Video: 'Vietnam: A Television History - America's Mandarin [2/11]' (NLF formed at 20:18)

(Tuesday, December 20, 1960; during the Vietnam War, part of the Indochina Wars and the Cold War) — The National Liberation Front (NLF) was created today as an armed communist political revolutionary organization in South Vietnam and Cambodia to oppose the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem, who gave the group the nickname “Viet Cong.”

Its military force, the Liberation Army of South Vietnam (LASV), fought against the United States and South Vietnamese governments during the Vietnam War, eventually emerging on the winning side.

Video: 'Vietnam War Documentary: Inside the Viet Cong - Tactics, Weapons, Tunnels, Uniform'

The LASV had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized peasants in the territory the Viet Cong controlled.

During the war, communist insurgents and anti-war activists claimed that 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.