The Vietnam Wars

Connecting the Pieces Through Radio: A Personal Journey

by Don Moore

Part Two

Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer [SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.

Except where noted otherwise, all photos are from the Vietnamese Military History Museum in Hanoi.

At the end of Part One I wrote how Vietnam became a single united independent country on 2 September 1945. That may have surprised you. It did me. But before we look at what happened, let’s consider what could have happened.

Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist with a desire to create a strong, independent Vietnam. Vietnam may have declared independence in 1945, but it needed help from a stronger nation to rebuild and to tell the French to keep out. Ho appealed to both the Soviet Union and the United States to support his new nation.

Ho Chi Minh had embraced Communism after living and studying in the Soviet Union for a few years in the 1920s. So, could modeling the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence after the US one have been part of a conspiracy with Moscow and a trick to cover Ho’s true intentions? Some claim so, but reality tells a different story. In 1945, the Soviet Union was devastated by World War II. Stalin’s focus was on rebuilding and on bringing the future satellites in Eastern Europe under his wing. He did not have the means, the interest, or the need to support an ally in a distant corner of Asia. Not only did Moscow ignore Ho’s requests, but the Soviet Union didn’t even recognize his government until 1950.

As a young man, Ho had also lived and traveled in the United States. He admired the country and its revolutionary heritage. He had good relationships with his OSS advisors. He believed that the American people were generally opposed to colonialism. Washington had already announced that the Philippines would become independent on 4 July 1946 and President Franklin Roosevelt was known to have opposed continued French rule of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh had strong hopes that the United States would use its diplomatic might to tell the French to stay out. If that had happened, Vietnam would have been drawn closer to the United States. Then what? It would probably have developed into an Asian version of Tito’s Yugoslavia – a non-aligned country with an economy blending Communism and capitalism.

The French War

History took a different path. At the July 1945 Potsdam conference, Allied leaders had agreed that French troops would occupy and disarm the Japanese south of the 16th parallel and that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese would do so in the north. By the end of August, the Vietnamese had already taken care of that for themselves. But the plans didn’t change. On 13 September 1945, a joint French and British force landed on the coast near Saigon and began to take control of population centers in the south. Meanwhile, two hundred thousand Nationalist Chinese troops crossed the border from the north, occupying all the major towns and cities, including Hanoi. Clearly outnumbered, the Viet Minh retreated to the countryside.

What happened over the next nine years is a long, complex story. It was brutal, and both sides committed atrocities. The British and Nationalist Chinese would soon be replaced by additional French troops. Unlike his predecessor, President Truman of the United States fully backed renewed French control of the region. The Viet Minh fought back. For the first few years, they were on their own and desperate for any help. They finally got that after Mao Tse-tung’s victory over the Nationalist Chinese in 1949. But what the Chinese supplied never matched the quality and quantity of what the French forces received from the United States. The Viet Minh countered that advantage through strong support of the populace, a well-developed intelligence-gathering network, and effective use of communication.

On 9 October 1947, Vietnamese forces shot down a French plane carrying Colonel Lambe, the Deputy Chief of Staff for French forces. This radio unit came from that plane. The make is not identified, but it appears to be from the American-made ARC-5 series.

This transceiver was captured by Vietnamese soldiers in 1950. The label on the bottom identifies it as a US Army Signal Corps RT-196/PRC-6

The American-made RPC-10 transceiver was used by Vietnamese forces in 1954 to coordinate the attack on the French position at Doc Lap in the early phases of the Dien Bien Phu campaign.

The Vietnamese forces also operated clandestine radio stations to broadcast their views to the general populace. The Voice of South Vietnam operated in the south with transmitting equipment built by Vietnamese engineers. It’s probable that the transmitters were still being used by clandestine stations into the 1960s and 1970s. (Photos from the Vietnam National Museum of History).

Another SSTR-1 set spy radio. This one was confiscated from French spies in Hanoi after the peace agreement had been signed. (Photo from the Vietnam National Museum of History).

By 1954, the war had turned into a sideshow of the Cold War. The Viet Minh were now firmly in the Communist camp, that being where their support came from. France had firm backing from the United States in the name of stopping Communism. Neither side was capable of decisively defeating the other. But the people of France were tiring of the endless war. The turning point came in May with the surrender of 11,000 French troops at Dien Bien Phu. The French people no longer had the stomach to continue the war. However, France still controlled much of the south. In 1949, they had created the quasi-independent State of Vietnam with its capital in the southern city of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). The 1954 Geneva Conference resulted in Vietnam being divided into two countries at the 17th parallel. A few months later, the State of Vietnam became the fully independent Republic of Vietnam. France was done in Southeast Asia.

(However, the French government hadn’t learned a thing from their experiences in Vietnam. Before 1954 was over a rebellion broke out in Algeria. That led to another brutal colonial war until Algeria was granted its independence in 1962.)

