Liberation Army of South Vietnam

North Vietnam established the National Liberation Front in 1960 to foment insurgency in the South. Many of the Việt Cộng’s core members were “regroupees”, southern Viet Minh who had resettled in the North after the Geneva Accord (1954). Hanoi gave the regroupees military training and sent them back to the South along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the early 1960s. The NLF called for southern Vietnamese to “overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists” and to make “efforts toward the peaceful unification”. The Việt Cộng’s best-known action was the Tet Offensive, a massive assault on more than 100 South Vietnamese urban centers in 1968, including an attack on the US embassy in Saigon. The offensive riveted the attention of the world’s media for weeks, but also overextended the Việt Cộng. Later communist offensives were conducted predominately by the North Vietnamese. The organisation was dissolved in 1976 when North and South Vietnam were officially unified under a communist government.