#North Vietnam

[lotusinjadewell]

Cao Bằng, Vietnam. Credit to Tiến Chu.

[mapsontheweb]

Countries that recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) as of 1973

[coolvietnamlove]

Ba Be Lake, North Vietnam: Ba Bể Lake is the largest natural lake in Vietnam. It is located in Nam Mẫu commune, Ba Bể district, Bắc Kạn Province in the Northeast region of the country. Having been formed approximately 200 million years ago, the lake is surrounded by limestone cliffs, which in turn are covered by primary forests. Wikipedia

[cid5]

A French colonial holdover: A Reibel MAC mle 31 machine gun captured from the Viet Cong on the Ca Mau Peninsula during 1964.

[henk-heijmans]

Young girl and her father inside a bunker, North Vietnam, 1965 - by Romano Cagnoni (1935 - 2018), Italian

[magic5ball]

Please feel free to leave additional thoughts in the replies and tags!

[aspookybunny]

Kayaking then caving through Phong Nha cave to an underground lake 4 km deep into the cave with with only a headlamp to light my way after the tourist boats stop with bats and bugs swooping over is honestly probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done.

Some truly explosive sights (phong nha cave was used as a hospital and storage area and bombed during the Vietnam war)

Part of the cave lake

Ancient Cham cave writing

Prev 2 photos from Heaven cave, used as a hospital during the Vietnam War

[richo1915]

[usafphantom2]

Just a couple of MIG’s hanging out on an American Carrier with a cruise ship as the background parked in NYC. Nothing to see here.

@Tomcatjunkie via X

[nameinconcept-blog]

"You can only hear the sound of cicadas" By Artist A. G. Danchenko. 1972

From the book "В странах друзей" Published by Soviet artist.

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

[lotusinjadewell]

Mù Cang Chải, Vietnam. Credit to Nguyễn Trọng Cung.

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

ASSEMBLE THE PARTY MEMBERS -- VIETNAMESE LIBERATION IS NOW.

PIC INFO: Spotlight on a shot of Le Duan, general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, with Ho Chi Minh at a rally in Hanoi, North Vietnam in 1966. 📸: Nihon Denpa.

OVERVIEW: "As any account of combat in the Vietnam War will tell you, America fought an “elusive enemy”: guerrillas who would strike and then disappear; battalion commanders who refused to engage in open battles. But there’s more to the cliché than most people realize. Even by 1967, America’s military, intelligence and civilian leaders had no real idea who was actually calling the shots in Hanoi.

To some extent, this is what the North wanted — the impression that decisions were made collectively, albeit under the gentle guiding hand of President Ho Chi Minh. But the American confusion also, inadvertently, reflected the messy, factionalized reality of North Vietnamese politics, one that historians are only now coming to grasp. Thanks to the slow if capricious process of historical declassification, the publications of renegade memoirs and histories, the dissemination of “open letters” by disgruntled former leaders, and the careful and painstaking research and analysis by Vietnam specialists, we now have a better understanding of who was on top in Hanoi and what battles he waged to get there.

During the war, American intelligence experts cycled through a long list of suspects. At one point or another, intelligence reports and analyses at the time named all 11 members of the top Communist leadership, the Political Bureau or Politburo (Bo Chinh Tri), as the true leader of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party.

The obvious choice, and the one portrayed as the North’s leader in the press, was Ho Chi Minh, a grandfatherly figure whose global travels and illustrious anticolonial career made him a world-renowned figure. Another popular candidate was Vo Nguyen Giap, the general credited with foiling superior French forces in spectacular fashion at Dien Bien Phu. Even Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, who represented the Democratic Republic of Vietnam at the Geneva talks in 1954, was put forward as the real mastermind behind Hanoi’s war.

In fact, it was none of these. The real leader was Le Van Nhuan, who later took the name Le Duan, a nondescript party official from humble origins in central Vietnam."

-- THE NEW YORK TIMES, "Who Called the Shots in Hanoi?," by Lien-Hang Nguyen, published February 14, 2017

Source: www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/who-called-the-shots-in-hanoi.html.

[stephen-molyneux]

Hà Giang, Việt Nam

[cid5]

A VC grenadier unit with a US M79 Grenade Launcher (left), a US M1 Carbine (middle), and a North Vietnamese K-50M (right).

[gregor-samsung]

" President Nixon's chief foreign policy aide, Henry Kissinger, was also bathed and frustrated by the Communists during his secret negotiations with them. Kissinger had tried above all to avoid a repetition of the Inconclusive Korean war armistice talks, which had dragged on for two years because, he believed, America had not stiffened its diplomacy with the threat of force. He calculated that the North Vietnamese would compromise only if menaced with total annihilation—an approach that Nixon privately dubbed his "madman theory." But, like his predecessors, Kissinger never found their breaking point. His later claims to the contrary, the Communists agreed to a cease-fire in October 1972 only after he had handed them major concessions that were to jeopardize the future of the South Vietnamese government. The real pressure on the Nixon administration to reach a settlement in Vietnam came from the American public, which by that time wanted peace at almost any price—for reasons that Kissinger himself had perceived four years before. Early in 1968, on the eve of Tet, the Asian lunar New Year, the Communists had launched a dramatic offensive against towns and cities throughout South Vietnam, which Kissinger saw as the "watershed" of the American effort in Vietnam: "Henceforth, no matter how effective our actions, the prevalent strategy could no longer achieve its objectives within a period or with force levels politically acceptable to the American people." Americans had been prepared to make sacrifices in blood and treasure, as they had in other wars. But they had to be shown progress, told when the war would end. In World War II, they could trace the advance of their army across Europe; in Vietnam, where there were no fronts, they were only given meaningless enemy "body counts"—and promises. So the United States, which had brought to bear stupendous military power to crack Communist morale, itself shattered under the strain of a struggle that seemed to be interminable. An original aim of the intervention, first enunciated by President Eisenhower, had been to protect all of Southeast Asia, whose countries would presumably "topple like a row of dominoes" were the Communists to take over Vietnam. Ironically, as Leslie Gelb of The New York Times observed, the real domino to fall was American public opinion. The public, distressed by mounting casualties, rising taxes, and no prospect of a solution in sight, turned against the war long before America's political leaders did. "

Karnow Stanley, Vietnam - A History. The First Complete Account of Vietnam at War, Penguin Books, 1985 [1983]; pages 19-20.