The Vietnam era produced dozens of recognizable, memorable images. In my memories, the one that stands out above all others is of a Buddhist monk sitting calmly as he is engulfed in flames. What would cause a peaceful monk to pour gasoline over himself and then light a match? And it wasn’t just one person. At least seventy-six Buddhist monks and nuns are known to have self-immolated in the early 1960s.

It’s easy to think in black and white. The North was Communist, and that made them the bad guys. But what if the other side weren’t the good guys, either? The government of South Vietnam was never popular with its own citizens. The people who France put in charge of the south were, unsurprisingly, sympathetic to French interests. Many had collaborated with the Vichy French during World War Two. Some, including President Ngo Dinh Diem, had collaborated with the Japanese occupation forces. But the biggest reason for the government’s unpopularity was religion. The vast majority of the South Vietnamese people were Buddhists, but the government was almost wholly run by Roman Catholics. They represented only ten percent of the population. The corrupt Diem government gave preference to Catholics in every way and systematically discriminated against Buddhists. That led to growing Buddhist opposition, which in turn led to the government further oppressing Buddhists. By the early 1960s, the Saigon government had even begun outlawing public displays of some Buddhist religious symbols. And that is what led to the self-immolations that drew international attention to what was happening in South Vietnam.

The American War

The third section of the Vietnamese Military History Museum is about the American War. We call it the Vietnam War in the United States. Military historians refer to it as the Second Indochina War, the first being the one with France just before. Once again, what happened is a long, complex story. Some of you reading this were there. Others, like me, have been around long enough to remember those times.

In 1960, opposition to the Diem government led to the formation of the Viet Cong guerrilla movement. Hanoi would do all it could to fan the flames of the rebellion, but it was the policies of the Saigon government that provided the fuel to start the fire. If Saigon had had a Buddhist government, maybe the war would never have happened, and there would still be two Vietnams, as there are two Koreas.

What followed was a gradual escalation on both sides. Hanoi began by providing the Viet Cong with supplies and military advice. The United States did the same for the Saigon government. When one side increased its involvement, the other did the same. Within a few years, American forces were fighting alongside the South Vietnamese army, and the North Vietnamese Army was fighting alongside the Viet Cong. (Although they worked hand-in-hand, the VC and the NVA were not the same. The Viet Cong were an insurgent guerrilla force. The NVA was an army and fought in organized military units.)

This radio transmitter was used by the 84th Artillery Regiment of the North Vietnamese Army in Quang Tri province during the January 1968 Tet Offensive. The campaign was a surprise attack on over one hundred towns and cities in South Vietnam during the Lunar New Year celebrations. It was one of the bloodiest periods of the war.

According to the display, Company Five of the 205th Regiment of the North Vietnamese Army used this set to send 213,567 messages between 1965 and 1968. I doubt anyone really kept an exact count, but the radio clearly had a lot of use.

This unit was used by the First Battalion of the Tenth Division of the North Vietnamese Army from 1968 to 1975.

The Finale

It seems long ago, but there once was a time when my daily news arrived in the form of a printed newspaper and not on the screen of a cellphone. The number of newspapers that I’ve held in my hands must number over ten thousand. But there is only one headline that I remember. It was late October 1972. I went to the back door to get the morning paper, the Altoona Mirror, and opened it up. Blazoned across the top were the words “PEACE IS AT HAND!” I can still picture it clearly over fifty years later.

According to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the peace talks were on the verge of producing a cease-fire. The 1972 US presidential election was just days away, and the war was the most important issue. No one doubted that Richard Nixon would win reelection, but being able to declare he had ended the war would add to his margin of victory. But Kissinger had been ignoring the South Vietnamese government, and the next day they rejected the treaty on numerous points. That caused the North Vietnamese to walk out.

Both the North and the South were willing to continue the war, but their major backers wanted it over. Nixon had made historic visits to China and the Soviet Union earlier in the year, and all three were looking for improved relations. Neither China nor the Soviet Union supported the North walking out, other than making obligatory diplomatic statements.

In order to bring the North back to the negotiating table, the US launched Operation Linebacker II, the most controversial bombing campaign of the entire war. From the 18th to the 29th of December 1972, over two hundred B-52 bombers dropped over twenty thousand tons of bombs on Hanoi and Haiphong. Thousands were killed, and huge swaths of both cities were leveled, destroying everything from military installations to children’s hospitals. Continue reading →

The Vietnam Wars

Connecting the Pieces Through Radio: A Personal Journey

by Don Moore

Part One

Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer [SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.

Except where noted otherwise, all photos are from the Vietnamese Military History Museum in Hanoi.

Last winter, I spent several months traveling through Southeast Asia. When I arrived in Hanoi I had the usual plans on my agenda. I wanted to learn more about Vietnamese culture and history. I wanted to sample authentic local food. I wanted to spend a few days outside the city to see some natural sites. And there was one more thing. I wanted to understand the Vietnam War better.

