War by Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Viet-Nam 1954-60

This study sets out to place the creation of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NFLSV) in its full historical context. It reveals how this organization was able to achieve nothing less than the revolutionary transformation of an agrarian Third World economy. In December 1960 a group of Vietnamese revolutionaries met in a hamlet near the Cambodian border. They proclaimed the formation of the NFLSV. The Second Indochinese War began. It ended with the expulsion of the US and its allies, the destruction of non-communist Vietnamese nationalism and the unification of Vietnam. Thayer's account is set within the the wider international context of the Cold War years and the emerging Sino-Soviet dispute, and has been meticulously reconstructed from captured Communist Party internal documents, clandestine radio broadcasts, and interviews with many government officials, intelligence analysts and defectors from the communist movement itself. Carlyle A. Thayer is an acknowledged international authority on Vietnam who, after serving in Vietnam as a volunteer with the International Voluntary Services, devoted over two decades of study to this subject, including three field-research trips. He teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy.