8 A.M., 11 MARCH 1975, BAN ME THUOT
The heavily armored Soviet-built T-54 tank maneuvered warily toward the front gate of the large South Vietnamese base in the heart of Ban Me Thuot, the capital city of Darlac province in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Bright red stars adorned each side of the dark green turret. Inside, the gunner peered through the gun sight, hunting for concealed predators. As he swung the turret and the barrel of its 100-mm gun back and forth, the sounds of the tank’s rumbling engine and clanking steel treads amplified its terrifying presence. Dozens of North Vietnamese assault troops crouched twenty yards behind it, automatic rifles pointed forward, poised to seize the base. When the gunner’s search revealed no foes, with a roar from its engine, the tank surged forward.
The tank’s dented fenders and mud-caked body gave ample proof of its difficult journey through the deep forest to reach the city. A surprise onslaught the day before by over sixty armored vehicles and thousands of soldiers had rapidly overwhelmed Ban Me Thuot’s few defenders. Now the attackers were charging the last South Vietnamese position in the city, the rear headquarters of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s (ARVN) 23rd Division. If it fell, the city would fall. If the city fell, the Central Highlands were in great danger, as was the rest of South Vietnam. Both sides had long believed that whoever won the battle for the Central Highlands would win the war.
Hidden inside the base, South Vietnamese Colonel Nguyen Trong Luat sat atop an M-113 armored personnel carrier, watching the approaching tank. Luat was the chief of Darlac province and a veteran armor officer. Awakened early the previous morning by the North Vietnamese artillery bombardment, Luat had retreated to the 23rd Division’s headquarters to prepare for a final stand. Inside the M-113, a sergeant crouched next to him, ready to destroy the approaching tank with a high-explosive shell from a 106-mm recoilless rifle mounted on the vehicle. This was a key moment in the battle. If Luat could destroy the T-54 as it entered the gate, the North Vietnamese would then have to use infantry to capture the camp, and that would take time—enough time for South Vietnamese reinforcements to arrive and possibly save the city.
As the T-54 penetrated the front gate and lumbered into full view, Luat yelled at the sergeant: “Fire!” The sergeant pulled the trigger. Click. “Misfire!” the sergeant screamed. He pulled apart the breech and discovered the problem: a broken firing pin. And he had no replacement. Luat jumped off the M-113 to rally his troops to stop the advancing enemy.
Rarely in the history of nations can one point with such precision to the beginning of a country’s demise. While scholars might argue that other notable events had heralded the war’s denouement, the capture of the ARVN 23rd Division headquarters completed the seizure of Ban Me Thuot, which caused the chain reaction that led directly to the fall of South Vietnam.
America’s Vietnamese allies call the loss of their country Black April (Thang Tu Den). That phrase captured for them, in semi-poetic terms, the events that led to a modern-day Diaspora of nearly a million Vietnamese from their native land. The fall also sent several hundred thousand to prison, and condemned the remainder—some eighteen million people—to a life of poverty and a loss of freedom. The Communists, not surprisingly, simply called it the Liberation of South Vietnam (Giai Phong Mien Nam).
The United States had spent billions of dollars and lost over 58,000 men defending South Vietnam, but ultimately failed. The defeat of South Vietnam was one of America’s worst foreign-policy disasters of the twentieth century, yet a complete understanding of the end-game—from the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on 27 January 1973 to South Vietnam’s surrender on 30 April 1975—has eluded us.
That absence of a comprehensive analysis of the finale of America’s first lost war represents an enormous gap in our understanding of recent American history. This work attempts to address that deficit, and is the first of two volumes dealing with the final two years of the Vietnam War. Although multiple books explaining the fall were published in the 1980s, offering diverse commentary from senior policy-makers, military commanders, and journalists, nothing of consequence has been published since. Moreover, none of those authors had access to high-level internal documents from the North Vietnamese and American governments dealing with those final years.1 Such primary source material is essential for scholars and others who wish to comprehend the complexities of that time.
Yet the need for a systematic review of the war’s end goes beyond the imperative for accurate historical analysis. The traumatic fall of South Vietnam provides potential guideposts for devising current and future military policy for any war involving sizable U.S. combat forces. While this book does not compare South Vietnam with Iraq and Afghanistan, the lessons learned from how America exits a war are often as important as those drawn from how we enter one.
