The official Vietnamese history gives the group's name as the Liberation Army of South Vietnam or the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam (NLFSV; Mặt trận Dân tộc Giải phóng miền Nam Việt Nam. [80] With U.S. bombing ended, communist logistical preparations could be accelerated. It had its own military organization: the National Liberation Army. While Beijing urged a fight to the finish, Moscow suggested a negotiated settlement. Pushed into Cambodia, the Viet Cong could no longer draw South Vietnamese recruits. The term Việt Cộng appeared in Saigon newspapers beginning in 1956. Find out what is the full meaning of NFL on Abbreviations.com! [58] In January and February 1968, some 80,000 Viet Cong struck more than 100 towns with orders to "crack the sky" and "shake the Earth. A divided Vietnam angered Vietnamese nationalists, but it made the country less of a threat to China. At this point, there were about 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam,[44] as well as 900,000 allied forces. NFL - What does NFL stand for? Arguing that a free election was impossible under the conditions that existed in communist-held territory, Diệm announced in July 1955 that the scheduled election on reunification would not be held. In 1994, the Census Bureau redesigned its survey and refined the classification of NLF individuals. Prados, John, (2006) "The Road South: The Ho Chi Minh Trail", Nghia M. Vo Saigon: A History 2011 - Page 140 "... on December 19 to 20, 1960, Nguyễn Hữu Thọ, a Saigon lawyer, Trương Như Tảng, chief comptroller of a bank, Drs. The FLN split into two factions: those who supported the Provisional Government, some of whose leaders were opposed to the Tripoli Program, and those who supported the Politburo of the FLN, which had been established in July 1962 and which sought to continue the revolution. [72] The group's manifesto called for an independent, non-aligned South Vietnam and stated that "national reunification cannot be achieved overnight. [81] Between the beginning of 1974 and April 1975, with now-excellent roads and no fear of air interdiction, the communists delivered nearly 365,000 tons of war matériel to battlefields, 2.6 times the total for the previous 13 years. All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. Find out what is the full meaning of NLF on Abbreviations.com! The Viet Cong created the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam in December 1960 at Tân Lập village in Tây Ninh as a "united front", or political branch intended to encourage the participation of non-communists. [7] The earliest citation for Viet Cong in English is from 1957. During the war, communist insurgents and anti-war activists insisted the Viet Cong was an insurgency indigenous to the South, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of North Vietnam. The Viet Cong (Vietnamese: Việt Cộng; pronounced [vîət kə̂wŋmˀ] (listen)), also known as the National Liberation Front of Southern Vietnam or FNL (Vietnamese: Mặt trận Dân tộc Giải phóng miền Nam Việt Nam), was an armed communist political organization in South Vietnam and Cambodia.