National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam
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Image:FNL Flag.svgThe Viet Cong, also known as the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (Vietnamese Mặt Trận Dân Tộc Giải Phóng Miền Nam), (VC), or the National Liberation Front (NLF), was an insurgent (partisan) organization fighting the Republic of Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The NLF was funded, equipped and staffed by both South Vietnamese and the army of North Vietnam.
Its military organization was known as the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF). The PLAF were, according to the official history of the (North) Vietnamese Army, strictly subordinated to the general staff in Hanoi. Their name "Viet Cong", (VC) came from the Vietnamese term for Vietnamese Communist (Việt Nam Cộng Sản). American forces typically referred to members of the NLF as "Charlie," which comes from the US Armed Forces' phonetic alphabet's pronunciation of VC ("Victor Charlie").
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Organization
The VC was nominally independent of the North Vietnamese armed forces and although the leadership of the group was communist, the NLF was also made up of others who were allied with the Front against the policies of Ngo Dinh Diem. However, as the war with the Americans escalated North Vietnamese personnel increasingly formed the military staff and officer corps of the VC as well as directly deploying their own forces. PAVN official history refers to the PLAF as "part of the PAVN". Communist cadres also, from the start, formed the majority of the decision-making strata of the organization, though non-Communists, encouraged by the initial chair, Nguyen Huu Tho, were also involved in this process.
American soldiers and the South Vietnam government typically referred to their guerrilla opponents as the Viet Cong or VC.
The VC organization grew out of the Viet Minh organization. By the time the Viet Cong began fighting the ARVN, the insurgency had a national infrastructure in the country. Rather than having to create "liberated zones" as in a classic insurgency, the VC were in control of such zones at the start of the war. The US/ARVN response - involving big-unit, conventional warfare and counter-insurgency was ineffective in part because it was fighting an insurgency with an infrastructure that in many areas was already 20 years old. The long western border of South Vietnam and the weakness of its reflected the People's War approach of Vo Nguyen Giap, who modified the writings of Mao for his purposes. But in truth, the People's War approach was abandoned after the Tet Offensive in favor of small-unit conventional warfare led by the army of North Vietnam.
In 1969, the VC formed a Provisional Revolutionary Government - PRG which after the fall of Saigon in 1975 claimed to represent South Vietnam. The provisional government never ruled any territory or exercised the functions of a government. Its principal role was to sign the instruments of unification with North Vietnam forming the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976. No non-communists were allowed to take part in the transitory PRG governement. VC "minister of justice" Truong Nhu Tang describes how cadres from the north took over the work of his ministry within days of the take-over.
"Viet Cong"
Viet Cong (Việt Cộng) was the general name used by South Vietnamese and allied soldiers in Vietnam, as well as by much of the English language media to refer to the armed insurgents fighting against the Republic of Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The name was derived from a contraction for the Vietnamese phrase Việt Nam Cộng Sản, or "Vietnamese Communist." The primary group covered by the term is the guerrilla army formally named the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), the military of the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (Vietnamese Mặt Trận Giải Phóng Miền Nam Việt Nam) or National Liberation Front (NLF). In areas under its control the VC also included political cadres, including village chiefs, village clerks, and school teachers. This expression originated with and was used by the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) government of South Vietnam under President Ngo Dinh Diem. It was originally a general term used to describe his political opponents, many of whom were Communists. Its use became widespread in Vietnam after the 1954 partition of the country between the RVN in the south and the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) in the north. The VC and its guerrilla army never used the name "Viet Cong" to refer to themselves, and always asserted that they were a national front of all anti-RVN forces, Communist or not. They received massive support from the North Vietnamese government and military.
Due to the very close ties between the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese government, some have alleged that the NLF was a puppet of the North Vietnamese. Indeed, by the end of the war only 25% of Communist forces were part of the Viet Cong, and 75% were North Vietnamese. The VC, for its part, never denied its ties to Hanoi, but claimed that it was an independent organization until long after the war. Most modern histories accept that whatever its origins, by the end of the war there was no real distinction between the NLF and the North Vietnamese army. Further, the NLF's claims to have been independent were refuted by its own members after the war.
