THE MAN WHO PLANNED THE OFFENSIVE

IT is one of those little ironies of fate that General Vo Nguyen Giap's name contains the Vietnamese words for force (Vo) and armor (Giap). The commander of North Viet Nam's armed forces and the overlord of the Viet Cong, he is a dangerous and wily foe who has become something of a legend in both Viet Nams for his stunning defeat of the French at Dienbienphu. He is one of the principal developers--along with Mao Tse-tung and Cuba's late Che Guevara--of the art of guerrilla warfare, a tactician of such talents that U.S. military experts have compared him with German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. "You know when he's in charge," said a top Pentagon official last week. "You can feel him there." Yet Giap had no formal training as a soldier. "The only military academy I have been to," he boasted after Dienbienphu, "is that of the bush."

Giap, 56, was not born to the bush. The son of a poor but educated landholder in what is now North Viet Nam, he was sent to an exclusive college in the old imperial capital of Hue, got a law degree from the French-run University of Hanoi and finally emerged as a history teacher at Hanoi's Thang Long School. His idol, even then, was Napoleon. "He could step to the blackboard," one of his former students recalls, "and draw in the most minute detail every battle plan of Napoleon." But his admiration for the French stopped there. A fervent Vietnamese patriot, he had joined an anti-French clandestine organization when he was only 14, later became a member of Viet Nam's fledgling Communist Party.

In 1939, the French banned the party, and Giap--together with scores of other Communists--fled to China. There he met Ho Chi Minh and became a charter member of a group that the French will long remember: the Viet Minh. His assignment, based largely on his blackboard battlegrounds, was to organize Ho's ragtag guerrillas into a fighting army. That was in 1941, and Giap has been in charge of the army ever since.

Giap is an ascetic man who neither smokes nor drinks, wears baggy, high-collared uniforms, and frequently goes about shod in sandals made from rubber tires. Yet there are streaks of vanity in him. Because of his short stature (5 ft.), he likes to stand on boxes to deliver his speeches. On visits to his troops, he is liable to shuck his uniform, four-starred helmet and all, and show up dressed conspicuously in civilian clothes. He is a ruthless taskmaster, utterly contemptuous of the value of human life--even that of his own troops. "Every minute, thousands of men die all over the world," he tells his officers. "The life and death of human beings means nothing."

Giap's life has not been easy. He married in 1938 and fathered a girl, but his wife was arrested by the French and died in prison while he was in China; he has since remarried. An emotional man whose temper often got the better of his cool--and earned him the nickname of "The Volcano and the Snow"--he has, at times, been put down by Ho. An outburst against a French general in 1945 cost him a place on the negotiating team that tried to win independence from France at the end of World War II. A running feud with two powerful Politburo members--whose pro-Peking sentiments were resented by the strongly nationalistic Giap--kept him well down in Hanoi's Communist pecking order. Although he is North Viet Nam's Defense Minister, military commander and Vice Premier--and a popular hero second only to Ho Chi Minh--Giap has still not risen above sixth place in his party's official hierarchy.

According to the evidence available, in fact, his total command of the current Communist offensive in South Viet Nam was accorded him quite by accident. One of his Politburo archfoes, Nguyen Chi Thanh, who had shared control of operations in the South, died last summer--of what Hanoi describes as a heart attack but U.S. officers refer to as "B-52-itis" caught in the South. Thanh's death left Giap unchallenged, and he has spent a large part of the past six months planning the New Year's offensive that began last week. j

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.