Struggle for Liberty; Contemporary Paintings

National Liberation Front, Struggle for Liberty; Contemporary Paintings, 1968, Michel Nr. NLF 15-18; Four stamps were issued with the nominals of “10”, “20”, “30” and “40” but without any currency units. The stamps were printed in the Soviet Union in sheets of 25 stamps each and in perforation 12.5. No official release date of these stamps is known. Michel reports them being issued in 1968 and the Vietnam Postage Stamp Catalogue in 1969. Ta Phi Long speculates in his book “Some Features of Postal History in the Period of Revolutionary South Vietnam” that the stamps must have been produced before 1967 as no currency unit is indicated and that was typical for the early NLF stamps up to 1966. He writes that the production of the stamps was likely delayed and that by the time they finally became available the NLF leadership had already moved on to issue stamps with the currency unit of the NLF.

Hers is the mint set in complete sheets of 25 stamps.

Here is the cancelled to order set. It was cancelled on December 20th, 1960 which just adds to the confusion on when these stamps were issued.

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).