People's Army of Vietnam

• 1. Introduction

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  The People's Army of Vietnam was born on the 22nd of December 1944 with a first formation of thirty-one men and three women, armed with two revolvers, seventeen rifles, one light machine gun, and fourteen breech-loading flintlocks. From that handful of guerrillas in the mountains of northern Vietnam grew one of the most consequential armies of the 20th century. Within thirty years, this force would end French colonial rule, fight the United States to a standstill, and unify a nation divided by decades of war. How does a fighting force that small become a military that outlasts every opponent it faces? What did it sacrifice to get there? And what does it look like today?

• 2. A Force Built From Nothing

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  Vo Nguyen Giap received his orders directly from Ho Chi Minh in late 1944: build a fighting force capable of driving out French colonizers and Japanese occupiers. The unit he established on the 22nd of December 1944 was called the Propaganda Unit of the Liberation Army. Its mission was as much about education and recruitment as combat. Those early soldiers fought their first engagement against French troops at the Battles of Khai Phat and Na Ngan before the year was out.

  The United States played an early and largely forgotten role in this formation. OSS agents led by Archimedes Patti supplied ammunition, logistics intelligence, and equipment, and helped train the soldiers who would form the backbone of the Vietnamese military. On the 19th of July 1945, five hundred of these soldiers attacked the Tam Dao internment camp in Tonkin, killing fifty Japanese soldiers and officials and freeing French civilian captives before escorting them to the Chinese border. The same force fought the Japanese 21st Division in Thai Nguyen and raided rice storehouses to relieve an ongoing famine.

  A parallel communist army, the National Salvation Army founded by Chu Van Tan on the 23rd of February 1941, merged with the Propaganda Liberation Army on the 15th of May 1945 to form the Vietnam Liberation Army. The force went through several name changes: the Vietnam National Defence Force in September 1945 with roughly 1,000 soldiers, the National Army of Vietnam on the 22nd of May 1946, and finally, in 1950, the People's Army of Vietnam. Vo Nguyen Giap became its first full general on the 28th of May 1948, setting the stage for a confrontation with France that would end the colonial era in Indochina.

• 3. Steel and Iron Divisions

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  On the 7th of January 1947, the PAVN created its first regiment, the 102nd Capital Regiment, for operations around Hanoi. Over the following two years, the 308th Division, later called the Pioneer Division, was assembled from that regiment and the 88th Tu Vu Regiment. By late 1950 it had a full three infantry regiments.

  In late 1951, after three campaigns against French strongpoints in the Red River Delta, the PAVN built five new divisions in a single push: the 304th Glory Division at Thanh Hoa, the 312th Victory Division in Vinh Phuc, the 316th Bong Lau Division in the northwest border region, the 320th Delta Division in the north Red River Delta, and the 325th Binh Tri Thien Division in Binh Tri Thien province. An artillery division, the 351st, was also formed that year. Before the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the 351st was equipped with twenty-four captured 105mm US howitzers supplied by the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

  These six original formations became known as the PAVN's Steel and Iron divisions. In 1954, four of them, backed by those howitzers, defeated French Union forces at Dien Bien Phu and ended eighty-three years of French rule in Indochina. The French Foreign Legion had fought to suppress the Vietnamese insurgency throughout this war. Some legionnaires, such as Stefan Kubiak, deserted after witnessing torture of Vietnamese peasants and crossed over to fight for the Viet Minh. The fall of Dien Bien Phu set terms for a divided Vietnam that neither side accepted as permanent.

• 4. Fighting Two Adversaries

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  In May 1959, the PAVN took its first major step toward infiltrating South Vietnam by establishing Group 559, a logistics unit charged with building supply routes through Laos and Cambodia. That network became known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. At roughly the same time, Group 579 was created as its maritime counterpart. Most of the early infiltrators were members of the 338th Division, former southerners who had relocated north from 1954 onward.

  Regular PAVN formations began deploying south from 1965 onward. The 325th Division's 101B Regiment and the 66th Regiment of the 304th Division met US forces on a large scale for the first time at the Battle of Ia Drang in November 1965. General Tran Van Tra, commander of the B2 Front headquartered in Saigon, described the strategic dilemma plainly. His account is direct: "We had to change our plan and make it different from when we fought the Saigon regime, because we now had to fight two adversaries - the United States and South Vietnam. We understood that the U.S. Army was superior to our own logistically, in weapons and in all things. So strategically we did not hope to defeat the U.S. Army completely. Our intentions were to fight a long time and cause heavy casualties to the United States, so the United States would see that the war was unwinnable and would leave."