This first volume covers the military aspects of South Vietnam’s defeat, and addresses five critical questions: (1) After the Paris Peace Accords, when did the North Vietnamese decide to return to war? (2) How did they disguise their decision and construct the successful surprise assault on Ban Me Thuot? (3) Why did President Nguyen Van Thieu withdraw his regular military forces from the Central Highlands, setting off the debacle that led to the fall? (4) What ensued militarily on the ground to trigger South Vietnam’s fall in fifty-five days? (5) Was the South Vietnamese military as inept as it has been depicted in the American press and academia?
Volume 2 will discuss the political and diplomatic efforts to implement the Paris Peace Accords, including many of the social and economic events that had such a profound impact on the war. It will also deeply probe the various efforts to arrange a ceasefire in April 1975. Each volume will present significant new evidence that will provide a complete picture of which decisions made in Hanoi, Saigon, and Washington caused South Vietnam’s defeat.
In addition to expanding our historical knowledge and gleaning lessons for future conflicts, there exists a third pressing reason for re-examining South Vietnam’s fall. For most Americans, the destruction of South Vietnam during those traumatic fifty-five days in March and April 1975 validated the judgment that the war was a terrible mistake. Many Americans had come to believe that our South Vietnamese allies were corrupt and oppressive Saigon elites who opposed the desire of the vast majority of Vietnamese for a united country. The American Left, from college campuses to major media institutions, along with foreign anti-war elements, fed that belief. They painted the South Vietnamese government as a dictatorial regime propped up by a crooked, poorly led military that was entirely dependent on U.S. aid, advice, and airpower to hold the Communist forces at bay. This portrayal of an inept South Vietnamese military was seemingly confirmed in late March 1975 during the chaotic fall of Danang, the capital of South Vietnam’s most heavily defended military region, when scenes were televised of rampaging soldiers fighting helpless civilians for airplane seats.
The anti-war groups further eroded support among free-world and non-aligned countries for the elected Government of South Vietnam (GVN) by insisting on two conditions for ending the war. First, they claimed that a coalition government was the sole means to stop the fighting, a position that ignored past Communist transgressions in such political marriages. Second, they demanded that the U.S. cease all material support for South Vietnam in order to achieve the first goal. Since the Vietnamese Communists stipulated the removal of the Saigon government before agreeing to join a coalition, the South Vietnamese and Americans rejected what would have been essentially a disguised surrender.
To eliminate American support for South Vietnam, the Left used a simple argument: The Saigon government was a dictatorial regime refusing to share power and suppressing the will of the people; the South Vietnamese were militarily ineffectual because of the regime’s lack of legitimacy; and hence the war was unwinnable. These conclusions endure in the public mind, often bolstered by those who view America’s involvement as wrong, if not immoral.
As I will argue, that representation of South Vietnam’s government and military is wrong. For example, the searing images from the collapse of Danang portray only a snapshot in time. To be sure, the images were grim, but they do not reflect the totality of events leading to that tragic moment. The chaos was not due to South Vietnamese incompetence or cowardice, as the breakdown in discipline occurred only in the final days before Danang’s capture. Few know that Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) in this region fought well until news of the bungled retreat from Pleiku reached them. This shocking news, in combination with widely believed rumors of an imminent and secretly negotiated division of the country—compounded by a million panicky civilians fearful of Communist atrocities—led many soldiers and officers to abandon their posts in order to rescue their families.
Although this book offers a counterweight to the prevailing portrayal of the South Vietnamese armed forces, it does not whitewash their mistakes or disregard their faults. The South Vietnamese have much to answer for, including debilitating factionalism and extensive corruption. Certainly large-scale corruption existed, and, occasionally, venal officers sold goods to their sworn enemy. But only through an extensive investigation—one that had to overcome significant cultural barriers, including an overarching suspicion among the Vietnamese of American writers—was I able to discover a long-ignored martial spirit in the South Vietnamese armed forces. Like any military, the RVNAF had both good and poor units, excellent and lackluster leaders, but only rarely are the good units and leaders depicted in the existing Western histories. As one South Vietnamese battalion commander said, commenting on the chaos in Danang and on the bungled retreat from the Central Highlands: “We are ashamed of these things, but they do not define us.”2 By that he meant that the South Vietnamese military, particularly in the 1973–75 period, had performed far better than anyone has realized.
