Phu, or the subsequent longer struggle wherein he was the chief strategist in a campaign that culminated in the ousting of an even larger American military presence from his country. But Vo Nguyen Giap's army career goes back more than a decade before Dien Bien Phu, and indeed the first few years of his military leader­ ship in behalf of the Vietnamese revolution--1943 through mid-1946--were probably the most difficult and critical of all. As Giap makes clear in the fascinating account that is here presented, the delicate and volatile seven months period following the revolution of August 1945 was a particularly uncertain and perilous ordeal for the leaders of the Vietminh. During it their political and military abilities were challenged by a range of in­ trinsically difficult, but often complexly interrelated, problems that followed one upon the other at a breathtaking and bewildering rate. The difficulty of coping con­ currently during this period with the political agents and military forces of Japan, Kuomintang China, Britain, France and the American OSS required an unusually high order of political sagacity and psychological "cool." The success of Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, Pham Van Dong, Truong Chinh and other Vietminh leaders in meeting this extraordinary challenge augured well for their ultimate success. As for Giap, no army commander, no matter how great his military skill, could have been effective in this situation unless he were also politically astute and. able promptly to appreciate the interacting and often critical interdependence of military and political factors. That Giap possessed these qualities is reflected in this account. If Westerners find it surprisjng to find a military leader so well endowed with political aptitude, it should be pointed out that before 1943, when Giap first embarked upon a military career, he was already a seasoned political leader who had developed a profound understanding of the social and economic problems of Viet­ namese society. To.appreciate this and to put Giap's army career in perspective, it may be helpful to sketch some of the relevant features of his life before he became his country's foremost military figure. Vo Nguyen Giap was born in 1911 in a village in Quang Binh province (Central Vietnam) where his family tilled the small plot of land that they owned. Giap's father, who had studied the Chinese classics, taught him to read Chinese characters, but in 1923 sent him to Hue to study at the French language Quoc Hoc school, a hotbed of nationalism that Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong had also attended. There Giap was exposed to the writings of the revolutionary nationalist leader, Phan Boi Chau, whom he met while the latter was still under house arrest. After expulsion from this school in 1927, Giap returned to Hue, where he assisted Huynh Thuc Khang, publisher of Tieng Dan (People's Voice) newspaper, and in 1930 he joined the Communist Party. Following the abortive uprising of the VNQDD (Nationalist Party) at Yen Bay in that year, he and his friends in the Communist Party took part in demonstrations protesting the arrests of these non-Communist nationalists and collected money for·them. Giap himself was soon arrested and sen­ tenced to prison. After his release, he studied at the Lycee Albert Sarraut in Hanoi, earning a living by teaching at a private school. (Some of his students, such as General Le V Quang Dao, later served under his command in the Liberation Army, and several became high civilian officials in Ho Chi Minh's government.) After finishing his studies at the Lycee Albert Sarraut, Giap enrolled in the Hanoi Law School from which he graduated in 1938. With the establishment of a Popular Front government in France in 1936, the scope for legal activities by Vietnamese nationalists was considerably broadened. In that year Giap, together with Truong Chinh and Pham Van Dong, formed an anti­ imperialist popular front, and Giap worked with Pham Van Dong in publishing a series of newspapers. In 1937, together with Truong Chinh, Giap researched and wrote an analysis in depth of conditions among the Vietnamese peasantry.1 This was published in 1938 under the title of The Peasant Question (1937-1938) and had a significant influence for years to come on the approach of the Vietnamese communists to agrarian problems. With the collapse of the French Popular Front government in 1939, Giap narrowly escaped arrest, and in the company of Pham Van Dong he left for China in the spring of 1940. (His wife was arrested soon afterward and later died in jail.) In Kunming in June 1940, Giap and Pham Van Dong first met Ho Chi Minh. Ho planned to send them to Yenan for training, but their trip was cancelled with news of the French surrender to the Japanese, and they returned to Vietnam. With the pro-Vichy French military forces and civil administration promptly collaborating with the Japanese armed forces that entered Vietnam, the repressive power ranged against the Vietminh at the time of the founding in 1941 under the aegis of Ho Chi Minh was all the more formidable. Only after many difficulties and after painstaking and indefatigable efforts were Giap and Chu Van Tan able to build up two small guerrilla nuclei. Giap operated in Cao Bang province·, training minorities and forging the Vietminh guerrilla army, of which the first detachment was formed in 1941. Despite heavy French military repression mounted in Cao Bang during 1942, in which many of the revolutionaries were captured, Giap and most of his men survived, and thereafter his unit gradually recovered and grew in strength so that by the end of 1944 it was able to launch attacks against French military posts. Soon after the end of the period of collaboration between the Japanese and the French in March 1945, and the prompt internment of French2 military units, the forces of Giap and Chu Van Tan's Army for National Salvation were merged into one revolu­ tionary army, under Giap's coJIDDand. Its units soon began attacking Japanese posts, and by the time of Japan's surrender controlled most of six of the northernmost prov­ inces of Vietnam. With Japan's capitulation, Giap's forces marched towards Hanoi, entering that city on August 26, 1945. Then begins the story that he here so vividly recounts of the critical first seven months of the Vietnamese revolution. The immediate background and the context of the events that Vo Nguyen Giap de­ scribes are admirably set forth in Mai Elliott's very useful introduction. For this and her explanatory footnotes, as well as for her careful and sensitive translation, all those interested in this dramatic and complicated period of Vietnam's revolution will, I am sure, be grateful. George McT. Kahin June, 1975 1. For a translation of this piece see The Peasant Question (193?-1938), by Truong Chinh and Vo Nguyen Giap, translation and introduction by Christine Pelzer White, Data Paper #94, Cornell Southeast Asia.Program, 1974. 2. For an account of the Army for National Salvation see Reminisaences on the Army for National Salvation, Memoir of General Chu Van Tan, translated by Mai Elliott, Data Paper #97, Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1974. vi I ....-­ • 11 ,,,.,.'"·'\ A ro---·� GULP OP TONKIN ca Hainan Is • ... t ·�• CJ .....-c ..... Danan parallel .,.---- -,··, . '• 0 inh Hoa Hha Trang oa\at "Poulo Condore I•. vii •• 1Tl.l..l• TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION The years 1945-46 represented the most perilous period in the history of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Following the revolution of August 1945, the Viet Minh government headed by Ho Chi Minh faced formidable tasks.