In fact, it was the NLF's ability to evade full engagement and yet continue to harass the U.S. forces all over the South that proved to be the crucial element of its strategy. A constant “slow grind of guerrilla warfare” wore the Americans down in a seemingly endless war of attrition. Two decades earlier, Mao had written that the “establishment of innumerable anti-Japanese bases behind the enemy's lines will force him to fight unceasingly in many places at once,” and that the Japanese commander “thus endlessly expends his resources.” The NLF knew this strategy could succeed in Vietnam if given enough time, and thus they never swerved from it. North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong was aware of the situation when he rhetorically asked Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times “How long do you Americans want to fight? One year, two years, three years, five years, ten years, twenty years,” adding that “[w]e will be glad to accommodate you.” Ho Chi Minh informed President Lyndon Johnson that the war might take 15 years, but eventually Vietnam would prevail. After the war, Northern General Giap wrote that the Americans had been forced to fight, instead of the blitzkrieg they desired, a “protracted war [which was] a big defeat for them.” That the NLF could wage a protracted war was essential to their success.
Just like the top leaders in the North, even the lowliest guerrilla fighters in the South were aware that “they were in it for the duration.” So deep was their conviction that many lived in their underground tunnels for months or years at a time. Primary accounts from the South during the war show that, for the Vietnamese, “this was a struggle that didn't simply punctuate their lives, it embraced them.” The popular commitment in South Vietnam to fight for as long as necessary was a strength that America, on the other hand, did not possess. Analysts in the U.S. at the time recognised the importance of a protracted conflict. Pike wrote in 1970 that “time, especially in terms of decades, is on the side of the communists.” Historians agree today that time was the crucial factor; Robert Schulzinger, for example, has noted that “the longer the war, the better [the NLF's] chances.”
Even General Westmoreland recognised the NLF's strategy as “a practical and clever one to continue a protracted war and inflict unacceptable casualties on our forces” but was nonetheless unable to counter it. When the Americans halted their increase in personnel at approximately 500,000, rather than the one million that was “a prerequisite for dominating the whole of the war theatre,” the U.S. command was simply unable to win a conventional war. The war of attrition that necessarily ensued went in the NLF's favour, because, unlike the Vietnamese, the American public was unwilling to undertake a total war, and the American economy “was not a bottomless well.” George Gallup, Louis Harris, and Oliver Quayle, the major independent pollsters at the time, told President Johnson that “you will continue to go down until there is some movement - either toward a military victory or toward a negotiated settlement.” Prophetically, O'Neill wrote in 1969 that “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the outcome of the war will be decided by political factors in the United States.” More recently, Schulzinger bluntly explained that “the end had to be in sight, otherwise public opinion would not tolerate the continuation of the effort.” U.S. public opinion, affected directly by the nature of the NLF's war in Vietnam, was thus a crucial factor in American withdrawal.
Karl von Clausewitz's insistence on the relationship between war and policy more than one hundred years earlier became hard fact once again, in 1968, with the opening of the massive Tet Offensive in January and its resulting impact on American policy. This NLF-NVA joint campaign truly represented the final straw in the Vietnam War, ruining any expectations that the war would end any time soon and solidly convincing the bulk of the American public that they were mired in an intolerable conflict. Though the NLF failed to achieve its tactical objectives, it finally succeeded in its strategy of creating a psychological shock great enough to “affect U.S. public opinion against continuation of the war.” Though its ranks were decimated in the Offensive, the NLF's long experience with guerrilla warfare ensured that its hit-and-run attacks continued unabated. The fact that the war continued even after the Tet Offensive fuelled President Richard Nixon's “consuming passion in 1971 and 1972” to win re-election by ending the war. By January of 1973, the Paris Peace Accords ensured that American forces would suspend offensive action and unilaterally withdraw all of their troops.
For the NLF, the war against American forces in Vietnam was both a military and political struggle. Expert manipulation of the political situation in Vietnam created an impressive resource pool and support base for revolutionary war. The war itself, fought with Mao's principles in mind, was designed specifically to generate an American political response in an essentially Clausewitzian manner, thus ensuring eventual U.S. withdrawal.
Abbreviated Terms
ARVN = Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnamese Army)
COSVN = Central Office for South Vietnam (NLF command group)
GVN = Government of South Vietnam
NFL = see NLF
NLF = National Liberation Front (same as VC)
NVA = North Vietnamese Army
PLAF = People's Liberation Armed Forces
PAVN = People's Army of Vietnam (same as NVA)
PRP = People's Revolutionary Party
VC = Vietcong (same as NLF)
Vietnamese Names
Ho Chi Minh = North Vietnamese President
Huong Van Ba = infiltrator in Ho Chi Minh Trail
Ngo Dinh Diem = President of the Republic of (South) Vietnam, 1955-1963
Nguyen Huu Tho = President of NLF in South Vietnam
Nguyen Van Thich = NLF Ranger Platoon Leader
Pham Van Dong = North Vietnamese Premier
Sau Thuong = political officer who travelled the Ho Chi Minh Trail
Trinh Duc = a village chief who fought for the NLF
Vo Nguyen Giap = ranking North Vietnamese military commander during the war
Xuan Vu = South Vietnamese war correspondent
Foreign Names
Clausewitz, Karl von = Prussian soldier, military historian and influential military theorist (1780-1831)
DuPuy, William = U.S. Major-General operating in South Vietnam
Johnson, Lyndon B. = U.S. President, 1963-1969
Kennedy, John F. = U.S. President, 1961-1963
Mao Tse-tung = Chairman of the Communist Party of China, 1945-1976
McNamara, Robert = U.S. Secretary of Defence, 1961-1968
Mansfield, Mike = Democratic member of U.S. House of Representatives, 1943-1953, and U.S. Senate, 1961-1977
Nixon, Richard M. = U.S. President, 1969-1974
Pearson, Willard = Brigadier General, Commanding officer of the 1st Bridage, 101st Airborne Division
Westmoreland, William = Senior U.S. General in Vietnam, 1964-1968, and U.S. Army Chief of Staff, 1968-1972
