Throughout his revolutionary career, General Hoang Van Thai was entrusted by the Party, State, and Military with many significant positions. Regardless of any positions, the General consistently demonstrated himself to be a talented military commander, brilliantly exemplifying the qualities of “a general’s ethics” as taught by Uncle Ho, making substantial contributions to our Party and nation’s revolutionary cause.

General Hoang Van Thai - A talented military commander

General Hoang Van Thai (birth name Hoang Van Xiem) was born on 1 May 1915, in An Khang village, Dai Hoang canton (now Tay An commune, Tien Hai district, Thai Binh province). Enlightened by the revolutionary cause at an early age, he joined the workers’ struggle movement at 18 and was admitted to the Indochinese Communist Party at 23. In 1944, he was assigned to take part in organising the Vietnam Propaganda Liberation Army Team, responsible for intelligence work and operations. After the success of the August Revolution, President Ho Chi Minh tasked him with establishing the General Staff and holding the position of Chief of the General Staff.

The Party Committee of the 1950 Border Campaign with General Hoang Van Thai as a member (file photo)

In preparation for the national war of resistance, he applied his practical experience of combat leadership in Hai Phong to commanding the Hanoi front. Accordingly, he directed the establishment of an inter-connected battle formation, arranging forces into multiple areas to pin down and wear out French troops for two full months, initially thwarting their plan of “rapid attack, rapid victory”. Entering the protracted resistance, with his sharp military thinking, he directed the General Staff to give advice to the Party Central Committee Standing Board and the Central Military Commission (CMC) on developing local armed forces and militia guerrillas. He defined the operational methods for main force units and local armed forces, significantly contributing to the development of guerrilla warfare. In late 1947, facing a large-scale French offensive against the Viet Bac revolutionary base, he recommended the High Command to issue orders to the entire military and nation, implement operational plans, and assign tasks and operational areas to units on the battlefield. Appointed as Commander of the Bac Kan - Route 3 Front, under his command, our forces won multiple victories at Cho Moi and Deo Giang, contributing to the Viet Bac Autumn - Winter Victory of 1947. In recognition of these significant contributions, during the Military’s first conferment of general ranks (January 1948), President Ho Chi Minh signed the decision to promote him to the rank of Major General.

In late 1950, as Chief of Staff of the Border Campaign, Major General Hoang Van Thai advised the Campaign’s Party Committee and Command to correctly select the main objectives, directions, and areas of attack, to concentrate firepower for key battles, and to creatively apply the “attack strongpoints to destroy reinforcements” approach, thereby contributing to the campaign’s complete victory. This “marked a step forward in staff work, operational art, and campaign command of our Military”.

With the ambition to regain the initiative and end the war “honourably,” French colonialists appointed General Navarre as commander-in-chief of the expeditionary force in Indochina, choosing the Northwest as the main battlefield. They formulated a plan to concentrate strong mobile forces and launch attacks aimed at eliminating our main forces. Firmly grasping this plan, Major General Hoang Van Thai directed agencies of the General Staff to focus on studying and closely monitoring the situation. He developed a meticulous 1953 - 1954 Winter - Spring operational plan, promptly assisting the CMC in recommending the Politburo to select the Northwest as the main direction of attack, with other directions being diversionary. This made the enemy disperse their forces to deal with our attacks, gradually foiling the “Navarre Plan”. During the Dien Bien Phu Campaign, as Chief of Staff of the Campaign, he offered many insightful opinions on the deployment and use of forces, the selection of breakthrough directions, tactics, organisation, coordination between the infantry and the artillery force, operational coordination between various battlefields, and logistics and technical support, thus contributing to achieving the “world-renowned, earth-shattering” Dien Bien Phu victory of the Vietnamese nation, gloriously ending the resistance war against French colonialists.

When appointed as Chief of the General Department of Military Training of the Vietnam People’s Army (VPA), he directed military training work of the entire Military and directly supervised the operations of military schools. In this position, he made significant contributions to building a standardised VPA, instilling discipline, and enhancing the combat capabilities of the armed forces.

Comrade Hoang Van Thai (on the left) reports the South battlefield situation to General Vo Nguyen Giap (file photo)

In preparation for the 1968 Tet General Offensive and Uprising, in October 1967, he was appointed as Deputy Secretary of the Central Office for South Vietnam, Deputy Secretary of the Southern Military Commission, and Commander of the Southern Command. As a highly experienced general, alongside his comrades in the Central Office, the Southern Military Commission, and the Southern Command, he led and directed the Southern Staff Department to develop operational plans. Concurrently, he directly participated in commanding the attacks during the 1968 Tet General Offensive and Uprising, and later defeated enemy operations, such as “Total Victory 1-71”, “Chenla II” (1971), and the Nguyen Hue Offensive Campaign (1972), among others.

