Origin (1959) By the terms of the
Geneva Accord (1954), which ended the
Indochina War, France and the Viet Minh agreed to a truce and to a separation of forces. The Viet Minh had become the government of North Vietnam, and military forces of the communists regrouped there. Military forces of the non-communists regrouped in
South Vietnam, which became a separate state. Elections on reunification were scheduled for July 1956. A divided Vietnam angered Vietnamese nationalists, but it made the country less of a threat to China. Chinese Premier
Zhou Enlai negotiated the terms of the ceasefire with France and then imposed them on the Viet Minh. About 90,000 Viet Minh were evacuated to the North while 5,000 to 10,000 cadre remained in the South, most of them with orders to refocus on political activity and agitation. Within a few months, the Viet Cong had been driven into remote swamps. The success of this campaign inspired U.S. President
Dwight Eisenhower to dub Diệm the "miracle man" when he visited the U.S. in May 1957. In March 1956, southern communist leader
Lê Duẩn presented a plan to revive the insurgency entitled "The Road to the South" to the other members of the
Politburo in Hanoi. He argued adamantly that war with the United States was necessary to achieve unification. Lê Duẩn's blueprint for revolution in the South was approved in principle, but implementation was conditional on winning international support and on modernizing the army, which was expected to take at least until 1959. Nguyễn Hữu Xuyên was assigned military command in the South, An assassination campaign, referred to as "extermination of traitors" or "armed propaganda" in communist literature, began in April 1957. Tales of sensational murder and mayhem soon crowded the headlines. French scholar
Bernard Fall published an influential article in July 1958 which analyzed the pattern of rising violence and concluded that a new war had begun. The first arms delivery via the trail, a few dozen rifles, was completed in August 1959. Two regional command centers were merged to create the
Central Office for South Vietnam (
Trung ương Cục miền Nam), a unified communist party headquarters for the South. The "2d Liberation Battalion" ambushed two companies of South Vietnamese soldiers in September 1959, the first large unit military action of the war. The fiery declarations of 1959 were followed by a lull while Hanoi focused on events in
Laos (1960–61). Despite this, 1960 was a year of unrest in South Vietnam, with pro-democracy demonstrations inspired by the
South Korean student uprising that year and a failed military coup in November. Violence between the VC and government forces soon increased drastically from 180 clashes in January 1960 to 545 clashes in September. By 1960, the Sino-Soviet split was a public rivalry, making China more supportive of Hanoi's war effort. For Chinese leader
Mao Zedong, aid to North Vietnam was a way to enhance his "anti-imperialist" credentials for both domestic and international audiences. About 40,000 communist soldiers infiltrated the South in 1961–63. The level of violence in the South jumped dramatically in the fall of 1961, from 50 guerrilla attacks in September to 150 in October. The arrived in Saigon with 35 helicopters in December 1961. By mid-1962, there were 12,000 U.S. military advisors in Vietnam. The "special war" and "strategic hamlets" policies allowed Saigon to push back in 1962, but in 1963 the VC regained the military initiative. Even as Hanoi embraced China's international line, it continued to follow the Soviet model of reliance on technical specialists and bureaucratic management, as opposed to mass mobilization. Soviet aid soared following a visit to Hanoi by Soviet Premier
Alexei Kosygin in February 1965. Hanoi was soon receiving up-to-date surface-to-air missiles. drops a
white phosphorus bomb on a Viet Cong position in South Vietnam in 1966. In January 1966, Australian troops uncovered a tunnel complex that had been used by COSVN. Six thousand documents were captured, revealing the inner workings of the VC. COSVN retreated to
Mimot in
Cambodia. As a result of an agreement with the Cambodian government made in 1966, weapons for the Viet Cong were shipped to the Cambodian port of
Sihanoukville and then trucked to VC bases near the border along the "
Sihanouk Trail", which replaced the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Many VC units operated at night, and employed terror as a standard tactic. Rice procured at gunpoint sustained the Viet Cong. Squads were assigned monthly assassination quotas. Government employees, especially village and district heads, were the most common targets, but there was a wide variety of targets, including clinics and medical personnel. and a massacre of 252
Montagnards in the village of
Đắk Sơn in December 1967 using flamethrowers. VC death squads assassinated at least 37,000 civilians in South Vietnam; the real figure was far higher since the data mostly cover 1967–72. They also waged a mass murder campaign against civilian hamlets and refugee camps; in the peak war years, nearly a third of all civilian deaths were the result of VC atrocities. Ami Pedahzur has written that "the overall volume and lethality of Vietcong terrorism rivals or exceeds all but a handful of terrorist campaigns waged over the last third of the twentieth century".
