The National Liberation Front’s (NLF) success in its struggle against the Government of South Vietnam (GVN) was possible only due to the combination of three key factors: the political situation in Vietnam, military-insurgent action in the South, and the nature of American domestic politics. Without each of these elements in its favour, the Vietnamese resistance movement would almost certainly have been futile. Moreover, the NLF’s recognition that these necessary conditions were inherently linked allowed it to exploit all three in its favour: with its masterful political arm, the NLF was able to ensure the continuation of its guerrilla campaign; and with this extended warfare it was able, in turn, to affect American domestic politics enough to elicit a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam was thus the instrument of revolutionary politics, an essentially Clausewitzian continuation of policy by other means. Unlike conflict in the Clausewitzian model, however, the war in South Vietnam was not a simple contest between two field armies. Instead, it was a fundamentally unconventional struggle fought by the NLF in the spirit of Mao’s revolutionary principles of war against an American force technologically superior to anything dreamed of in Clausewitz’s era.

Part I of this essay examines the nature of the NLF’s political arm, illustrating how it supported and sustained the guerrilla struggle. Part II looks at the success of the NLF’s military organisation, support and tactics, and explains how its style of warfare was tailored to generate an American political response.

Part I

A central tenet of the NLF’s resistance movement was its reliance on the support of the general population in Vietnam. This maxim was in accordance with the revolutionary principles popularised by Mao Tse-tung, who wrote as early as 1937 that “[w]ithout question, the fountainhead of guerrilla warfare is in the masses of the people.” Operating under this basic assumption, President Nguyen Huu Tho of the NLF deemed that, above all other considerations, “it is the human factor that is decisive.” In light of this philosophy, the great extent to which the NLF went to ensure the loyalty of the people of South Vietnam is hardly surprising. The NLF waged what was clearly recognised by scholars in 1969 as a “constant political offensive in the South” designed to generate support for its cause. This endeavour involved three main elements: casting the current American-backed government and its policies in a negative light, portraying itself and its own actions in a conversely positive light, and finally securing complete devotion to the revolutionary cause in the minds of as many citizens as possible.

The first of these goals was, in many cases, the most easily attained. The undemocratic and frequently brutal policies of suppression taken by the Government of South Vietnam (GVN) led even American Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara to conclude, in a memoir to President John F. Kennedy, that it could not be moved “towards moderation.” In addition, the series of coups d’état beginning with Diem’s downfall in 1963 certainly failed to build confidence in the regime’s stability. Even disregarding the effects of NLF propaganda, there was widespread “fear, uncertainty and frustration regarding the future” in South Vietnam. A clear trend in “growth of popular Vietnamese disaffection [for the South Vietnamese Government] in key segments of the elite and among broader elements of the population” had emerged by 1964. Support for the U.S. military and political presence in South Vietnam was similarly abysmal. Having already driven the French out of Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, no Vietnamese nationalist welcomed a renewed “imperialist” presence in an American form. The colossal failure of America’s Strategic Hamlet program, which relocated villagers behind barbed wire to cut them off from Vietcong influence, served to strengthen the popular anti-American resolve. In this sense, the NLF propaganda machine had much of its work already done. When NLF propagandists used terms such as “puppet repressor,” “lackey,” “henchman,” “imperialist aggressor,” and “cruel fascist” in reference to the GVN and its American supporters in order to reinforce anti-government sentiment and rationalise NLF attacks on government buildings and personnel, they could safely assume that such pronouncements would usually fall on receptive ears.

The fine line between passive aversion to the government and active support for anti-government action was aggressively pushed by the NLF. By 1964, intensive propaganda campaigns urged people to “look to the Vietcong for protection and for their future government.” Support for the NLF was portrayed as the natural answer to the American problem. Recruiters for various armed resistance groups, collectively but inaccurately termed “Vietcong” by the U.S. Military, stressed patriotism, opposition to the current government, and hatred for the Americans. In this way, in the tradition of recruiters since the French Revolution, the NLF stirred up and exploited fervent nationalism and ideology, combining them with the more pragmatic, pressing, and specific anti-American concerns. After initial training, new recruits were often expected to return to their homes and persuade friends and family members to join as well. Pro-guerrilla propaganda and recruitment techniques – often one and the same – thus worked on multiple levels, not only appealing to the Vietnamese sense of nationalism and the already-established anti-American sentiment, but to the bonds of kin and community as well.

