Van Tien Dung

Mar 28th 2002
From The Economist print edition
Van Tien Dung, a peasant who became a general, died on March 17th, aged 85
AP

AN AMERICAN historian, Eugene Grayson, who served in Vietnam as a colonel, reckoned that Van Tien Dung was one of the “great captains” of warfare, ranking with Wellington and Rommel. The campaign that General Dung planned and directed to give the communists a final victory after 30 years of war was, said Mr Grayson in an influential essay, “a classic masterpiece of manoeuvre warfare”. Some people were surprised by this encomium. Asked to name the communists' most famous general, many would award the laurel to Vo Nguyen Giap, who is usually credited with defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, sometimes seen as the beginning of the end for western forces in Vietnam. However, General Dung was the youthful number two at Dien Bien Phu and some say was the real brains behind victory. He later succeeded General Giap as army chief.

Nostalgically refighting the battles of long ago is a favourite game of historians. Who was the better general of the second world war, Britain's careful Bernard Montgomery or America's hot-tempered George Patton? Your choice may well be determined by which military historian you have been reading. Vietnam's propagandists once portrayed General Giap as a military genius. Perhaps he was, but with peace wartime heroes became less important. He was removed from the Politburo and for a few years was in charge of family planning, which caused some amusement among irreverent Vietnamese. Probably General Dung made things worse for him with his account of the war published in the party newspaper. While in no way knocking his former boss, he gave himself full credit for the final victory. General Giap, now 91, is rarely seen in public. But last week he put on his dress uniform and attended the state funeral of General Dung, to witness the departure of the man who to some extent had stolen his glory. He declined to say anything about his old colleague. That will probably have to wait for his memoirs.

Life with Ho
As a young man Van Tien Dung never thought of becoming a soldier. Soldiers were men of the French Foreign Legion who kept order for the colonial power. Like many other Vietnamese of peasant stock with little schooling he was recruited into the communist party run by Ho Chi Minh. Just as easily he was picked up by the French and jailed for belonging to an illegal organisation. He spent about four years in jail, often escaping, once as a Buddhist monk, and always recaptured. In 1940 the Japanese occupied Vietnam and other parts of Indochina, but allowed the French to continue their administration of the region. The United States supported Ho's anti-Japanese campaign, and sent a medical team to his jungle hideout to treat him when he was ill with malaria. After the war, Ho hoped that the French, urged on by America, would grant Vietnam independence. The French declined, and the long struggle began, first as guerrilla war and later as a series of clashes between great armies.

How did Dung acquire the training expected of a high-ranking military commander? The communists had no West Point, no Sandhurst. China and Russia were able to offer guerrilla training, but the Vietnamese were nationalists as well as communists, and jealously retained control of their forces, even if it meant promoting men from a non-proletarian background. Some 70% of General Giap's officers, including Giap himself, were from the middle class. He seems to have recognised Dung as a natural leader who had a firm command, despite his lack of formal education, of logistics, which played a key part in the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. Like Napoleon, the two men were prepared to squander any number of lives to win. In one campaign in 1968, the so-called Tet offensive, named after a Vietnamese holiday, General Giap lost 500,000 men killed by American and South Vietnamese forces. However, even in overpopulated North Vietnam, never short of recruits, such a loss was thought unacceptable and contributed to Giap's loss of support.

For the final offensive of the war General Dung had under his command an army of 800,000 men, the third largest in the world, supported by tanks and aircraft. The Americans had withdrawn from Vietnam after losing 58,000 soldiers and the South was on its own. The United States' “potential for aiding its puppets is rapidly declining”, he told an approving Politburo. Even so, General Dung noted, the southerners were hard to break. It took 55 days of hard pounding to reach Saigon on April 30th 1975.

General Dung never lost his interest in military affairs and took a spectator's view of the interminable wars that have continued around the world. After the attacks on New York and Washington of September 11th and the subsequent war in Afghanistan he gave warning that the United States would encounter the same difficulties experienced by the Soviet Union when it occupied the country, and would find it difficult to withdraw. He was aware that his view was not particularly original, nor would it be welcomed. But who would deprive an old adversary of his mischievous parting shot?