The People's Army of Vietnam, also known as the North Vietnam Army (NVA for short) during the Vietnam War of 1964 / 1965-1975, was formed in December 1944. She took part in the battles with the French in 1946-1954 with great success, giving them a spectacular defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Pho in 1954. In both this war and the Vietnam War (1964 / 1965-1975), the primary type of NVA was infantry. This was due to, on the one hand, economic reasons, and on the other - the terrain of Vietnam, which made it impossible to use mechanized and armored units on a larger scale. During the war of 1964 / 1965-1975, the NVA was able to put around 450,000-500,000 soldiers into combat at a time. The army used various types of small arms, ranging from TT and PM pistols, through captured MAT 49 submachine guns, AK and AKM rifles, to RPD and DP machine guns. It is also often forgotten that the NVA had artillery units (e.g. 107 and 120 mm mortars), anti-aircraft weapons and armored forces composed of vehicles such as the T-54, T-55 or PT-76. The main strategy of the North Vietnamese forces was to inflict the greatest possible losses on the American troops and make them withdraw from the conflict. Exceptions to this strategy (e.g. the Tet offensive of 1968) only supported these assumptions. It is worth adding that this strategy turned out to be right, and the NVA finally won the Vietnam War despite suffering huge losses estimated (along with the Viet Cong) at around 650,000-800,000 killed.
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War (called the Vietnam War), was fought from 1964 (events in the Gulf of Tonkin) or from 1965 (the landing of the first, larger American forces in Vietnam) until 1975, i.e. until the occupation of South Vietnam through North Vietnam. The opponents in this war were, on the one hand, the United States, supporting its ally, i.e. South Vietnam and North Vietnam, along with the communist Vietcong guerrillas, supported (in one way or another) by the PRC and the USSR. Assume that at one time, at the maximum, North Vietnam involved about 690,000 soldiers in the conflict, Vietcong - about 200,000 people, while the United States reached the peak of its involvement in 1969, when Vietnam had about 540,000 American soldiers. The immediate cause of the conflict was the claims and ambitions of North Vietnam to take power and control over its southern neighbor, which the United States could not and did not want to agree to. The Vietnam War was an excellent example of a guerrilla war, in which the highly advanced technological armed forces of the USA suffered considerable losses and finally lost in the clash with the armed forces incomparably worse. It is worth adding that from a purely military point of view, the US troops were able to inflict huge losses on their opponent (e.g. the Tet offensive of 1968), but on the so-called The "home front" completely lost it. It is often assumed that the Vietnam War was lost by the US primarily because of tensions in American society, its reluctance to do so, and the inability of the US establishment to provide a convincing justification for it. The Vietnam War finally ended in 1975 with a complete defeat of the United States, which was forced to withdraw from Vietnam and come to terms with the unification of Vietnam by the communist government in Hanoi. The prestige of this country in the international arena has also decreased significantly for some time.