Official American sources, and occasionally (and surprisingly) Communist histories, support this conclusion. For instance, many have asserted that the short, four-day final battle for Saigon that ended the war typified the overall ease of the North Vietnamese victory. Yet the North Vietnamese make no such claim. Writing after the war, Politburo member Le Duc Tho, probably number four in the hierarchy, stated: “The amount of blood shed during these four days was in no way small. . . . The battle at the belt of Saigon was fierce and marked many examples of noble sacrifices. Thousands of sons and daughters . . . [fell] on the outskirts of the city when peace was only 24 hours away.”3 Since North Vietnamese Communists typically denigrate their Southern opponents, for someone of Le Duc Tho’s stature to concede even grudgingly the stiff resistance by the RVNAF until the end is a telling admission.
There were two reasons for this improvement in the South Vietnamese armed forces. First, Vietnamization—the process of transferring responsibility and control from the Americans to our allies—while still incomplete, had worked. Second, the 1972 Easter Offensive forced senior South Vietnamese officers to sweep out many incompetent commanders, replacing them with younger, combat-hardened, U.S.-trained leaders. For example, during the 1972 attacks the ARVN 3rd and 22nd Divisions were virtually annihilated. However, under the new leadership of then Brigadier Generals Nguyen Duy Hinh and Phan Dinh Niem, the divisions were rapidly rebuilt and operated exceedingly well in the 1973–75 period. Unfortunately, American military advisors, who also sometimes had a poor opinion of their counterparts, were no longer around to see the fruits of their labor.
As this book depicts, South Vietnam was defeated not because of military incompetence or an unjust dictatorship, but because of six overriding facts: complete abrogation of the Paris Peace Accords by the North Vietnamese; dire South Vietnamese economic straits; lack of U.S. firepower to stem a massive assault; the vast reduction of U.S. aid; and President Thieu’s military blunders in the face of a large-scale Communist offensive. In combination, these five facts created a sixth: devastated South Vietnamese morale, which led to the swift collapse.
Strategically, the main failure in 1975 was not RVNAF cowardice, but Thieu’s aversion to a strong, centralized military command system. His structure of four corps commanders exercising complete control over their fiefdoms proved more devastating than anyone would have imagined. Faced with a nationwide offensive in 1975, and bereft of American fire support to counter the North Vietnamese army’s ability to mass, ARVN corps commanders were left isolated against a powerful and centrally controlled enemy.
The Communist offensive, of course, remains the primary reason for South Vietnam’s demise. Why did Hanoi succeed in 1975 when it had failed in 1972? Beyond the obvious impact of U.S. aid cuts on the South Vietnamese, the lack of U.S. firepower, and the massive infiltration of men and equipment, there were three significant improvements in the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) between 1972 and 1975 that helped Hanoi win.
First was the enhancement in North Vietnamese command and control, to include successfully using combined-arms formations, particularly armor. Soviet training assisted this development, but so did hard-won experience. Second, sophisticated logistics planning, improved engineering abilities, and detailed military and political analysis, even if heavily colored by Communist dogma, were all hallmarks of the 1975 campaign. In these fundamental aspects, the People’s Army in 1975 was far superior to any previous incarnation, even though it had fewer heavy weapons than the 1972 version.
The third factor was Communist spies who provided Hanoi critical intelligence into Saigon’s most closely guarded secrets. This advantage enabled PAVN to draft combat plans with almost real-time insight into RVNAF designs for counterattacks, withdrawals, and other maneuvers. Without such intelligence coups, it is doubtful that the North Vietnamese could have conducted its war-planning with such precision. Moreover, several agents acted as provocateurs, including one who visited President Gerald Ford with a South Vietnamese delegation in late March 1975. Another convinced an entire ARVN battalion to surrender on 28 April 1975.