In U.S. military usage Viet Cong was the successor term to Viet Minh, which described the forces led by Ho Chi Minh against the French for the independence of Vietnam in the First Indochina War, from 1945 to 1954; however, unlike the term Viet Minh, which described all of the forces fighting France, Viet Cong specifically referred only to the insurgent forces in South Vietnam. North Vietnam's regular army forces were described as PAVN (People's Army of Vietnam) or simply 'NVA' for North Vietnamese Army. The Viet Cong often appeared to be part of the civilian population, and thus U.S. troops could not tell the difference between the Viet Cong insurgents and peaceful civilians. During the Vietnam War, U.S. stated policy was to treat captured Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars as Enemy Prisoners of War under the Geneva Convention of 1949.
The Tet Offensive and Afterward
During the celebration of Tet in 1968, the NLF violated the implicit holiday ceasefire held between themselves and the US-RVN forces and attacked many of the main cities, provincial capitals and villages throughout South Vietnam. The US embassy in Saigon was attacked, and it appeared at first glance that the PLAF could attack anywhere with impunity. The Tet Offensive came as a surprise to the American public, who had gotten constant optimistic appraisals of the war by William Westmoreland, who, in the wake of Tet claimed that the NLF failed to achieve any of their strategic goals or hold any of their brief gains and that they achieved a "psychological victory" at best. Westmoreland's assertions have been called into question by Vietnam historians such as David Hunt and Marvin Gettleman, who point out that one of the major aims of Tet was to bring the Americans to the bargaining table but they cannot point to any particular evidence of this being the Vietnamese intent before Tet. They also point to the fact that the body count estimate, which was the standard American method by which success or failure in Vietnam was gauged, was inflated by various means, including adding civilians like those from My Lai to the total. Although the main military forces of the PLAF no doubt were hit hard by the Offensive, historians differ on the degree to which the NLF suffered as a result of Tet. But there is no doubt that after Tet the cadres of the NLF were more and more made up of Vietnamese from the north.
The public image in the West of the Tet Offensive is sometimes portrayed as a crushing failure for the US, a military giant humiliated by the NLF. This analysis, however, has not been supported by some Vietnam scholars. Instead, these academics point to the fact that the US media, during the time of Tet, was caught very much off guard by the offensive, especially in light of Westmoreland's rather faulty prognostications. Walter Cronkite, for example, famously stated on February 27, 1968, that the US was "now mired in a stalemate" in Vietnam. The idea that Vietnam could not be won, and instead should be resolved via "disengagement with honor", animated both the Johnson and Nixon regimes and led to the latter's process of "Vietnamizing" the war. Other academics point out that regardless of the ultimate military success of the US at the end of the Tet offensive, the offensive had shown that three years into the war US intelligence was inept in not being able to even detect a national uprising, that the scale of the offensive showed that the insurgency had not been defeated by the introduction of hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the US and that those supporting the war could not credibly describe their strategy for victory anymore. Rather than offering a hope for success, many supporters of the war fell back on patriotic arguments and the idea that the war had to continue on in its current form forever because a lack of success was better than an admission of failure. After Tet, even among the strongest supporters of the war there was no longer any will to expand the military commitment on the ground.
In 1969, the NLF formed the Provisional Revolutionary Government which operated until the end of the Vietnam War. But it was a powerless front organization that no real authority and no other function than propaganda. When the North Vietnamese army captured Saigon in 1975, the NLF and the PRG were set up as a legal front as part of the process of unification. The PRG never functioned as a real government in South Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon, administration was organized by the North Vietnamese Army. The country was unified under the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976.
See also
fr:Front National pour la Libération du Viêt Nam
Further reading
- Marvin Gettleman, et al. 1995. "Vietnam and America: A Documented History". Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3362-2. (See epsecially Part VII: The Decisive Year. Discussions of Tet from Westoreland, Hunt and the Pentagon papers are presented as well as Seymour Hersh on My Lai.)
- Truong Nhu Tang. 1985. "A Viet Cong Memoir". Random House. ISBN 0394743091. (See Chapter 7 on the forming of the NLF, and chapter 21 on the communist take-over in 1975.)
- Frances Fitzgerald. 1972. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0316284238. (See the description in Chapter 4. 'The National Liberation Front'.)
- Douglas Valentine. 1990. The Phoenix Program. New York: William Morrow and Company. ISBN 068809130X.
- Merle Pribbenow (transl). 2002 "Victory in Vietnam. The official history of the people´s army of Vietnam". University Press of Kansas. ISBN 0700611754ca:Front Nacional d'Alliberament del Vietnam
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