The NLF was not content with general acquiescence to its goals or even with high recruitment numbers, however. Total and undivided support for the revolutionary cause was demanded from each guerrilla fighter, and political commissars were even supplied from the North to guarantee his or her ideological commitment to the struggle. One such political commissar states that he did everything possible “to ensure that not a single soldier should have a single doubt as to why and for whom he was fighting.” Moreover, political and ideological teachings were usually blended with military and tactical instruction, to produce not mere incompetent ideologues but confident and effective guerrilla warriors. Trinh Duc, a Village Chief, says “While the political courses were going on, I was also trained in guerrilla warfare. I learned to use a carbine, AK-47, grenades, the different kinds of mines… I also learned field tactics and studied the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy.” Tactics relevant to the South Vietnamese terrain, up-to-date techniques of resistance against an American foe, and detailed training in conventional as well as unconventional weapons usage were essential elements of the NLF training regime. Even the NLF award for bravery during the Vietnam War, the Heroic Killer of Americans medal, was pointedly explicit in terms of what was expected of its warriors. Though they lacked the vast technological and equipment advantages of their American opponents, the NLF’s guerrilla fighters were nonetheless better mentally prepared for the type of struggle they would be thrust into, and more ideologically and emotionally committed to the necessity of victory.

Though unalloyed support of the revolutionary cause was a prerequisite for its guerrilla combatants, it was also highly sought after in the general population of NLF-controlled areas in the South. The campaign to inculcate and ensure total civilian commitment to the revolution could reach extreme proportions. “Thought control” programs were devised and initiated in most of the guerrilla-controlled villages. A captured document from the zonal level in 1966 showed that a staggering 2,700 people were put through a district-level thought reform course in a three month period. War correspondent Xuan Vu writes of this NLF effort:

“What they wanted was for you to deny yourself and accept the consciousness of the Party…there was a lot of good psychological insight in what they were doing. After you had written or said something terrible about your parents or grandparents, you really felt as if you had betrayed them… you created a distance… You had broken a bond that tied you to something outside the revolution.”

This intensely psychological program aimed to minimise or eliminate any allegiance or tie that threatened the primacy of the resistance. Those who still dissented were kept in line through social pressures, coercion, force, and terror. In this way, the NLF’s system ensured that the revolution was as high a priority as possible for the people under its influence.

The NLF was quickly able to reap the benefits of such an extraordinary and virtually unanimous psychological commitment in the population centres it controlled. Public trials of “reactionary agents and spies” were held without opposition in villages, further spreading the NLF’s influence. Villagers were expected to raise food for combatants in their vicinity, to engage in labour such as transporting supplies, to pay “national defence taxes”, and to root out spies. When NLF fighters were killed in the conflict, the villages of the south proved a constant source of replacement, such that in spite of “ghastly losses – perhaps 850,000 NVA [North Vietnamese Army] and VC [Vietcong, NLF] dead between 1965-72 – the Communist forces kept increasing.” In this way, support in the villages enabled the NLF to absorb massive punishment and still remain an effective fighting force. None of this would have been possible without explicit use of force – as was usually unnecessary – had the NLF not already had the population in the palm of its hand.