Three physical factors also played pivotal roles in the war: weather, infrastructure, and geography. Vietnam has a distinct rainy season and dry season, and they dictated the war’s tempo. Since South Vietnam has few roads, the Communist tactic of using large units to grab and hold important sections of road, such as mountain passes and critical junctions, was essential in defeating the RVNAF. During the days of vast American-supplied helicopter mobility, cutting the roads was a nuisance. In 1975, with limited fuel supplies and few spare parts for South Vietnamese helicopters, it was a mortal blow.
Most important, South Vietnam’s geography made defending the country against an invader extraordinarily difficult. South Vietnam is a long, narrow country, especially in the central and northern portions. This geographical fact meant the RVNAF had to protect an 800-mile western flank, most of which consisted of sparsely populated rugged mountain terrain covered with thick jungle vegetation. The difficult landscape provided plenty of concealment for enemy forces, enabling them to mass undetected at key points. Worse, there was little room between the mountains and the coast to absorb an assault. Armored columns could easily penetrate to the sea and cut the country in two, which is precisely what occurred in the Central Highlands in 1975. In perhaps the strangest twist of the war, in a conflict exemplified by the guerrilla on one side and the helicopter on the other, it was armor, the war’s least-used weapon system, which was the key to victory. This shocking development began at Ban Me Thuot, and continued until North Vietnamese tanks burst onto the grounds of Independence Palace in Saigon.
These key features, from an improved PAVN to the geography, made having reserves, firepower, mobility, and supplies fundamental ingredients in defending South Vietnam. No senior American or South Vietnamese military or political figure expected South Vietnam to defeat a major attack without adequate U.S. military firepower. Thus, for the remaining American personnel in South Vietnam, the U.S. Congress’s aid cutbacks and legislation denying fire support were the main culprits in South Vietnam’s demise. This combination essentially gutted the RVNAF while enticing the Politburo into militarily re-escalating the war.
Historical records prove this perspective to be correct, as there is no doubt that congressional aid reductions were imposed in perverse synchronicity with increased Communist aggression. Communist accounts written after the war trumpet the fact that aid cuts progressively weakened the RVNAF, while North Vietnam’s military strength concurrently recovered from the debacle of the 1972 offensive. In this volume, I discuss only briefly the anti-war groups’ efforts to convince Congress to reduce aid, but it should surprise no one that Hanoi closely monitored the ongoing discussion, attempted to influence it, and calculated its own opportunities accordingly.
Yet Hanoi’s decision to return to war was not based solely on American actions. Just as important was the North Vietnamese leaders’ judgment that the circumstances of 1973–75 presented them with the best window for achieving victory. They viewed the burgeoning economic problems of both South Vietnam and the United States, along with American domestic dissent and occasional South Vietnamese street protests, as proof that “internal contradictions” (mau thuan noi bo) had badly weakened both countries. Eventually, the Politburo reasoned, both would recover from their economic and political frailty. Moreover, China and Japan would establish stronger ties with South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese judged that if they did not act soon, it would be nearly impossible to unify the country under their domination.
To achieve their long-sought goal of unification, and unknown to everyone else at the time, in May 1973 the Communist leaders in North Vietnam decided to resume full-scale warfare in the South. To justify their decision, they blamed the failure of the accords on “massive” South Vietnamese and U.S. violations. The Politburo then hid its decision behind a public façade that its priority was economic reconstruction.
While the record on that decision leaves little room for misinterpretation, the evidence remains thin on precisely how the decision was reached. The debate among Politburo members over returning to war was probably more intense than has been revealed. Undoubtedly, the Party suppressed evidence of internal dissent in favor of a glorious tale of a unified Politburo determined to “liberate” the South. Still, the suppression of such evidence does not alter the fact that less than four months after the signing of the Paris Accords, the Party leadership in Hanoi secretly made a formal decision to return to war.
Ultimately, whatever errors were committed on the American and South Vietnamese side, the simple fact remains that a North Vietnamese military invasion conquered the country in direct violation of the Politburo’s solemn written pledges against such an action. Hanoi’s momentous choice to destroy the Paris Peace Accords and forcibly unify the country sent a generation of South Vietnamese into exile, and exacerbated a societal trauma in America over our long Vietnam involvement that reverberates to this day. How that transpired deserves deeper scrutiny.
