National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam
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- Vietcong leads here. For the first-person computer game, see Vietcong (computer game).
- Victor Charlie leads here. For the origin of the term, see NATO Phonetic Alphabet.
The National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (Vietnamese Mặt trận Dân tộc Giải phóng miền Nam Việt Nam), also known as the Việt Cộng pronunciation , VC, or the National Liberation Front (NLF), was an insurgent (partisan) organization fighting the Republic of Vietnam (South 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 Vietnam People's Army, strictly subordinated to the general staff in Hanoi. Their name "Việt Cộng", (VC) came from the Vietnamese term for Vietnamese Communist (Việt Nam Cộng Sản) and was popularized by the South Vietnamese government in an effort to downplay the NLF's role as a truly national, not simply communist organization. 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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[edit] Organization
The NLF was nominally independent of the North Vietnam 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 Ngô Ðình Diệm. The NLF was organized in 1960 at the direction of the Northern Communist Party, the Lao Dong, which in 1962, also formed a communist southern party, the People's Revolutionary Party (PRP). Ultimate control of the PRP, NLF and associated front organizations rested with the Northern Lao Dong party throughout the conflict. As the war with the Americans progressed, North Vietnamese personnel increasingly formed the military staff and officer corps of the NLF as well as directly deploying their own forces. Vietnam People's Army's (PAVN) official history refers to the PLAF as "part of fthe 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, Nguyễn Hữu Thọ, were also involved in this process.
American soldiers and South Vietnamese government typically referred to their guerrilla opponents as the Việt Cộng (usually mispronounced by Westerners as 'viɪt kɔŋ') or VC.
The NLF organization grew out of the Việt Minh organization. By the time the NLF 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 NLF 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 its weakness reflected the People's War approach of General Võ Nguyên Giáp, who modified the writings of Mao Zedong for his purposes. But in truth, the People's War approach was mainly abandoned after the Tet Offensive in favor of small-unit conventional warfare led by the army of North Vietnam.
In 1969, the NLF formed a Provisional Revolutionary Government - PRG which after the fall of Saigon in 1975 represented South Vietnam. The provisional government never effectively controlled any territory or exercised the functions of a government, as this was carried out by the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Its principal role was to sign the instruments of reunification with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam forming the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976. No non-communists were allowed to take part in the transitory PRG government. NLF Minister of Justice Truong Nhu Tang has described how cadres from the North took over the work of his ministry within days of the take-over.
[edit] The Tết Offensive and Afterward
During the celebration of Tết in January of 1968, the NLF violated an 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 Tết Offensive came as a surprise to the American public, who had gotten constant optimistic appraisals of the war by General William Westmoreland. In the wake of Tết, Westmoreland 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 argue that one of the major aims of Tết was to bring the Americans to the bargaining table. Although the main military forces of the PLAF no doubt suffered tremendous losses due to the Offensive, historians differ on the degree to which the NLF suffered as a result of Tết. However, there is no doubt that after Tết the cadres of the NLF were more and more made up of Vietnamese from the North.
The Tết Offensive is sometimes portrayed as a crushing failure for the US, a military giant humiliated by the NLF. This analysis, however, speaks more to the largely-unanticipated psychological effect the Offensive had on the American public, rather than any military success. The NLF and North Vietnamese had clearly stated goals in launching the Offensive, including a mass uprising of the South Vietnamese citizenry in support of the NLF. These goals were not achieved, but the US military, media and public were all caught very much off guard by the offensive, thanks largely to 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 administrations and led to the latter's process of "Vietnamizing" the war. Some academics have pointed out that regardless of the ultimate military success of the US at the end of the Tết 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 a strategy for victory. 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.
In 1969, the NLF formed the Provisional Revolutionary Government which operated until the end of the Vietnam War. But it was a front organization that had 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 reunification. The PRG never effectively functioned as a real government in South Vietnam. After the Fall/Liberation of Saigon, administration was organized by the Vietnam People's Army. The country was reunified under the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976.
[edit] See also
[edit] 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 0-394-74309-1. (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 0-316-28423-8. (See the description in Chapter 4. 'The National Liberation Front'.)
- Douglas Valentine. 1990. The Phoenix Program. New York: William Morrow and Company. ISBN 0-688-09130-X.
- Merle Pribbenow (transl). 2002 "Victory in Vietnam. The official history of the people's army of Vietnam". University Press of Kansas. ISBN 0-7006-1175-4