The NLF’s emphasis on its soldiers’ commitment yielded impressive results as well. Combatants clearly understood a link between the military and political. Nguyen Van Thich, a VC Ranger Platoon Leader in 1967, explains that the “motto we used was “Kill the Wicked and Destroy the Oppressors to Promote Mobilization of the People.”” NLF operatives, “indoctrinated with the necessity of killing,” carried out their missions without qualms because they understood the political benefit of their actions to the revolution. Huong Van Ba, a repeat-infiltrator through the Ho Chi Minh Trail, expressed “such hatred for the enemy and such devotion to the noble cause of liberating our suppressed people that we felt we could overcome any difficulty and make any sacrifice [and, furthermore] this faith was reinforced by effective propaganda.” Sau Thuong, also operating along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, asserts that he “would rather have died in the mountains”  than fail his superiors. Born into a social matrix that considered self-sacrifice to be “a normal concomitant of the human condition,” this generation of fighters was an accordingly resilient and powerful force. U.S. General Ridgway noted admiringly that “they are used to all manner of deprivations which would be extreme hardship to our men.” Such total commitment, physical and mental, was necessary for the type of engagements in which these fighters were to be employed.

 

Part II

That the NLF could take the massive political-ideological potential it had stirred up and use it to form a cohesive resistance movement was possible due to three factors: first, the strict yet decentralised nature of its organisation kept its operations effective and resistant to compromise; second, support from North Vietnam, China, and Russia ensured the availability of resources necessary for the movement; and third, highly appropriate and effective military tactics were employed to yield maximal results on its enemy. In this way, the NLF was able to cause sufficient sustained havoc and inflict enough damage on the American forces to coerce their withdrawal.

The key feature of the NLF’s organisation was its decentralisation. Tightly organised three-man cells, the “basic unit in any communist organization, in Viet-Nam or elsewhere”, frequently operated independently, privy only to information necessary for their immediate objectives. Special activities cells, operating in rural and urban areas, often remained non-operational and completely segregated from any NLF activity until ordered to strike, when they carried out special tasks such as assassination and kidnapping. The NLF tried to ensure that its sapper cells, which carried out attacks on targets including government buildings, communication and transportation centres, port and storage facilities, vehicles, and key public figures, were similarly unlikely to reveal compromising information: sappers were picked from the most ideologically devoted members of the NLF, and information given to these cells was relevant only to immediate targets. This tight organisational structure and strict control of information ensured that when an NLF cell was captured, it could not reveal the location or activities of other units.

For larger objectives, cells were combined into groups, but even these were designed to limit damage resulting from capture. For example, paramilitary units (semi-professional groups of civilian operating in their home territory) were trained to operate in teams of up to nine cells when undertaking sabotage missions, carrying out small strikes, performing ordered executions, and spreading pro-NLF propaganda. If compromised, however, a member of such a cell could only betray other members of the small attack group, usually fewer than thirty people.

Travelling up the chain of command, the decentralisation of NLF control becomes even more evident. Even analysts who stressed the importance of an external element of communist control, such as Robert O’Neill, recognised that guerrilla operations “mounted in 1959 and afterwards could not have been directly controlled from Hanoi because the scope of these operations was too localised.” O’Neill called the control exercised by Hanoi over the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) as limited as that between the Australian Government and General Blamey in the Middle East during the Second World War. The organisational structure of NLF units varied so much between regions that, according to Douglas Pike, another contemporary analyst, “what is a common pattern in the Mekong Delta may be unknown in the Hue area.” With such a high level of decentralisation and local autonomy, it was difficult for the U.S. Military and ARVN to make accurate or useful generalisations about the nature of insurgency, and even harder to follow the NLF chain of command to identify leaders or key personnel.

To add to American confusion, the NLF was not the only resistance movement in the South at the time. Completely separate organisations, imprecisely bundled with the NLF as “Vietcong” by the Americans, operated throughout the South. The People’s Liberation Armed Force and the People’s Revolutionary Party are but two examples. The organisation of resistance was so decentralised and locality-specific that even understanding the nature of their enemy was an all-but-impossible task for the U.S. and GVN.

