I would add that this didn’t seem to be something Giap would say-—he was more involved in the tactical situation in the South, not the STRATEGIC situation in the North. It is entirely possible the quotation is accurate, but it needs to be attributed to someone else.
Well, it may have been bogus on the absolute face of it being from Giap, but it was undoubtedly true in the sense that the long-term bombing that Nixon initiated had an effect to dampen some of the will of the NVA, because it forced them to at least talk to Kissinger in Paris about peace. However, short-term bombing never works. It didn’t work when Hitler was trying it over England; it didn’t work when Clinton was bombing the Balkans (remember them wearing target clothes). Long-term did seem to work when the U.S. 8th and 10th Army Air Corps was bombing Berlin and Germany; and to a lesser extent when Curtis Lemay was doing it to Tokyo. But LBJ never seemed to realize that his “Christmas pause” in stopping Operation Rolling Thunder only steeled the North Vietnamese and made the South Vietnamese wonder about our will. I recall an old “Papa San” telling me in the fall of 1967 in DaNang (I wasn’t there long and missed Tet): “Ho Chi Minh number one, LBJ number 10!” (1 was good, 10 was bad).