Logistics and equipment rifle.|alt=Looking from the waist up, a man wearing a hat and holding an assault rifle with one hand holding the magazine and the other on the pistol grip
Tet Offensive Major reversals in 1966 and 1967, as well as the growing American presence in Vietnam, inspired Hanoi to consult its allies and reassess strategy in April 1967. While Beijing urged a fight to the finish, Moscow suggested a negotiated settlement. He submitted a plan to Hanoi in May 1967. Funeral processions were used to smuggle weapons into Saigon. In January and February 1968, some 80,000 VC struck more than 100 towns with orders to "crack the sky" and "shake the Earth." The offensive included a commando raid on the
U.S. Embassy in Saigon and the massacre at Huế of about 3,500 residents. House-to-house fighting between VC and
South Vietnamese Rangers left much of
Cholon, a section of Saigon, in ruins. The VC used any available tactic to demoralize and intimidate the population, including the assassination of South Vietnamese commanders. A photo by
Eddie Adams showing the
summary execution of a VC in Saigon on February 1 became a symbol of the brutality of the war. In an influential broadcast on February 27, newsman
Walter Cronkite stated that the war was a "stalemate" and could be ended only by negotiation. The offensive was undertaken in the hope of triggering a general uprising, but urban Vietnamese did not respond as the VC anticipated. About 75,000 VC/PAVN soldiers were killed or wounded, according to
Trần Văn Trà, commander of the "B-2" district, which consisted of southern South Vietnam. "We did not base ourselves on scientific calculation or a careful weighing of all factors, but...on an illusion based on our subjective desires", Trà concluded.
Earle G. Wheeler, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that Tet resulted in 40,000 communist dead (compared to about 10,600 U.S. and South Vietnamese dead). "It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits", said PRG Justice Minister
Trương Như Tảng. U.S. President
Lyndon Johnson and Westmoreland argued that panicky news coverage gave the public the unfair perception that America had been defeated. Aside from some districts in the
Mekong Delta, the VC failed to create a governing apparatus in South Vietnam following Tet, according to an assessment of captured documents by the U.S.
CIA. The breakup of larger VC units increased the effectiveness of the CIA's
Phoenix Program (1968–72), which targeted individual leaders, as well as the
Chiêu Hồi Program, which encouraged defections. By the end of 1969, there was little communist-held territory, or "liberated zones", in the rural lowlands of
Cochin China, according to the official communist military history. The US military believed that 70 percent of communist main-force combat troops in the South were northerners, but most communist military personnel were not main-force combat troops. Even in early 1970, MACV estimated that northerners made up no more than 45 percent of communist military forces overall in South Vietnam. The VC created an urban front in 1968 called the
Alliance of National, Democratic, and Peace Forces (
ANDPF). in other to mobilize and attract support from non-communist
opposition groups in the then-South Vietnamese politics. The group's manifesto called for an independent,
neutralist, non-aligned South Vietnam and stated that "national reunification cannot be achieved overnight." Despite the
Paris Peace Accords, signed by all parties in January 1973, fighting continued. In March, Trà was recalled to Hanoi for a series of meetings to hammer out a plan for an enormous offensive against Saigon. in 1973. The VC uniform was a floppy jungle hat, rubber sandals, and green fatigues without rank or insignia.
Fall of Saigon In response to the
anti-war movement, the U.S. Congress passed the
Case–Church Amendment to prohibit further U.S. military intervention in Vietnam in June 1973 and reduced aid to South Vietnam in August 1974. With U.S. bombing ended, communist logistical preparations could be accelerated. An oil pipeline was built from North Vietnam to VC headquarters in
Lộc Ninh, about northwest of Saigon. (COSVN was moved back to South Vietnam following the Easter Offensive.) The Ho Chi Minh Trail, beginning as a series of treacherous mountain tracks at the start of the war, was upgraded throughout the war, first into a road network driveable by trucks in the dry season, and finally, into paved, all-weather roads that could be used year-round, even during the
monsoon. Between the beginning of 1974 and April 1975, with now-excellent roads and no fear of air interdiction, the North delivered nearly 365,000 tons of
war matériel to battlefields, 2.6 times the total for the previous 13 years. The success of the 1973–74 dry season offensive convinced Hanoi to accelerate its timetable. When there was no U.S. response to a successful PAVN attack on
Phước Bình in January 1975, South Vietnamese morale collapsed. The next major battle, at
Buôn Ma Thuột in March, was a walkover. After the
fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the PRG moved into government offices there. At the victory parade, Tạng noticed that the units formerly dominated by southerners were missing, replaced by northerners years earlier. Without consulting the PRG, North Vietnamese leaders decided to rapidly dissolve the PRG at a party meeting in August 1975. North and South were merged as the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam in July 1976 and the PRG was dissolved. The VC was merged with the
Vietnamese Fatherland Front on February 4, 1977. ==Relationship with North Vietnam==