National Liberation Front for South Vietnam
| Việt Cộng | |
|---|---|
| Participant in the Vietnam War | |
The flag of the Viet Cong, adopted in 1960, is a variation on the flag of North Vietnam.
|
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| Active | 21 July 1954 – 2 July 1976 |
| Ideology |
Communism Marxism–Leninism Left-wing nationalism Vietnamese nationalism Ho Chi Minh Thought Anti-revisionism |
| Groups | National Liberation Front for Southern Vietnam Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam (PRG) People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam (PLAF) Alliance of National Democratic and Peace Forces Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) |
| Leaders |
PLAF Commander
COSVN Party Secretary
NLF
PRG
|
| Headquarters |
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| Area of operations | Indochina, with a focus on South Vietnam |
| Originated as | Viet Minh |
| Became | Vietnam Fatherland Front |
| Allies | North Vietnam, Soviet Union, China |
| Opponents |
South Vietnam United States United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races (FULRO) |
| Battles and wars | See full list |
The Việt Cộng (Vietnamese: [vîət kə̂wŋmˀ]), also known as the National Liberation Front, was a political organization with its own army – People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam (PLAF) – in South Vietnam and Cambodia, that fought the United States and South Vietnamese governments, eventually emerging on the winning side. It had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized peasants in the territory it controlled. Many soldiers were recruited in South Vietnam, but others were attached to the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), the regular North Vietnamese army. During the war, communists and anti-war spokesmen insisted the Việt Cộng was an insurgency indigenous to the South, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of Hanoi. Although the terminology distinguishes northerners from the southerners, communist forces were under a single command structure set up in 1958.
North Vietnam established the National Liberation Front on December 20, 1960, to foment insurgency in the South. Many of the Việt Cộng's core members were volunteer "regroupees", southern Viet Minh who had resettled in the North after the Geneva Accord (1954). Hanoi gave the regroupees military training and sent them back to the South along the Ho Chi Minh trail in the early 1960s. The NLF called for southern Vietnamese to "overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists" and to make "efforts toward the peaceful unification". The People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam (PLAF)'s best-known action was the Tet Offensive, a massive assault on more than 100 South Vietnamese urban centers in 1968, including an attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The offensive riveted the attention of the world's media for weeks, but also overextended the Việt Cộng. Later communist offensives were conducted predominantly by the North Vietnamese. The organisation was dissolved in 1976 when North and South Vietnam were officially unified under a communist government.
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