Though the NLF retained strict control over its own operations, it was thoroughly dependent on indirect support from North Vietnam, which was in turn vitally sustained by military and economic aid from China and Russia. By the end of 1966, North Vietnamese imports by sea had risen to about one million metric tons, arriving in Haiphong from Soviet and Chinese ports. An additional 420,000 tons came in to Hanoi by rail from China in 1966. By 1967, imports had risen 45 percent, with one quarter coming from China and the remaining three quarters from the U.S.S.R. and Soviet Bloc nations. Without Soviet and Chinese support, North Vietnam would have been isolated, more open to attack, and of less use to the NLF in the South.

In turn, the North concentrated its resources on aiding the resistance in the South. An estimated ten thousand tons of war materiel per week was “trucked, biked, boated, and carried down the [Ho Chi Minh] Trail” to aid the NLF during peak periods. Many personnel in COSVN headquarters and a large proportion of the military supplies used by the troops under its control were lent by North Vietnam. Furthermore, the NLF could rely on actions of the NVA to provide diversions in times of crisis. In mid-1967, for example, North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap saved the bulk of the NLF in War Zone C from destruction with his series of offensives “aimed at distracting American attention from the southern provinces before Westmoreland had time to establish some degree of permanent control”, causing a significant concentration of U.S. resources to be diverted to the Dak To and Kontum areas further North. This North Vietnamese support that the NLF had come to rely on was virtually guaranteed to continue unabated when American officials, fearing Soviet or Chinese retaliation, publicly and repeatedly announced a policy of non-involvement in the North during the early Johnson era.

However, regardless of the level of support from external sources, the success of the NLF movement depended overwhelmingly on its performance in combat. From a purely tactical point of view, of course, the NLF lost virtually every engagement to which it committed itself. Post-battle casualty counts, though usually confused by the Vietnamese practise of carrying dead and badly wounded off field, went overwhelmingly in the Americans’ favour. U.S. forces often found that they could patrol enemy territory without being engaged. When the conflict is viewed not in terms of tactical victory or defeat, however, the NLF’s strategic strengths become apparent: in a war of constant attrition, the guerrilla fighters were able to absorb heavy punishment as long as they inflicted noticeable damage on their enemy. The NLF’s success was not due to any military prowess or astounding victory, for it had neither. It was achieved simply by keeping up a steady hammering of attacks while simultaneously refusing to be drawn out in any large numbers.

In keeping with this general doctrine, the NLF fought only where it knew it was strong. This meant that, just as Mao had realised in China more than two decades earlier, the rural areas were of primary importance. By 1964, the NLF had established considerable control over the countryside, levying taxes in 41 of the 44 provinces and operating in 80 percent of the area of South Vietnam. As has been established in Part I, this led to substantial political-ideological support, essential to the NLF throughout the conflict.

However, the NLF’s actions in rural areas were not limited to political action. Whenever they entered these areas, Americans forces frequently found themselves under attack regardless of their immense technological superiority. The well-known NLF tactic – “Grasp the Belt of the GI and Fight Him” – was taken to a near-literal level, countering American fire superiority for the staggeringly straightforward reason that a commander could not call an artillery or air-strike on his own position. This aggressive tactic was used to great success on December 9th, 1964, when a group of guerrillas armed only with light infantry weapons attacked a U.S. amphibious tank group at such close quarters that “the heavy tank weapons could not be angled sharply to fire back”. That all fourteen tanks were destroyed is a testament to the effectiveness of the NLF’s extreme approach to combat.

American technological superiority was similarly useless against the NLF’s most basic weapon: the booby trap. From bodies wired with captured mines to camouflaged holes filled with sharpened bamboo sticks, booby traps accounted for one fifth of American wounds in South Vietnam. With such invisible danger all around, patrols made use of the sarcastically labelled (unofficial) tactic of “search and avoidance” just as often as they did search and destroy. The booby trap technique was also extremely cheap in resources, and helped to account for the fact that the NLF needed only about 60 tons per day to continue fighting, an impressive figure when compared with the 32,000 tons used by American forces.