RESEARCH, TERMINOLOGY, AND GEOGRAPHY
This book is the culmination of exhaustive research in three distinct areas: primary source documents from American archives, North Vietnamese publications containing primary and secondary source material, and dozens of articles and numerous interviews with key South Vietnamese participants. This work is mainly the voice of the Vietnamese—their stories, their view of what happened during the final days. It represents one of the largest Vietnamese translation projects ever accomplished, including almost one hundred North Vietnamese unit histories, battle studies, and memoirs. Most important, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the conquest of South Vietnam, the leaders in Hanoi released several compendia of formerly highly classified cables and memoranda between the Politburo and its military commanders in the South. Using this treasure trove of primary source materials, along with unit histories and memoirs of senior officers, this work provides the most complete account of North Vietnamese decision-making in a particular era ever compiled. While official South Vietnamese documentation remains scarce, enough material exists to provide a decent overview.
All of these Vietnamese publications have been wonderfully translated by Merle L. Pribbenow. He is undoubtedly one of the best, if not the best, translators from Vietnamese to English in the United States. Mr. Pribbenow translated the official North Vietnamese book History of the People’s Army: 1945–1975, published in English in 2002 as Victory in Vietnam by the University of Kansas Press. He served from April 1970 to April 1975 in the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Not only does he possess an incredible fluency in both North and South Vietnamese military and political terminology, he is also familiar with such arcane subjects as ARVN slang.
Uncovering North Vietnamese decision-making during the last two years of the war was critical. What little had been revealed about Hanoi’s strategy came mostly from Senior General Van Tien Dung’s book, published a year after the war’s end and translated into English as Our Great Spring Victory. Dung, a Politburo member and second-in-command of the PAVN, was Hanoi’s overall commander in South Vietnam during the final offensive. Consequently, the bulk of his account focuses on late 1974 through April 1975, virtually ignoring the 1973 to mid-1974 time frame. Although three other books by senior North Vietnamese officers that provide inside accounts were published after Dung’s and were translated into English, none had a similar impact. Since his version of events went largely uncontested in the West, Dung received the lion’s share of the credit for North Vietnam’s victory among Western authors.4
As with the Western perceptions of the South Vietnamese, the acclaim for Dung is also incorrect. The true architect of Hanoi’s victory was Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap, who pressed hard within the Politburo after the signing of the Paris Accords to resume offensive operations. It was his vision that enabled the North Vietnamese to seize an unexpected “strategic opportunity” (thoi co chien luoc), and turn South Vietnam’s worst strategic mistake into a rout that destroyed the country. This discovery came as a surprise, as most Western analysts at the time thought Giap was either absent during the last offensive because of illness, or sidelined owing to previous failures. It was even more shocking to learn that Giap had opposed major elements of the North’s previous two large-scale offensives, in 1968 and 1972. Where Dung deserves recognition is for his decision-making after the Ban Me Thuot attack. As will be seen, it is Dung who correctly analyzed the situation, at first in the II Corps area and then as the offensive progressed, and who fought to modify the Politburo’s overly ambitious plans.
While reviewing Communist publications was crucial to comprehending the policies that led to victory, accepting their claims at face value would have been a sure road to ruin. The Vietnamese have an old saying, one that resonates in any culture: “Losers are pirates, winners are kings.” (Duoc lam vua, thua lam giac.) One must wade through massive propaganda distortions to find verifiable truths. North Vietnamese publications are fraught with misleading statistics, they ignore or gloss over defeats, and they are dramatically uneven in terms of factuality. PAVN’s unit histories are designed to provide an uplifting story rather a “warts and all” review. Former Communist soldiers now blogging about the war often deride official publications as “political histories.”
Regardless, once one moves beyond the turgid prose and exaggerated claims, North Vietnamese publications usually provide a detailed overview of the planning, execution, and aftermath of battles and campaigns. While it was vital to cross-check numerous Communist publications in order to confirm events, a process that was especially laborious since the authors often simply copied approved text about particular incidents from earlier books, eventually a solid framework emerged. Much of the strict Communist wartime secrecy has evaporated, even in security and intelligence matters, replaced by an acknowledgment that the lessons and episodes of the war needed to be studied and debated. Although Vietnam has nothing like Western transparency, given the vast range of Communist publications, we can now ascertain the Politburo’s motivation and actions to a fair degree.
