Word: giap
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Urgent Questions. Last week the army of South Viet Nam suffered its worst debacle of the five-week-old Communist offensive, and North Viet Nam's Defense Minister and chief military tactician, General Vo Nguyen Giap, gained his easiest victory of the long war. The 8,000-man ARVN 3rd Division, assigned to the defense of the northernmost provincial capital, Quang Tri, was known to be poorly trained and questionably led. But no one had expected the 3rd to give up as quickly as it did. Pounded by five days of shelling by Giap's troops and abandoned...
...General Giap has thrown his strongest forces into the drive on Hué. Three divisions are closing on the city from the North and West, and a fourth is poised to the Southwest. The seasoned Communist troops, many of whom took part in the bloodying of ARVN in Laos last spring, are equipped as never before. They have tanks and heavy artillery, including Soviet 130-mm. guns with a range of 17 miles. Some of their equipment is even more sophisticated: last week a portable heat-seeking Soviet missile downed two U.S. helicopters and a light plane near Quang...
...moment, the answers were all held by General Giap, North Viet Nam's legendary lord of the battlefield. More than likely, he was methodically measuring the odds in terms of his oft-repeated principle: "Strike to win, strike only if success is certain; if it is not, then don't strike...
...Giap, now 60, the capture of Hué would be almost as great a victory as the fall of Dien Bien Phu 18 years ago last week. The man the French called the "snow-covered volcano" -because his calm exterior masks a fiery temperament-once again dominates the war in the South, something no South Vietnamese leader has ever been able to do. Maintaining the military initiative, Giap has called each turn of how and when a battle will be fought. The question that remains, and may be decided at Hué, is whether, as one U.S. general puts...
Many Enemies. So far, Giap has proved himself a master of Vietnamese situations, and has contributed a large chapter to any textbook on the black art of war. Going far beyond the Chinese concept of a "people's war" by guerrillas, he has developed the orchestrated use of guerrillas and conventional forces, and demonstrated-as at Tet in 1968-the importance of psychology to the outcome on the battlefield. In a 1969 article in the North Vietnamese army journal, Quart Dot Nhan Dan, he spelled out the strategy that he is pursuing in this offensive. "Being held...