Wo Nguyen Zap

In Nguyen Zyap was born in 1911 or 1912 in the village of Anxa, province of Quangbin (Central Vietnam) ^{[Note. 1]} . His father, Vo Quang Nguyem, was a farmer, performing some official functions that required knowledge of literacy ( fr. Lettré ) ^[1] . He participated in rebellions against the French in 1885 and 1888. In 1919, when Va Nguyen Zyap was not even ten years old, his father was arrested for subversive activities. A few weeks after his arrest, Ngiem died in prison, allegedly from torture. ^[1] After a short arrest, the elder sister of Vo Nguyen Zyap also died. There is an opinion that these events had a significant impact on the character of Vo Nguyen Zyap and his attitude to the colonialists ^[1] .

Primary education Vo Nguyen Zyap received at home under the guidance of his father. In the mid-1920s, he studied at the Hue State Lyceum (the same educational institution graduated at different times, Ho Chi Minh , Pham Van Dong and Ngo Dinh Zyem ), who gave education of a European type. While in college, Vo Nguyen Zyap read the Ho Chi Minh pamphlet and joined a revolutionary youth organization. In 1927 , at the age of fifteen, he organized a strike of lyceum students in protest against the arbitrariness of the authorities, after which he was expelled from the educational institution. After that, he continued to actively participate in underground revolutionary activities. After the unsuccessful anti-French uprising of 1930, he was arrested and imprisoned, where he met his future wife Ming Tai.

It is believed that Vo Nguyen Zyap, for some reason, spent only a small part of his two-year term in prison. After his release, he was allowed to complete his education in Hue, and in 1933 he entered the University of Hanoi, where he graduated with a law degree. In the 1930s, he actively wrote articles in underground revolutionary newspapers and joined the Communist Party of Indochina ^{[Note. 2]} . At the same time, the future commander read a lot of the works of Napoleon and Sun Tzu , becoming a fan of the French emperor. After graduating from Va Nguyen University, Zyap worked as a history teacher at a private Hanoi lyceum for about a year; the students gave him the nickname "general" for the fact that he could draw on the board a detailed plan of any campaign of Napoleon. In the late 1930s, Vo Nguyen Zyap first married. What is known about his life with his first wife, Ming Tai, is that they had one daughter.

In September 1939, World War II broke out , and the Communist Party in France was outlawed. By order of the Central Committee of the party, the following year, Vo Nguyen Zyap, together with Pham Van Dong, moved to China , where he received shelter from local communists. The family of Nguyen Zyapa remained in Vietnam and her fate was tragic; Ming Tai was arrested and executed, and her daughter died, probably from a lack of care.

It is not clear how much time Wo Nguyen Zyap spent in China. Some sources say that Ho Chi Minh, who was here, ordered him to return to Vietnam immediately after the surrender of France in June 1940 , according to others, Vo Nguyen Zyap underwent revolutionary training in China for several years. In 1941, Vietnam was founded - a military-political organization that united a wide range of anti-French forces and set the task of liberating Vietnam from French colonial rule. In Nguyen, Ziapu was instructed to form armed detachments of Vietnam, and he began to do this from scratch, at first having under his command several dozen untrained partisans with outdated weapons. In December 1944, he stood at the head of the newly created People’s Army of Vietnam, which received the baptism of fire on the 24th during an attack on two small French posts. Basically, the forces of Vo Nguyen Zyap carried out small attacks against the French. In March 1945, Japanese troops overthrew the French administration, which still ruled Vietnam under the Franco-Japanese agreement of 1941. An important consequence of this event was that the rural areas of Vietnam finally ceased to be controlled by the central government, which allowed Vietnam to expand its activities and quickly recruit a large number of volunteers in the army.

Contrary to some claims, nothing is known about Vietnam’s success in the fight against Japanese forces. Immediately after Japan surrendered in August 1945, Vietnamese forces quickly occupied a number of key cities in Vietnam, including Hanoi, in which Ho Chi Minh declared its independence on September 2 . In Nguyen, Zyap was appointed Minister of the Interior in the interim government, and after a while became chairman of the Supreme Council of State Defense, that is, in fact, Minister of Defense. In 1946, he was vice-chairman of the Vietnamese delegation in negotiations with the French regarding the future status of Vietnam. France used diplomatic maneuvering to build up forces to strike at Vietnam and return to its former colony. In November-December 1946, hostilities broke out between the French army and the forces of Vietnam, which marked the start of the eight-year colonial war of France in Indochina . Soldiers in Nguyen Zyap held Hanoi for two months to ensure that urban industrial enterprises were evacuated to the jungle.