To balance the Communist version of events, I made broad use of South Vietnamese post-war journals published by the RVNAF military associations. Few American authors have made use of these magazines, which contain articles about various battles written by the participants. I used these materials in combination with scores of Vietnamese-language books by former military officers. Additionally, I incorporated my own extensive oral-history interviews plus interviews conducted by official American researchers in 1975. While generally more accurate in their depiction of battles, the South Vietnamese often succumb to the same temptations as their Northern brethren. A similar warning applies to use of this information.
The U.S. government’s documentation regarding Vietnam in the final years is wide-ranging and detailed on both the military action and the internal deliberations in Washington. These sources provide a comprehensive discussion of the growing frustration, first in the Nixon and then in the Ford administration, over congressional restrictions that made it increasingly difficult to assist South Vietnam in its ongoing fight. I also conducted wide-ranging research at the Library of Congress to develop a thorough listing of scholarly articles on the final two years of the war. The result is a lengthy bibliography that I have placed online at www.blackapril75.com so that future scholars can avail themselves of these resources. By integrating all these sources, and constantly cross-checking claims, I was able to deduce what transpired on long-ago battlefields and in the chambers of government in Hanoi, Saigon, and Washington.
Although previous authors did not have the rich primary sources now available, I owe a debt of gratitude to earlier scribes. Foremost among their works are William Le Gro’s Vietnam from Cease-Fire to Capitulation, Frank Snepp’s Decent Interval, and Dr. Henry Kissinger’s Ending the Vietnam War. Books by journalists who covered Vietnam include Arnold Isaacs’s Without Honor, David Butler’s The Fall of Saigon, and Olivier Todd’s Cruel April. Providing the South Vietnamese perspective are Cao Van Vien’sThe Final Collapse, Pham Huan’s The Withdrawal from the Central Highlands, Stephen Hosmer’s The Fall of South Vietnam, and Nguyen Tien Hung’s The Palace File. For the North Vietnamese, Van Tien Dung’s Our Great Spring Victory, Tran Van Tra’sHistory of the Bulwark B-2 Theatre, Hoang Van Thai’s The Decisive Years, and Vo Nguyen Giap’s The General Headquarters give the military perspective.
To ease the American reader’s journey, I have taken several liberties. I refer to our allies as the South Vietnamese, and to their opponents as either the North Vietnamese or the Communists. I converted kilometers and meters to miles and yards. Directions in the text (north, south, east, and west) refer to map direction, not compass direction, although they are often the same. For dates I used the conventional military format of day-month-year (19 May 1973, for example), but used standard time as opposed to military time. I eliminated diacritical marks in the Vietnamese words in the text and notes. Also, although Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language (Hanoi and Danang, for example, should be written as Ha Noi and Da Nang), I used the combined form more familiar to Western readers. Since official Communist publications, such as division and corps histories, are usually written by committee, with multiple authors engaged in revisions at various levels, I have not included an author. Only for memoirs did I add the author’s name. Moreover, in referring to a Vietnamese publication, I used the translated English title instead of the Vietnamese title. In addition to a list of acronyms, I have also included a register of prominent persons and their positions to help the reader keep track of the mostly Vietnamese personalities. I also included a directory of military units from both sides to help the reader keep straight the often bewildering array of units. As a refresher, Army and Marine units, from largest to smallest, are: corps, division, regiment (or brigade, or group), and battalion (or squadron for armor). For Air Force units, it is division, wing, and then squadron.
To simplify the war jargon, I have used the following conventions: South Vietnam had four corps areas, running north to south, and numbered I through IV. All South Vietnamese corps areas were also known as military regions. Hence, I Corps was in MR-1, and so forth. To prevent confusion, I have used roman numerals for the South Vietnamese (II Corps, for example), Arabic for PAVN (1st Corps), and either Front or Military Region (MR) for the North Vietnamese commands across the country. Lastly, maps depicting the terrain and flow of battles are included at various points in the text.
