Viet Cong (VC)

The Viet Cong was the military branch of the National Front for the Liberation of the South, or National Liberation Front, a North Vietnamese communist organization that worked to overthrow the South Vietnamese government and unify Vietnam under communism during the Vietnam War (1955–1975). The Viet Cong was mostly a guerilla force, or one composed of irregular soldiers. The army used hit-and-run tactics to overcome the forces of South Vietnam and their American allies throughout the war. The ability of the Viet Cong to hide among Vietnamese civilians made defeating them difficult, and an exhausted United States finally left Vietnam in the early 1970s. North Vietnam captured South Vietnam in 1975, thus uniting the country. The Viet Cong, and the larger National Liberation Front, dissolved shortly thereafter.

Background

The origins of the Viet Cong, and of the Vietnam War itself, lay in the Vietnamese nationalist movement begun principally by Vietnamese communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. Born in 1890, Ho had trained in organizing communist revolutions in the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union and China. He planned to return to Vietnam and declare the country free of French colonial rule, which had been established in the late nineteenth century. Ho formed the Viet Minh, a Vietnamese independence organization, in 1941. The organization then spent four years fighting Japan, which had invaded Vietnam during World War II (1939–1945). In 1945, Ho declared Vietnam an independent nation.

France went to war with the Viet Minh in 1946 but was defeated in 1954. Peace talks between the two combatants led to a compromise that allowed Vietnam to be partitioned into the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or North Vietnam, a communist state, and the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam, a Western-style republic supported by France and its allies, including the United States.

Ngo Dinh Diem, who became the first president of South Vietnam in 1955, was fiercely anti-communist. The US government shared his views and materially assisted him in cleansing South Vietnam of communist sympathizers. Diem ordered his military to arrest any South Vietnamese citizens believed to be supporters of North Vietnam. About 100,000 people were arrested over the next few years, and many of these were later tortured and killed.

By the late 1950s, opponents of Diem's oppressive government had organized themselves into a fighting force and began assaulting South Vietnamese government officials as a means of resistance. The militia eventually started attacking South Vietnamese army units. In December of 1960, Diem's enemies in South Vietnam, with aid from the Viet Minh in North Vietnam, formally united as the National Front for the Liberation of the South, known simply as the National Liberation Front (NLF). The group's goal was to mimic the Viet Minh's actions against the French by ridding South Vietnam of Diem and his Western allies, whom the NLF saw as colonizers.

The NLF claimed its members were both communists and non-communists, but both Diem and the United States believed the organization was simply a South Vietnamese branch of North Vietnam's communist government and military. This was in fact the case, and Diem referred derisively to the NLF as Viet Cong, a shortened version of the Vietnamese phrase Viet Nam Cong San, or "Vietnamese communists."

In the midst of the Cold War (1947– 1991) with the communist Soviet Union, the United States believed the fall of any democratic country to communism would encourage other communists around the world to overthrow their democratic governments. Seeking to contain the communist threat, President John F. Kennedy began building up the United States' military presence in South Vietnam to defend the country against the Viet Cong. By the mid-1960s, the United States had committed to all-out war in Vietnam.

Overview

Initially, the conditions of the Vietnam War appeared to favor the United States. The American military brought a wealth of state-of-the-art combat equipment to the conflict. These included B-52 bombers, artillery weapons, tanks, helicopters, advanced firearms, and chemicals such as the flammable liquid napalm and the herbicide Agent Orange.

The Viet Cong had no such weaponry. They were a guerilla force that depended only on their light firearms and knowledge of their country to outmaneuver the Americans. Overcoming the Viet Cong's guerilla warfare tactics proved to be one of the United States' primary obstacles in fighting the Vietnam War.

Guerilla warfare avoids engaging enemies in open combat. Instead, Viet Cong soldiers believed they could gradually wear down the US military by hiding in Vietnam's dense jungles and launching surprise attacks against passing US forces. Once they inflicted their damage on the Americans, the Viet Cong scattered and were soon hidden in the jungles again.

One of the Viet Cong's chief tactics was the planting of booby traps throughout the jungles to surprise unsuspecting US forces. These traps ranged from landmines to covered pits with sharp spikes at the bottom. The Viet Cong sometimes covered the spike tips with unsanitary material, so anyone who fell on the spikes and survived would then become infected.

One of the most dangerous missions Americans had in fighting the Viet Cong was clearing the organization's complex tunnel system. The Viet Cong used more than 200 miles of underground tunnels to transport supplies south from North Vietnam. American soldiers assigned to infiltrate these tunnels were known as tunnel rats. They could never tell whether the tunnels they were about to crawl into had been booby trapped with grenades or spikes.

Another of the Viet Cong's guerilla tactics was simply to blend into the Vietnamese civilian population by wearing plain clothes and moving about in civilian villages. US forces were unable to tell where their enemies were, and their suspicions about the Viet Cong hiding in plain sight ultimately drove them to destroy civilian settlements and kill many innocent Vietnamese people.

However, the Viet Cong remained a trained fighting force and sometimes directly attacked enemy targets. For example, the 1968 Tet Offensive saw the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army raid and hold more than 100 South Vietnamese cities, although US and South Vietnamese forces ultimately pushed them back after much destruction and loss of life.

By the early 1970s, US government officials realized the Vietnam War would not be won without risking the lives of many more American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians. The 1973 Paris Peace Accords between the United States and North Vietnam led to the United States' withdrawal from Vietnam. The North Vietnamese army captured the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon in 1975, thus uniting the country under communism and ending the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong and the NLF soon disbanded.

Bibliography

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"Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969)." BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic‗figures/ho‗chi‗minh.shtml. Accessed 30 May 2017.

"1960: National Liberation Front Formed." History, 2009, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/national-liberation-front-formed. Accessed 30 May 2017.

"People & Events: Paris Peace Talks." PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh//amex/honor/peopleevents/e‗paris.html. Accessed 30 May 2017.

"Reasons for US Failure in Defeating the Vietcong." BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/education/guides/zv7bkqt/revision/3. Accessed 30 May 2017.

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"Vietcong Military Tactics." BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/education/guides/zv7bkqt/revision/4. Accessed 30 May 2017.

"Vietnam War History." History, 2009, www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-history. Accessed 30 May 2017.