The revolutionary struggle waged by our people under the leadership of our Party to liberate the country, gain independence and freedom and take Vietnamese society to socialism, continues the heroic struggle carried on by our people for thousands of years to defend and build the country. Our Party’s military line in this revolutionary struggle cannot be divorced from the long military tradition of our people.
Because of its geographical position in Southeast Asia, ever since its foundation, our country has been compelled to fight foreign aggression almost continually, and this uninterrupted struggle for the nation’s survival has made our history an epic replete with outstanding exploits. From the 1st to the 18th centuries, counting only nation-wide wars, our people fought over 20 times to liberate our country or defend our sovereignty.
During the thousand years under foreign feudal domination, our people repeatedly rose up to wrest back national independence. The first insurrection, led by the Trung sisters, liberated the whole country; later other uprisings and national liberation wars broke out under the leadership of Lady Triêu, Ly Bon, Mai Thuc Loan... Finally, the brilliant victory won by Ngo Quyen on the Bach Dang river in 938 ended the ten-centuries-long foreign domination: the era of national independence and sovereignty began.
Ever since then, to safeguard that independence and sovereignty, our people had to wage a series of wars for national salvation, against foreign aggression. These were, up to the 19th century:
The war of resistance fought in the 11th century, in the reign of the Ly, against an invasion by a Sung army, in which Ly Thuong Kiet launched a resolute and daring pre-emptive attack, followed by a counter-offensive which completely foiled the enemy’s scheme of aggression.
The war of resistance in the 13th century in the reign of the Tran against Mongol aggression: it was a most typical resistance led by Tran Hung Dao who three times in thirty years(1), at the gate of the capital, Thang Long(2), defeated cruel and battle-seasoned armies who had won great victories and had conquered a great part of Asia and Europe.
In the 15th century, the Lam Son Insurrection under the leadership of Le Loi and Nguyen Trai, turned into a protracted national liberation war. It lasted 10 years and resulted in the Ming invaders being driven out and national independence being regained after 20 years of foreign domination.
The war of resistance led by Nguyen Hue in the 18th century relied on the emerging strength of a widespread revolutionary movement of the peasantry against the rotten feudal regime. Within a matter of days, a 200,000-strong army of the Ching was crushed. Thus was foiled the last foreign feudal aggression against our country.
Those wars and uprisings waged by our people to liberate or defend the country were, generally speaking, led by the feudal class but they all bore an undisputable popular stamp for it was the people who, consciously and spontaneously, rose up as one man to fight and save the fatherland. They can be said to be uprisings and wars with a popular character. These long and unremitting struggles form the basis of our forefathers’ rich knowledge in the military field and that of our people’s military tradition so full of courage and intelligence.
Towards the middle of the 19th century, when the French colonialists began to invade our country, our people in spite of the ignominious capitulation of the Nguyen dynasty, heroically rose up everywhere under the leadership of such great patriots as Truong Cong Dinh, Nguyen Trung Truc in the South, and Phan Dinh Phung, Nguyen Thien Thuat, Hoang Hoa Tham in the North. Only about thirty years later were the French colonialists able to impose on our country their domination which was, however, repeatedly challenged. While previously we had to cope with aggressions by a foreign country which, although much bigger in size, was under the same feudal regime and on nearly the same economic, cultural and technical level, we had this time to face a war of colonial aggression by a capitalist power which was not only more populous but also vastly superior to us in the level of economic and technical development as well as in equipment and armaments.
Our Party was founded with the historical task of leading the Vietnamese revolution in a new epoch of human history, the epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism on a world scale, beginning with the great Russian October Revolution. At this historical juncture, our Party, headed by President Ho Chi Minh, the first Vietnamese Communist, creatively applied Marxism-Leninism to the concrete conditions of our country and set forth a correct revolutionary line: people’s democratic national revolution advancing to socialism without going through the stage of capitalist development. It took the national liberation war in our country to an entirely new path. With a correct political line defined right at the beginning in its Political Theses of 1930, during the process of leading the revolution, our Party mobilized the huge revolutionary forces of workers and toiling peasants – the basic forces of the national democratic revolution – and built up a strong workerpeasant alliance led by the working class as the foundation for a broad national united front. It was precisely on the basis of that correct political line that the military line of the Party was worked out and gradually perfected in the practice of the long revolutionary struggle of our people.
