10th Founding Anniversary of the Liberated Armed Forces of South Vietnam

National Liberation Front, 10th Founding Anniversary of the Liberated Armed Forces of South Vietnam, February 15th, 1971, Michel Nr. NLF 35-38; Four stamps with nominals of 20xu, 30xu, 50xu and 1 Dong (in the NLF currency) were issued in perforation 11.0.

Here is the mint set.

Mint blocks of four.

Here is the cancelled to order set.

This is a rare printing error of the 20xu stamp on which the entire green printing phase is missing.

Since these stamps were never used there is no genuine postal history. Sometimes one can see letters that were favor cancelled after the end of the war or NLF stamps mixed in with North Vietnamese stamps also used after the war but they are basically philatelic documents that were simply made up to please collectors. NLF stamps were not permitted to be used in the North (mostly because the currency units were simply not compatible) so the mixed frankings one sees once in a while simply slipped through unrecognized or were obtained by bribing a postal clerk.

Ta Phi Long reports in his book “Some Features of postal History in the period of revolutionary South Vietnam” that these stamps were overprinted with a black X on top of the nominal value (which was expressed in NLF currency). Reportedly each overprinted stamp was valued with the standard letter rate (up to 20g) in force at time of usage in the South, however, the editor has never seen any genuine postal history that demonstrates the actual usage of these provisional stamps. So it is likely that these stamps were prepared but were not used released after all.

Here are two mint overprinted stamps.

Details scans of the overprints.

The editor has a rare sheet of 50 of the 50xu value overprinted by an X but here is only a partial scan due to the size of the sheet.

There is also a genuine overprint that shows the elimination of the old nominal by what looks like a semi-colon and the new nominal of 10D. Here is a mint sample.

The National Liberation Front was an unground army of people that often posed as ordinary citizens and farmers during daytime but became soldiers at night. This made it so hard for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and the Americans to defeat them. In order to scare this underground army and erode support among the population, ARVN distributed propaganda leaflets intended as psychological warfare like this original one below (ex Munshower).