So as not to perpetuate the myth of a mainly Southern-based insurgency fighting against the Saigon government, I will not use the terms Viet Cong (VC) or People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) to describe the Southern-based Communist military forces.5 I believe that using this terminology inhibits our ability to understand the Communist movement in Vietnam and the history of the war. Scholars have argued passionately for decades about the correct use and meaning of the term Viet Cong. It is an abbreviation ofCong San Viet Nam, which simply means Vietnamese Communist. The South Vietnamese government coined the term sometime in the mid-1950s to describe the Communist movement that was seeking to overthrow it and unify the country under Party control. As originally used, the term applied to all Vietnamese Communists and did not connote a distinction between Northerners and Southerners. American military commanders, analysts, and journalists adopted the term to distinguish between the Southern components of the Communist movement—the shadowy guerrillas hiding among the villagers—and the Northern component, often called the NVA, or North Vietnamese Army. During 1973–75, Southerners represented only a small percentage of Communist military strength.
The Communists’ title for their Southern-based forces was Quan Giai Phong Mien Nam Viet Nam (South Vietnam Liberation Army—SVNLA), often shortened to Quan Giai Phong (Liberation Army). The SVNLA was popularly called the Viet Cong by the American and South Vietnamese military. It is often depicted by the Western media and entertainment industry as the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) “guerrilla army” of native Southerners. Popular misperceptions notwithstanding, the SVNLA, the National Liberation Front, and the NLF’s replacement, the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), were not independent entities. The Politburo and the Ministry of Defense in Hanoi created the SVNLA with the intention that it function as a Southern-based element of PAVN. In January 1961 the Central Military Affairs Committee in Hanoi clearly established that the “Liberation Army of South Vietnam is a component of the People’s Army of Vietnam, established, built, educated, and led by the Party.”6
In every aspect, the SVNLA was under the unified leadership of the Vietnam Communist Party and the High Command in Hanoi. No independent Southern Viet Cong military force ever existed, nor was there a split chain of command or separate logistics systems. The Southern-based Communist forces either were forward-deployed elements of the People’s Army, or locally raised units that recruited or kidnapped Southern youths into their ranks. Further, separating the People’s Army and its Southern component does not address the third element of the PAVN wartime organization, the Vietnamese “Volunteer Army” forces in Laos and Cambodia. Would they be considered separate elements as well? The answer is no, and neither should the Communist forces in South Vietnam. Hence, I will use the term PAVN for all Communist military units. The only distinction will be between two key components of the People’s Army in the South. They are main forces (regular military, consisting almost exclusively of Northern soldiers) and local forces (less well-armed and well-trained militias, usually Southerners infused with a healthy dose of Northerners), which are based at province level and below.
Politically also there was no division between the Communist Party in the North and the South. The Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN, Trung Uong Cuc Mien Nam) and its Military Affairs Committee functioned as a branch office of the Politburo and a forward headquarters for the PAVN High Command. COSVN and its Military Affairs Committee controlled only those units operating in southern South Vietnam (Nam Bo) during 1951–54 and 1961–75. PAVN designated this region as the B-2 Front (Mat tran B-2). This was one of five military-front commands PAVN established in the Republic of Vietnam. Units based along the coast from Danang to Nha Trang, in the Central Highlands, and in the Thua Thien–Hue region operated under the control of separate Military Regions/Fronts—the B-1 Front, B-3 Front, and B-4 Front, respectively. These commands all reported directly to Hanoi. The old B-5 Front in Quang Tri was converted to the 2nd Corps in 1974. For a more detailed description of each PAVN command and region, see Appendix I at www.blackapril75.com.
To what extent, then, should history acknowledge the NLF/PRG and the PLAF? That the NLF and PLAF were simply front organizations is undeniable, but to ignore the Communist policies that spawned them is a mistake. To allow future generations to forget how Hanoi skillfully and deceitfully created the elaborate political and military fronts with which it waged war against the GVN and the U.S. would be to deny those generations the tools with which to understand similar regimes. Although the NLF/PRG was undeniably a Communist front, some of its constituents believed it to be a mechanism to unite all classes and political parties to create a coalition government in the South. This, of course, was a fantasy, deftly manufactured by the Communist Party in Hanoi. It is also undeniable that many in both Vietnam and the West accepted this fantasy, but that is beyond the scope of this work.