For destroying armored vehicles or bunkers, the Vietcong had highly effective rocket propelled grenades and recoilless rifles. Mortars were also available in large numbers and had the advantage of being very easy to transport. Many weapons, including booby traps and mines, were homemade in villages.

At the heart of the conflict was the desire of North Vietnam, which had defeated the French colonial administration of Vietnam in 1954, to unify the entire country under a single communist regime modeled after those of the Soviet Union and China. In 1975 South Vietnam fell to a full-scale invasion by the North.

Advantages of Vietnamese Troops The Vietnamese also had a vast network of of tunnels and a variety of booby traps such as Punji Pits. Not only did the Vietnamese had better military tactic, they also had the resilience to the low resources due to war being a large part of their history.

The USA relied on high altitude bombers to drop heavy bombs in North Vietnam. They used jets to dump napalm, a chemical that burnt skin down to the bone, on suspected Vietcong strongholds, and Agent Orange, an ultra-strong defoliant, was used to destroy the jungle cover.

The group is better known as the Viet Cong (Việt Cộng) or V.C., short for “Vietnamese Communist.” American soldiers called the Vietnamese communist forces Charlie (which is the letter “C” in the NATO phonetic alphabet), no matter whether North Vietnamese or Vietcong.

The Việt Minh established itself as the only organized anti-French and anti-Japanese resistance group. The Việt Minh initially formed to seek independence for Vietnam from the French Empire. The United States supported France.

Vietnam (1954–76) Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Elements of the Viet Minh joined with the Viet Cong against the U.S.-supported government of South Vietnam and the United States in the Vietnam War (or Second Indochina War) of the late 1950s, the ’60s, and the early ’70s.

In response, the Viet Minh launched an attack against the French in Hanoi on December 19, 1946—the beginning of the First Indochina War. During the eight-year war, Mao Zedong’s Chinese communists supported the Viet Minh, while the United States aided the French and anti-communist Vietnamese forces.

The Viet Minh was a Communist guerrilla force founded in 1941 to fight against the joint Japanese and Vichy French occupation of Vietnam during World War II. Its full name was Việt Nam Ðộc Lập Ðồng Minh Hội, which literally translates as the “League for Viet Nam’s Independence.”

If any nation was a champion of other colonial underdogs, it was the United States, at least in the popular imagination. So, the young Ho Chi Minh and other young nationalists around the world admired this and would try to court US public opinion by appealing to that strain of revolutionary anti-colonialism in America.

1 Answer. Charlie P. Ho Chi Minh was a communist, wanted reunification of Vietnam, of which S. Vietnam was under US control/supervision, and the US did not want a spread of communism through Asia, fearing a communist takeover.

“Underlying the American refusal to deal with Ho at all is a suspicious uncertainty about helping a leader known to be a Communist, for fear that he might lead his country into the orbit of the Soviet Union.

Two-thirds of the U.S. military who served in the Vietnam War — and more than half of the names on The Wall — volunteered for duty. The other one-third were drafted, primarily into the Army. Beginning in 1969, draftees were picked via a televised lottery based on date of birth.