COSVN Plenum Number 13 (Expanded) to Review the Situation and to Establish the Revolution’s Guidelines, Directions, Missions, and Requirements for Late 1974 and 1975

After the Paris Agreement was signed, the situation in South Vietnam changed substantially. The U.S. withdrew its troops and there was a change in the revolutionary situation, shifting it in our favor. Because of this situation, COSVN held a full Party conference from 28 July to 4 August 1974 to agree on its assessment of the situation and to set out guidelines, directions, and missions for last part of 1974 and for 1975.

After listening to briefings and holding discussions on the battlefield situation in Cochin China during the first six months of 1974 and on our missions for the last half of the year, the COSVN conference unanimously concluded as follows:

-The most outstanding feature of the current situation was that we are now capable of winning a large victory during the rainy season and dry season of 1974-1975, and at the same time there are many favorable factors that can create a major turning point for the South Vietnamese revolution. As for the other side, the enemy’s situation was deteriorating in every respect: military, economic, and political.

With regard to our mission and goals for the 1974-1975 rainy and dry season, the Conference concluded:

-We had to create the possibility for winning a great victory during the 1974-1975 dry season and create a decisive turning point that would advance our movement in order to achieve and perhaps even exceed our assigned goals for 1974. If we wanted to accomplish this, the conference said, we would have to make good preparations for the rainy season and the dry season. We would have to make great efforts, and there was a possibility that the situation might develop even faster than anticipated.

In order to properly accomplish this mission, the Conference requested that all Region Party Committees and Province Party Committees review their activities, derive lessons learned from their experience, update their plans for the dry season, concentrate their efforts on the 1974-1975 dry season, and study and absorb our offensive concept for the coming phase of the war.

The Conference unanimously decided on the following missions:

-Continue to attack and defeat the enemy’s pacification program;

-Maintain a firm grasp of our formulas and missions for conducting armed operations and building up our armed forces;

-Strengthen our operations in urban areas and the areas where we were still weak.

-Develop our liberated zones, base areas, and supply corridors, expand production, and gradually and systematically build new production relationships.

-Intensify our ideological and mass mobilization activities to ensure that the masses correctly understood the new situation in order to increase their enthusiasm for our cause. We must employ an offensive, resolute ideology and a correct mass concept. We would have to guard against thoughts of self-satisfaction, complacency, hesitation, and rightist deviationism.

The Conference affirmed that we must constantly maintain close contact with the Party Central Committee and submit concrete status reports on all aspects of the situation to the Central Committee in order to strengthen guidance and direction regarding the missions and objectives of the soldiers and civilians of South Vietnam during the coming phase.

After the conference, in early April 1974 COSVN issued a directive that clearly stated the following:

Our most urgent guidelines, directions, missions, requirements [goals], and activities during the last six months of 1974 were:

-To continue to fundamentally defeat the enemy’s “pacification and land encroachment” plan, especially in the area of the Mekong Delta and the areas around the cities, and strive to liberate and gain control over approximately 4 million people during the last half of 1975.

During the 1974-1975 rainy season and dry season, we should strive to achieve most of the goals that have been set:

-To annihilate truly large numbers of enemy troops, including regular troops, RF soldiers, PF soldiers, and PSDF personnel;

-To take an important step forward in transforming the situation in the areas where we are weak, advancing toward the goal of eliminating one half of the current number of “white” [abandoned, deserted] hamlets and of moving our mass organizations, and eventually Party chapters, into these hamlets;

-Move our urban movement in the cities another step forward, build up our Party organization and our mass organizations in the cities, develop and expand our three types of troops [main force, local force, guerrilla militia] in the cities, win the support of opposition forces and of the followers of the different religions and religious factions, and properly exploit the internal contradictions within the enemy’s own camp, coordinating these efforts with our other attack spearheads in the rural countryside to build the strength needed to overthrow the Nguyen Van Thieu puppet government.

[…]

[Translator’s Note: This document can also be found in the first edition of Lich Su Bien Nien Xu Uy Nam Bo va Trung Uong Cuc Mien Nam (1954-1975) [Historical Chronicle of the Cochin China Party Committee and the Central Office for South Vietnam, 1954-1975] (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban Chinh tri quoc gia, 2002), 1023-1025.]