To counter U.S. high explosives, frequently in the form of mines or air attack, NLF fighters created various ploys: they would send villagers to find suspicious objects and poke them with long sticks from behind bamboo shields; they would drag logs and chains to set off mines and foul sensor; they would, create false truck convoys with fake headlights; and they would construct dummy supply dumps and bridges. More than one thousand anti-aircraft weapons were deployed in-country, and camouflage was raised “to an art form.” In heavily bombed areas, the guerrillas simply dug tunnels that provided protection from anything but a direct hit, such that “One learned to feel very safe with a few feet of earth overhead during the bombing raids.” These tunnels were also extremely useful for launching undetected surprise attacks. An NLF manual explains that though “the enemy may be several times superior to us in strength and modern weapons,” the guerrillas still had the advantage “because we will launch surprise attacks from within the underground tunnels.” According to Village Chief Trinh Duc, the Cu Chi Tunnels around Saigon served as defence, as a trap for enemy troops, as a supply area, and as a staging area for recruits coming into the jungle from Saigon. The Cu Chi Tunnels were, as was discovered after the war, “an underground city,” and of vital importance to the NLF.

Even when tunnels were not available, the NLF was still highly competent in avoiding destruction. U.S. Major-General William DuPuy observed that when Vietcong losses were “too high…they just backed off and waited.” So elusive was the enemy that Brigadier General Willard Pearson wrote in a 1966 that “our biggest problem has been and remains one of target acquisition.” When by February of 1967 General Westmoreland’s Operation Junction City began to threaten War Zone C, the COSVN withdrew into neighbouring Cambodia. Richard Stevens, an American engaged in combat in 1969-1970 in Quant Tri Province, writes cynically that “The NVA and VC almost always escaped on these operations, but we massacred multitudes of flora and fauna.” Frustrated reports, such as this one from the 1st Marine Corps Reconnaissance Battalion, were typical: “Called fire mission with unobserved results due to enemy movement into treeline, darkness, and terrain.” The NLF simply refused to fight on American terms, and was as a result able to remain active for the duration of the war.

In fact, it was the NLF’s ability to evade full engagement and yet continue to harass the U.S. forces all over the South that proved to be the crucial element of its strategy. A constant “slow grind of guerrilla warfare” wore the Americans down in a seemingly endless war of attrition. Two decades earlier, Mao had written that the “establishment of innumerable anti-Japanese bases behind the enemy’s lines will force him to fight unceasingly in many places at once,” and that the Japanese commander “thus endlessly expends his resources.” The NLF knew this strategy could succeed in Vietnam if given enough time, and thus they never swerved from it. North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong was aware of the situation when he rhetorically asked Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times “How long do you Americans want to fight? One year, two years, three years, five years, ten years, twenty years,” adding that “[w]e will be glad to accommodate you.” Ho Chi Minh informed President Lyndon Johnson that the war might take 15 years, but eventually Vietnam would prevail. After the war, Northern General Giap wrote that the Americans had been forced to fight, instead of the blitzkrieg they desired, a “protracted war [which was] a big defeat for them.” That the NLF could wage a protracted war was essential to their success.

Just like the top leaders in the North, even the lowliest guerrilla fighters in the South were aware that “they were in it for the duration.” So deep was their conviction that many lived in their underground tunnels for months or years at a time. Primary accounts from the South during the war show that, for the Vietnamese, “this was a struggle that didn’t simply punctuate their lives, it embraced them.” The popular commitment in South Vietnam to fight for as long as necessary was a strength that America, on the other hand, did not possess. Analysts in the U.S. at the time recognised the importance of a protracted conflict. Pike wrote in 1970 that “time, especially in terms of decades, is on the side of the communists.” Historians agree today that time was the crucial factor; Robert Schulzinger, for example, has noted that “the longer the war, the better [the NLF's] chances.”

