A Protracted War

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.