The period 1947 - 1949 was a time of great work for Vo Nguyen Zyap. In the Red River Delta, he created the future regular army of the country. As a result, by the end of 1949, Vietmin received five full-blooded infantry divisions at its disposal, which had the appropriate structure, training, and armament. In the same year, there was a victory for the communist forces in China, with which the Vietnamese have been cooperating for several years. Mao Zedong immediately increased aid to Vietnam. In 1950, General Wo Nguyen Zyap organized his first major offensive, establishing full control over the Vietnamese-Chinese border and demonstrating his ability to coordinate the actions of large forces. Of course, he still had a lot to learn. The new commander-in-chief of the French forces in Indochina, General de Tassigny , inflicted a number of defeats on Vietnam in 1951 and restored the balance of power for a while. However, the subsequent French commanders were not particularly talented, and by the beginning of 1954, the army of Va Nguyen Zyap was stronger than ever.

The French command made a critical mistake by placing a fortified point in Dienbienfu at a great distance from its forces and underestimating the ability of the enemy. General Vo Nguyen Zyap brilliantly used this miss, having managed to quickly transfer several divisions to Dienbienf, as well as artillery ^{[Note. 3]} .

The siege of Dienbyenfu in March-May 1954 was the most successful military operation in the career of Vo Nguyen Zyap. He managed to completely outplay the French commander General Navarre , foiling a major enemy offensive in Central Vietnam and launching a counterattack there, diverting the attention of the French on the very eve of the battle of Dienbienf. With serious superiority in manpower and artillery, Vietmin repeatedly attacked the besieged French garrison, slowly capturing the strongholds of the fortified area. Vo Nguyen Zyap himself set up his headquarters in one of the caves in the mountains surrounding Dienbienfu, and could directly direct the siege.

On May 7, French forces surrendered to Dienbienfu; French society was shocked by the defeat, and the continuation of the war became politically impossible. General Vo Nguyen Zyap won the largest victory of local forces over the metropolis in the history of the colonial wars of the XX century and gained worldwide fame.

After the signing of the Geneva Agreements in July 1954, Vietnam was temporarily divided into two parts - the communist North and the pro-French South . Very soon, Ngo Dinh Zyem came to power in South Vietnam, adhering to a decisive pro-American line. He managed to disrupt the implementation of the Geneva Agreements, which provided for the unification of Vietnam after the general election in 1956 . The authoritarian style of government of Zyem and his unsuccessful domestic policies fostered the emergence of an armed opposition known as the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NFLJW, referred to in the West as Viet Cong). In 1959, the leadership of North Vietnam decided to support the partisan formations in the south, not seeing the peaceful ways to unite the country.

As Minister of Defense, Vo Nguyen Zyap was directly involved in military operations in South Vietnam, where the regiments and divisions of the North Vietnamese army secretly went along the Ho Chi Minh trail . After the end of the war with the French, he did a lot for its development. At that time, the Navy and Air Force of North Vietnam were created, the first armored units arose. In Nguyen, Zyap actively participated in disputes with other members of the country's leadership on a number of political and economic issues. With the start of the intervention in the war in the South, he entered into a lengthy discussion with the chief of the political department of the army and his personal rival Nguyen Ti Thanh about the general strategy of action. Tan suggested organizing major battles corresponding to a regular type of war; In Nguyen, Zyap advocated the need for a protracted guerrilla warfare aimed at exhausting the enemy. In 1965, the United States shifted from financial and political support to South Vietnam to direct participation in the war , sending regular troops to the South and launching bombing of the North. At first, the forces of the NFED and the North Vietnamese army adhered exclusively to guerrilla tactics, but already in November 1965 the first major battles with the American forces took place - at an altitude of 65, near the village of Apbaubang and especially in the valley of the Ya-Drang river near the Cambodian border. In the future, preference was given to partisan actions, and large operations were carried out only when the most favorable tactical conditions were for this.

In 1967, the Chairman of the Central Organizing Commission of the Central Committee Le Duc Tho and the Minister of Public Security, Chan Quoc Hoan (with the participation of the Secretary of the Central Committee Le Duan and with the consent of Ho Chi Minh ) organized a repression campaign against the "anti-party group" of moderates and supporters of Vo Nguyen Zyap. Under Secretary of Defense Nguyen Van Vinh and several high-ranking officers were arrested and imprisoned. The political influence of Vo Nguyen Zyap was markedly limited ^[2] .