Even General Westmoreland recognised the NLF’s strategy as “a practical and clever one to continue a protracted war and inflict unacceptable casualties on our forces” but was nonetheless unable to counter it. When the Americans halted their increase in personnel at approximately 500,000, rather than the one million that was “a prerequisite for dominating the whole of the war theatre,” the U.S. command was simply unable to win a conventional war. The war of attrition that necessarily ensued went in the NLF’s favour, because, unlike the Vietnamese, the American public was unwilling to undertake a total war, and the American economy “was not a bottomless well.” George Gallup, Louis Harris, and Oliver Quayle, the major independent pollsters at the time, told President Johnson that “you will continue to go down until there is some movement – either toward a military victory or toward a negotiated settlement.” Prophetically, O’Neill wrote in 1969 that “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the outcome of the war will be decided by political factors in the United States.” More recently, Schulzinger bluntly explained that “the end had to be in sight, otherwise public opinion would not tolerate the continuation of the effort.” U.S. public opinion, affected directly by the nature of the NLF’s war in Vietnam, was thus a crucial factor in American withdrawal.

Karl von Clausewitz’s insistence on the relationship between war and policy more than one hundred years earlier became hard fact once again, in 1968, with the opening of the massive Tet Offensive in January and its resulting impact on American policy. This NLF-NVA joint campaign truly represented the final straw in the Vietnam War, ruining any expectations that the war would end any time soon and solidly convincing the bulk of the American public that they were mired in an intolerable conflict. Though the NLF failed to achieve its tactical objectives, it finally succeeded in its strategy of creating a psychological shock great enough to “affect U.S. public opinion against continuation of the war.” Though its ranks were decimated in the Offensive, the NLF’s long experience with guerrilla warfare ensured that its hit-and-run attacks continued unabated. The fact that the war continued even after the Tet Offensive fuelled President Richard Nixon’s “consuming passion in 1971 and 1972” to win re-election by ending the war. By January of 1973, the Paris Peace Accords ensured that American forces would suspend offensive action and unilaterally withdraw all of their troops.

For the NLF, the war against American forces in Vietnam was both a military and political struggle. Expert manipulation of the political situation in Vietnam created an impressive resource pool and support base for revolutionary war. The war itself, fought with Mao’s principles in mind, was designed specifically to generate an American political response in an essentially Clausewitzian manner, thus ensuring eventual U.S. withdrawal.

Abbreviated Terms

ARVN = Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnamese Army)

COSVN = Central Office for South Vietnam (NLF command group)

GVN = Government of South Vietnam

NFL = see NLF

NLF = National Liberation Front (same as VC)

NVA = North Vietnamese Army

PLAF = People’s Liberation Armed Forces

PAVN = People’s Army of Vietnam (same as NVA)

PRP = People’s Revolutionary Party

VC = Vietcong (same as NLF)

Vietnamese Names

Ho Chi Minh = North Vietnamese President

Huong Van Ba = infiltrator in Ho Chi Minh Trail

Ngo Dinh Diem = President of the Republic of (South) Vietnam, 1955-1963

Nguyen Huu Tho = President of NLF in South Vietnam

Nguyen Van Thich = NLF Ranger Platoon Leader

Pham Van Dong = North Vietnamese Premier

Sau Thuong = political officer who travelled the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Trinh Duc = a village chief who fought for the NLF

Vo Nguyen Giap = ranking North Vietnamese military commander during the war

Xuan Vu = South Vietnamese war correspondent

Foreign Names

Clausewitz, Karl von = Prussian soldier, military historian and influential military theorist (1780-1831)

DuPuy, William = U.S. Major-General operating in South Vietnam

Johnson, Lyndon B. = U.S. President, 1963-1969

Kennedy, John F. = U.S. President, 1961-1963

Mao Tse-tung = Chairman of the Communist Party of China, 1945-1976

McNamara, Robert = U.S. Secretary of Defence, 1961-1968

Mansfield, Mike = Democratic member of U.S. House of Representatives, 1943-1953, and U.S. Senate, 1961-1977

Nixon, Richard M. = U.S. President, 1969-1974

Pearson, Willard = Brigadier General, Commanding officer of the 1st Bridage, 101st Airborne Division

Westmoreland, William = Senior U.S. General in Vietnam, 1964-1968, and U.S. Army Chief of Staff, 1968-1972