As soon as our Party came into being a revolutionary tempest of the masses swept the country, coming to a climax with the Nghe An – Ha Tinh Soviet movement in 1930 and 1931. For the first time in our country, the peasants’ movement was closely linked with that of the workers, a firm worker-peasant alliance set up, and the exclusive leadership of the working class, represented by our Party, confirmed in practice. Led by the Party’s regional organizations, the workers and peasants of Nghe An and Ha Tinh rose up, using revolutionary violence to overthrow the colonial administrators and the local mandarins and bullies and set up worker-peasant power in a number of rural areas.
In the 1936-1939 democratic campaign, our Party skilfully combined legal and semi-legal struggles with illegal underground activities and started a seething movement of political struggle from town to country against the reactionary colonialists, the king and his mandarins, for freedom, democracy, and social progress and against aggressive fascism, in defence of world peace. This great democratic drive and the coming into being of those political forces paved the way for a new revolutionary struggle, which soon followed.
The outbreak of World War II created a new situation. Our Party regarded national liberation as the primary objective and the preparation for uprising, the central task of the time. It set up a national united front to rally all anti-imperialist forces. Under the leadership of the Party, the revolutionary movement shifted from political to armed struggle, from mass political organizations to revolutionary armed organizations; this movement cleverly combined political action with armed struggle, started local-scale guerilla warfare and partial uprisings, causing a violent revolutionary upsurge to sweep the whole country, to be followed by a general insurrection to seize power.
The August 1945 Revolution was a general insurrection by the entire people. In a short period of time, led by the Party, the revolutionary masses rose up simultaneously in town and country, from North to South, to overthrow the rule of the Japanese fascists and the pro-Japanese puppet administration, wrest back power in the whole country and found the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, the first people’s democratic state in Southeast Asia. The August Revolution marked the first triumph of Marxism-Leninism in a colonial and semi-feudal country; our people, seizing an extremely favourable historical opportunity, rose up in arms and won triumph all over the country.
In the course of fifteen years of heroic struggle – from the revolutionary upsurge of 1930-1931 to the August 1945 Revolution – the military line of our Party was gradually worked out in the main.
Immediately after the August Revolution, our people had to resist aggression by the French colonialists, who, propped up by the American interventionists, staged a comeback and invaded our country. That first war of resistance lasted nearly nine years, and ended with the victory of Winter 1953-Summer 1954. After our historic victory at Dien Bien Phu, the French colonialists were compelled to sign the Geneva Agreements. Peace was restored in Indochina on the basis of international recognition of the independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of the peoples of Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos. The North of our country was completely liberated. That war of resistance which followed the August Revolution was a war waged by our people for national liberation and at the same time a war to defend the fatherland. It was a war of resistance waged by a small country with a backward agrarian economy, which had just won power through a general insurrection but had not had time to consolidate it, a country with only embryonic armed forces, which was besieged in the beginning by imperialism on all sides but heroically fought and defeated the nearly half-a-million-strong professional aggressive army of an imperialist power many times superior to it in armaments and technique and receiving important financial aid from the U.S. (80 per cent of the war expenditure in 1953-1954). For their part, in that war of resistance, our people received very important international support from the newly formed world socialist system. Our victory over the French colonialists was the first great victory of the wars for national liberation waged by colonial countries.
In the course of this war of resistance, our Party’s military line was evolved and perfected in every respect.
Hardly had our first resistance ended when our people had to resume their struggle, this time against U.S. imperialism which took the place of French colonialism in trying to grab South Viet Nam, plotted to turn that part of our country into a new-type colony and a military base for an eventual attack on North Viet Nam and the socialist camp, and for stemming the revolutionary movement in Southeast Asia. This time, the aggressor is U.S. imperialism, the ringleader and the most powerful country of the imperialist camp, one with a huge modern war machine and an immense economic and war potential. It is also the international gendarme and the number one enemy of mankind.