  During the Tet holiday starting on the 30th of January 1968, PAVN and Viet Cong forces launched coordinated attacks across more than sixty cities and towns throughout South Vietnam. Commando units struck the US Embassy in Saigon, the Presidential Palace, the headquarters of the Joint General Staff and Republic of Vietnam Navy, TV and radio stations, and Tan Son Nhat Air Base. The PAVN sustained heavy losses of its main forces in southern military zones. Some regular forces had to withdraw to Laos and Cambodia, and local guerrilla networks in the Mekong Delta were badly exposed by the Phoenix Program. Despite the military outcome, the political impact in the United States was severe, and public opposition to the war intensified sharply after the offensive.

• 5. Victory and Regional Reach

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  After most US combat forces withdrew through the Vietnamization strategy, the PAVN launched the Easter Offensive in 1972. It succeeded at the outset but was repulsed by South Vietnamese forces with US air support, though North Vietnam retained some South Vietnamese territory from that campaign.

  Nearly two years after the full US withdrawal under the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the PAVN launched a Spring Offensive aimed at reunifying Vietnam under communist rule. Without direct US support and weakened by dwindling aid, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam was unable to withstand the assault. Despite holding an advantage on paper, the South Vietnamese forces collapsed quickly. The PAVN captured Saigon on the 30th of April 1975, ending the twenty-year war.

  In 1975, alongside Pathet Lao forces, the PAVN helped topple the Royal Laotian regime and install the Lao People's Democratic Republic, a government that rules Laos to this day. That same year it aided the Khmer Rouge in removing Lon Nol's US-backed government in Cambodia. In 1978, the PAVN joined with the Cambodian National Salvation Front to oust Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea regime, installing the People's Republic of Kampuchea. During the Sino-Vietnamese War, Vietnamese forces conducted cross-border raids into Chinese territory to destroy artillery ammunition stocks. The Chinese forces ran short of ammunition early in the conflict and had to call in reinforcements, a factor that shaped the conflict's outcome. The Liberation Army of South Vietnam was officially merged into the PAVN on the 2nd of July 1976, completing the military reunification of the country.

• 6. Global Reach and Modern Role

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  From the 1970s through the 1990s, the PAVN's Special Operations Forces trained foreign revolutionary groups at the PAVN Sapper Training School and through Vietnamese sapper advisors attached to the Cuban Army's Sapper School in Cuba. A secret Vietnamese sapper training team operated in Nicaragua during the 1980s. Among the foreign forces that received training in sapper tactics, bomb-making, and weapons use were the Salvadoran FMLN, the Chilean MIR fighting against Augusto Pinochet's government, and the Colombian FARC.

  In 2014, Vietnam requested to join United Nations peacekeeping operations. The first Vietnamese UN peacekeeping officers were deployed to South Sudan, marking Vietnam's first participation in a UN mission abroad. Peacekeepers subsequently went to the Central African Republic, and from 2022 onward, Vietnam deployed its first military engineer unit to peacekeeping missions in Abyei. In response to the 2023 earthquake in Turkey, the PAVN sent seventy-six servicemen from the Border Guard, Army Medic, and Engineering Corps to assist in search-and-rescue operations. The source identifies that deployment as the first time Vietnam had ever officially engaged in an overseas search-and-rescue campaign. On the 31st of March 2025, another contingent of seventy-six personnel from the same units deployed to Sagaing for relief operations after the Myanmar earthquake.

  At home, the PAVN operates across economic sectors including industry, agriculture, forestry, fishery, and telecommunications. Conscription applies in principle to every male between eighteen and twenty-five years old, with exceptions for the disabled and those who attended university directly after high school. The current reserve and militia force stands at between three and four million personnel combined. Russia remains Vietnam's largest arms supplier, though since 2016, when President Barack Obama lifted the lethal weapons embargo, military equipment choices have expanded to include the United States, Israel, India, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, France, and the United Kingdom. The STV rifles, Vietnam's indigenous service weapon, are modeled on the Israeli Galil ACE, a detail that captures how far the PAVN's supply chain has traveled since those first fourteen flintlocks.