Vietnam Celebrates 50th Anniversary of Victory

Harsh Thakor

Vietnam: 50 years since the end of the war. 30th April this year marked the 50th anniversary of the historic victory of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism while the 19th of May was the 135th anniversary of the birth of Ho Chi Minh.

Vietnam’s victory in the war in the twentieth century wrote a new chapter in history. It was a testament to military skill, courage, endurance and tenacity in overcoming adversity, transcending heights unparalleled in history.

Fifty years ago, on the 29th of April 1975, the joint forces of the North Vietnamese Army and the National Liberation Front stormed into the southern capital of Saigon, where they were greeted with the overwhelming joy of a population which had undergone untold misery over the course of decades at the hands of foreign invaders and puppet governments. Just a day later, at around 10:45 am, a North Vietnamese tank broke through the gates of the presidential palace and waved the red flag.

An army of peasant guerrillas had defeated US imperialism in a full-scale war, overcoming the most insurmountable odds. The Vietnamese had not waged the battle alone, with the American people turning into their able allies as well as millions of others across the globe.

The total tonnage of bombs the United States dropped on North Vietnam surpassed that of the bombing of Germany, Italy, and Japan during World War 11. The imperialist war cost the lives of some 3.4 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American soldiers. Millions of Vietnamese still battle with disabilities linked to Agent Orange.

The most crucial factor in defeating the mighty America by Vietnam was the mastery of guerrilla warfare through planting underground tunnels and undertaking selective encircling campaigns, construction of genuine people’s organisations which assured genuine autonomy, deep roots of the Vietcong in the basic masses and overwhelming anti-imperialist support in USA and developed countries, which sharpened the challenge to imperialism; and support of China and USSR.

The guerrillas fought their war with outdated weapons, homemade bombs, and jungle booby-traps. They protected themselves craftily from the enemy in underground tunnel complexes.

They were highly organised in the Communist-led National Liberation Front, being an ethnically and culturally homogeneous people with a long history of resistance to foreign invaders, including the Chinese in 1979. They had, in recent times, fought successfully against both the Japanese and the French.

Fused with Leninism, which extends Marxism from its European birthplace and applies it to the conditions of an imperialist-dominated world, this ideology enabled Ho Chi Minh and his followers to explore and diagnose the social classes that could develop a vast revolutionary mass movement capable of fighting and winning; to relate revolutionary science to ordinary workers and peasants; and to develop the level of unity needed to defeat the strongest enemies.

Notably that Vietnam did not blindly copy the Chinese path of people’s war and devised a path suitable to their own conditions and situation.

It was the communists who diagnosed the strategy and the course that was needed to bring about liberation. Naomi Cohen states, “The Vietnamese people, who began their war of liberation with only bows and arrows, were organised by communist revolutionaries into the most determined and experienced anti-imperialist fighting force ever seen. This is how they defeated the most powerful military on earth.”

Vietnam's experience cannot be directly duplicated with such radical transformations taking place globally and the advent of artificial intelligence in the electronic or digital age. Still, liberation movements can imbibe important lessons in methods to battle invincible-looking enemies with weaker forces and also resurrect the anti-war movements in the streets in the 1960s and 70’s, with the world today on the verge of a world war.

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 48, May 25 - 31, 2025