8 Years National Liberation Front

National Liberation Front, 8 Years National Liberation Front, December 20th, 1968, Michel Nr. 19-22; Four stamps in the nominals of 20xu (2) and 30xu (2) were issued. The 30xu stamps were printed together in the same sheets. The stamps were produced by the Tien Bo Printing House in sheets of 100 stamps.

Here is the mint set.

Mint blocks of four.

Here is the cancelled to order set.

Cancelled to order strip of three of the 30xu value that shows the arrangement within the sheet.

These stamps were not officially released imperforate however a very small number of imperforate trial profs have come to market. Here is one of them.

Some errors are known on the red 20 xu stamp. Here is a mint stamp that shows a printing error on which all of the entire black printing phase is missing. Rare.

Here is a perforation error on the same stamp. It is a spectacular mint block of 20 stamps on which all vertical perforation 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 bring the postal clerk.

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).