After the Paris Peace Accords on ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam in 1973, he returned to the position of First Deputy Chief of the General Staff, responsible for operations and battlefield support. Grounded on his operational experience from the Southern battlefield, together with the agencies of the General Staff, he studied and finalised strategic operational plans, allowing the entire Party, People, and VPA to victoriously carry out the 1975 Spring General Offensive and Uprising.

Following the liberation of the South and national reunification, the CMC and the Ministry of National Defence assigned him to directly oversee the development of the Strategic Operational Plan for the Defence of the Socialist Fatherland nationwide. Together with the collective leadership of the General Staff and its agencies, he progressively refined strategic operational plans. He adjusted the deployment of forces and resources for agencies and units throughout the VPA, aligning them with the national defence strategy. This involved building all-people national defence and a people’s war posture, developing a revolutionary, standardised, elite, gradually modernised VPA, establishing defensive zones, and enhancing the three-category armed forces’ combat readiness and capability.

An outstanding student of President Ho Chi Minh

Entrusted by Uncle Ho with organising and building the General Staff - “the Party’s critical military agency, the VPA’s nerve centre, responsible for building a strong VPA, training proficient soldiers, having clear insights of both the enemy and ourselves, devising clever stratagems and sound plans, and organising command to be seamless, secure, swift, timely, and accurate to defeat all enemies”, General Hoang Van Thai always bore in mind Uncle Ho’s advice. He focused on developing the General Staff from an initial body of only eight members into an outstanding strategic staff and operational command apparatus for the Party Central Committee, the CMC, and the Ministry of National Defence, quickly establishing a system of staff agencies at all levels across the VPA. With his strategic vision, he consistently prioritised building and training main force units to be comprehensively strong in terms of politics, ideology, organisation, discipline, and tactics, ensuring that they were properly equipped and supplied. This helped create “iron fists” capable of executing crucial, decisive key battles and strategic campaigns, thereby shifting the tide of war in our favour. Comrade Hoang Van Thai was a brilliant general of large-scale joint campaigns, a talented commander of Vietnamese people’s war. In the General’s strategic thinking, the offensive blow of the main force units in a campaign must always be accompanied by the offensive posture of local armed forces across the entire battlefield; military attacks must always be combined with mass uprisings, and military struggle must always go hand in hand with political struggle.  

In his career, directly mentored by President Ho Chi Minh, General Hoang Van Thai always remembered the President’s teachings: “Military affairs without politics are like a tree without roots, not only useless but also harmful”. Accordingly, the General attached great importance to building the Military politically and ensuring the Party’s absolute, direct, all-round leadership over the VPA as the decisive factor in our Military’s construction, combat, maturity, and victory process. At the same time, he resolutely combated wrong views of imperialism and revisionism regarding the laws of war, the absolutist views on weaponry and equipment, and the denial of the role of the political and spiritual factor and the role of the masses in warfare, and so forth.

The General was both a talented military organiser and a notable military theorist of our VPA. Under the direct guidance of President Ho Chi Minh, the “Military Affairs Review” (now the “National Defence Journal”), for which he was responsible, published its first issue in April 1948. It promptly disseminated the combat experiences of our Military and people in the resistance war against French colonial aggression, laying the groundwork for the formation of our Military’s first military theory journal. After each campaign and every battle, he promptly directed the work of combat summary and assessment, seriously evaluating successes as well as shortcomings in the process of organising and conducting combat. From this, he extracted lessons learned and developed theories on strategic direction, operational art, and tactics. The General made many important contributions to military science research, military history, and war summarisation, and the establishment of the field of Vietnamese Military History. He directly compiled numerous works and military theses, presiding over many reviews and studies on Vietnamese military history and art, providing many documents and research projects for troop training, and so forth. These are assets of immense value to the cause of VPA building, national defence consolidation, and Fatherland protection.

From a patriotic young man participating in revolutionary activities, directly mentored by President Ho Chi Minh, with his own endeavour, General Hoang Van Thai became a talented military commander of our VPA. He was profoundly loyal to the Fatherland, maintaining unwavering devotion to his people, comrades, and fellow soldiers; he was a general of comprehensive talent and virtue, a true embodiment of “wisdom, courage, humanity, trustworthiness, integrity, and loyalty”.

Sr. Col. LE THANH BAI, PhD

Vietnam Institute for Defence Strategy and History