Although General Tan died in mid- 1967 , Wo Nguyen Zyap still had to implement his ideas for a strategic offensive. The Tet offensive in January – February 1968 was an attempt to quickly win the war. Despite its complete failure and the catastrophic losses of the NLFF (up to the onset of 1972 it was the most bloody moment of the war), the psychological effect of a series of unexpected and coordinated attacks across South Vietnam was enormous. American society, already doubting the success of the war after three years of hostilities, finally became convinced of the unattainability of victory. In March, US President Johnson announced the start of negotiations with North Vietnam on ending the war. It should be noted that Vo Nguyen Zyap was a key figure in planning the Tet offensive. According to General Davidson , chief of U.S. military intelligence in Vietnam at that time, Wo Nguyen Zyap may have directly directed the siege of the Khesan Marine Corps near the demilitarized zone between North and South.

The Easter Offensive , which began in March 1972 , was the last military action planned by Vo Nguyen Zyap. Although almost the entire army of North Vietnam was involved in the offensive, success was limited to taking the provincial capital Quangchi and several minor cities, while the losses were very large. After this offensive, Vo Nguyen Zyap no longer played a large role in planning military operations. The victorious spring offensive of 1975, which ended the Vietnam War, was carried out not by him, but by Van Thien Dung . Despite this, after the capture of Saigon, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong nevertheless called Vo Nguyen Zyap the architect of the victory of North Vietnam.

After the reunification of the two parts of Vietnam in July 1976, Vo Nguyen Zyap was appointed deputy prime minister, but his time was drawing to a close. Formally, he was still the Minister of Defense during the invasion of Kampuchea (which he opposed) and the war with China in 1979 , but General Van Thien Dung actually controlled the army. In February 1980, Vo Nguyen Zyap transferred him the post of Minister of Defense . After losing his post in the Vietnamese Politburo in 1982, General Wo Nguyen Zyap ceased to play any significant role in the government. In 1991, he was removed from all posts.

In the last years of his life, he led a closed lifestyle and rarely spoke in public, as, for example, in 2004 , when he declared then that "the USA will not be able to win the Iraq war " ^[4] . However, he continued to criticize corruption in the Vietnamese leadership. ^[5] In 2010, Vo Nguyen Zyap criticized a large-scale bauxite mining project in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. In Nguyen, Zyap pointed out that studies conducted by experts in the 1980s showed that mining would entail serious environmental risks.

He died on October 4, 2013 ^[6] in the Hanoi Military Hospital, where he has been since 2009 ^[7] .

In Nguyen, Zyap is the creator of the regular army of independent Vietnam, as well as the most famous Vietnamese commander of modern times. According to Philip Davidson , as a person he was distinguished by arrogance, ambition and revenge ^[8] . He took little account of the losses ^{[Note. 4]} . Short in height even by Vietnamese standards (not higher than one and a half meters) and extremely restrained, Vo Nguyen Zyap received the nickname “volcano under the snow” for his brief but extremely emotional outbursts of rage. The inconsistency of his personality was clearly manifested in an interview given to him by the famous journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1969 ^[9] . In this interview, he, on the one hand, tried to relieve himself of responsibility for the Tet offensive, and on the other, he calmly confirmed that the American figures for the losses of the NLFJ are true. In a recent interview, he stated that he never wanted to be a military man, but dreamed of becoming "just a teacher - philosophy or history." In connection with his death, former Vietnam War veteran Senator John McCain tweeted: “General Nguyen Ziap left - an excellent military strategist who once said that we Americans were“ a worthy enemy “for him.” ^[10]

In Nguyen, Zyap remarried in 1946 or 1947 , his second wife was Dang Tai Hai. Since the 1950s, he suffered from high blood pressure and periodic headaches.

• Historic day

• Davidson F. The Vietnam War (1946-1975) = Vietnam at War: The History 1946-1975. - M .: Izografus, Eksmo, 2002 .-- S. 816.
• Kolotov V. N. The stratagem of thinking of the Vietnamese commander Vo Nguyen Zyapa as a key element of the historical victory at Dienbienf // East-West: historical and cultural almanac: 2013—2014 / ed. Acad. V. S. Myasnikov; Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences. - M .: Science - East. lit., 2014 .-- S. 80-103.
• Lanning, Michael Lee. One Hundred Great Leaders = The Military 100. - M .: Veche, 1998. - S. 480. - ISBN 5-7838-0414-2 .
• Black, Edwin F. The Master Plan for Conquest in Vietnam . // Military Review . - June 1963. - Vol. 43 - No. 6.

• Short biography of Wo Nguyen Ziapa
• Ignatiev N. The Legacy of General Ziap // "Independent Military Review" of July 14, 2000
• Photos of General Vo Nguyen Zyap