Standing firmly in the frontline of the struggle under the banner of the South Viet Nam National Front for Liberation, our Southern fellow-countrymen have evinced great revolutionary heroism and are adding each day more glorious pages to the history of our country.
Following years of vigorous and stubborn political struggle chain uprisings broke out over vast rural areas of the South in 1959 and 1960. These were most heroic and imaginative actions carried out by millions of our fellow-countrymen. Relying essentially on the masses’ political forces supported by very small armed forces, they smashed the enemy’s grip on the countryside and won control over a major part of the country in spite of his over 200,000-strong army and huge repressive apparatus. Those uprisings led to the collapse of the Ngo Dinh Diem fascist regime, and developed into a revolutionary war, a war of liberation against the U.S. “special war”. With a puppet army over half a million-strong and over 30,000 American “advisers”, using the newest experiences gained by international imperialism against the national-liberation movement, Washington attempted to counter-attack and crush the revolution in the South. Our people thus started their second war of resistance, that against the U.S. imperialist aggressors. Within four years, our Southern fellow-countrymen wiped out or put out of action a sizeable part of the puppet army and administration, foiled the enemy’s “strategic hamlet” policy and virtually defeated the U.S. “special war”.
Then the American imperialists introduced en masse their troops and those of satellite countries for direct aggression on the South and started a war of destruction on the North in the hope of retrieving their failures in the South. Responding to President Ho Chi Minh’s sacred appeal, our people throughout the country rose up as one man, resolved to fight the aggressors to liberate the South, defend the North and eventually reunify the country. This is a revolutionary war, a war for liberation against the biggest and most ferocious “limited war” in the history of U.S. imperialism, which was “escalated” by Washington to an unprecedented level of barbarity, until even Hanoi and Haiphong were raided, over one million GIs, puppet and satellite troops involved, over a hundred billion dollars spent and all kinds of modern weapons resorted to, except nuclear ones. Displaying extraordinary heroism, our people resolutely brought their offensive posture into full play; they gained ever more victories and grew stronger with each victory. Barely three years later, the armed forces and people of the South launched general offensives and concerted uprisings in the spring of 1968, marking a historic turning point in the war and compelling the enemy to fall back on a defensive strategy on all battlefields, to acknowledge the bankruptcy of his “limited war” and to rush into a blind alley: the “de-Americanization” and “Vietnamization” of the war. The revolutionary war in the South has taken a new turn. It has recorded big victories in all fields and is heading for total victory.
The revolution and revolutionary war in South Viet Nam are the application and development of the experience gained in the August Revolution, the resistance against the French colonialists and all experiences of the Vietnamese revolution.
In North Viet Nam, our people and armed forces have defeated the war of destruction waged by the American imperialists by means of their modern aviation, in a “surface-to-air” people’s war unprecedented in our country. For the first time, we have conducted a war for self-defence in the socialist North with a comprehensive State structure. We have defeated an alien aggressor, firmly defended the socialist North and fulfilled our duty as the great rear base of the whole country. We have fought the enemy with the combined strength of our entire people, conducted combat operations while actively organizing A.A. civilian defence, carried out a war of resistance together with socialist construction, fought while carrying on production, ensured good communications and transport, maintained order and security and frustrated all U.S. “escalation” schemes. After four years of heroic struggle, we have completely foiled the U.S. war of destruction.
Our nation-wide anti-U.S. war of resistance is the greatest and most glorious war against foreign aggression in our history. It is at present the frontline and the climax of the struggle put up by the world’s peoples against U.S. imperialism. In this war, the Party’s military line has been enriched with rich experiences in many respects and has known a new development.
Thus, faithful to our tradition of unyielding struggle against foreign aggression, our people have been tirelessly fighting for decades under the leadership of the Party; they have successively beaten the aggressive armies of three imperialist powers, effectively contributed to the disintegration of old colonialism and are now vigorously speeding up the collapse and bankruptcy of neo-colonialism in the world.
(1) In 1258, 1285 and 1287.
(2) Old name of Hanoi.
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