National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam
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The National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (Vietnamese Mặt Trận Dân Tộc Giải Phóng Miền Nam), also known as the Viet Cong (VC), the National Liberation Front (NLF), and as the Front National de Liberté (FNL), was the primary rebel (partisans) organization fighting the US-backed Republic of Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
The NLF claimed that it was a national front of all elements opposed to the existing government, whether communist or not. Its military organization was known as the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLA). U.S. soldiers came to refer to the NLF as "Viet Cong", (VC) from the Vietnamese term for Vietnamese Communist (Việt Nam Cộng Sản). American forces typically refered 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 NLF was formally independent of the North Vietnamese armed forces and, being a "front" organization, not all NLF members were Communists. However, as the war with the Americans escalated North Vietnamese personnel increasingly formed the military staff and officer corps of the NLF as well as directly deploying their own forces. PAVN official history refers to the NLF as "part of the PLA". Communist cadre also, from the start, formed the decision-making strata of the organization.
American soldiers and the South Vietnam government typically referred to their guerrilla opponents as the "Viet Cong".
In classic tactics of partisan warfare NLF aimed to create "liberated zones" within South Vietnam, and the US/ARVN response - big-unit, conventional warfare, was never able to cope with the guerilla infrastructure in the villages.
In 1969, the NLF formed a provisional Republic of South Vietnam which took power briefly after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and before the reunification of the country under the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976. By this time non-Communist influence in the NLF had been eliminated.
"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 NLF also included many non-military cadres, including village chiefs, village clerks, and school teachers. Many consider the term Viet Cong fairly derogatory, although its widespread use in the United States and Europe since the Vietnam War has made the term better known than the proper name of the NLF.
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 (but not all) 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 NLF and its guerrilla army, the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), 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 support from the North Vietnamese government and military.
Due to the very close ties between the National Liberation Front 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 NLF, for its part, never denied its ties to Hanoi, but always affirmed that it was an independent organization.
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 Viet Nam 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 North Vietnamese Army (Quân đội Bắc Việt).
In 1969, the National Front formed a provisional Republic of South Vietnam which took power briefly after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and before the reunification of the country under the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976.
The U.S. military complained that 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. It was also policy to hand over any and all prisoners to the Southern authorities, which doesn't absolve foreign forces of any responsiblity or war crime.
See also
Further reading
- 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 0700611754