Understanding history is always at the top of my agenda when I travel. But this time was different, as it was also very personal. I was too young to have been in the Vietnam War, but the war was a constant presence throughout my childhood. It was on the front page of the daily newspaper. It was in the radio news reports. And it was on television. The Vietnam War is often called the first television war, as television brought the reality of the war directly into our living rooms. My family regularly watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and his calm, controlled manner in reporting the news. I remember videos of soldiers hacking their way through dense jungle foliage. I remember bombed-out buildings, helicopters crashing, and wounded soldiers being carried in stretchers. It wasn’t like the war stories in my history books.

Early in the war, around 1966, one of my mother’s cousins was drafted and sent to Vietnam. A few months later, he suffered a severe head wound and was sent home. I was nine years old, and I remember him watching me play with my toy soldiers in a corner at a family gathering. What did he think of my childish innocence? That was the last time I saw him. He left the area and lived a disturbed, difficult life until passing away several years ago.

Once a week, Walter Cronkite would report the official casualty counts from the Pentagon. Whatever the number of American dead was, our South Vietnamese allies generally had about twice that number. And our Viet Cong and North Vietnamese enemies? They always suffered about ten dead for every American killed. The pattern was very consistent, and the numbers said it all. We were winning. So why did the nightly news also carry reports of massive anti-war protests around the country?

The war and the protests against it continued. In 1970, I was in junior high school and still several years too young for the draft. That didn’t stop my mother from worrying that the war would last long enough to drag me into it. It certainly seemed possible. My parents and many of the adults around me didn’t think highly of the hippies doing the protesting. But those same adults were also questioning whether the war was worth the cost. I didn’t understand that. Shouldn’t we want to win the war, whatever the cost?

American history was my passion when I was a child. I read a steady stream of history books that always put my country and its great leaders in the best possible light. My heroes were people like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, perfect and admirable in every way. And John Wayne. I loved his western and World War II movies. I was becoming a flag-waving my-country-does-no-wrong super patriot. I believed that the Vietnam War was a good thing and that we were on the side of right. I saw the war as just one more chapter in our glorious history. My parents did not teach me to think that way. That wasn’t who they were. I had gotten that way by taking the books I chose to read and the movies I chose to watch too seriously.

In 1971, I discovered shortwave radio. I wasn’t surprised by the anti-American sentiment on stations like Radio Moscow and Radio Havana. They were on the side of evil. And some of the language they used was humorous. Imperialist running dogs? Really? What puzzled me was what I heard on stations like the BBC, Radio Canada, Radio Netherlands, and Deutsche Welle. They were good guys on our side. Why were our friends so strongly questioning what we were doing in Vietnam? Something didn’t add up.

Mark Twain famously said that travel is fatal to prejudice and narrow-minded thinking. With me, it started with shortwave radio. I expanded my reading list to include history and recent events from the rest of the world, especially Latin America. In the school library, I began critically reading the news reports from Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. I began to understand that reality was different from what I had come to believe. Until 1971, the world was black and white. Good versus evil. Bad guys versus good guys. That’s how a child thinks. In 1971, I began to learn that reality has many shades of gray. Understanding the Vietnam War was a key part of that change.

The Vietnam War ended just before I graduated from high school in 1975. Soon other events and wars around the world filled the daily news cycle. The Vietnam War faded from memory. Then about twenty years ago, I came across bound copies of old Time and Newsweek magazines while browsing at the Penn State University library. I pulled out a volume from the late 1960s and began leafing through it. I spent the rest of the afternoon reading about the war as it happened. That rekindled my interest in the era that I grew up in, and since then I’ve read several books on the Vietnam War. But I always knew I was missing part of the story. That is what I was searching for when I landed at Hanoi airport.

Two Sculptures

One of the first places I sought out was the John McCain memorial. A young Navy pilot when his plane was shot down over Hanoi in late 1967, McCain spent over five years in Hanoi’s notorious Hoa Lo Prison. Later, he became a congressman and a senator, and in 2008 he ran for president against Barack Obama. McCain wasn’t perfect; heroes never are. But he was a highly principled, independently thinking man, and even those who disagreed with his politics respected him for that.

A river runs through Hanoi, and there are several small lakes within the central city. American forces launched over a million air sorties against the north during the war. When their planes were hit by enemy fire, American pilots attempted to direct their damaged aircraft towards water for a better chance of survival versus crashing into buildings. That’s what injured John McCain did. This picture from the Ho Loa Prison Museum shows Vietnamese civilians who went into the lake and pulled McCain from the water before he could drown. They did that for dozens of downed American pilots.

As I stood there looking over the now peaceful lake, I tried to picture the scene as a Vietnamese civilian at the time. Enemy planes are flying overhead, dropping bombs to destroy my city and kill my people. Shells are exploding above me as my side tries to shoot them down. And in front of me in the lake is an injured enemy pilot about to drown as his nearby plane sinks below the surface. Amidst all the chaos, would I risk my life by going into the lake to save his? I know that a part of me would want to let the $%#* drown. Would I save him? I don’t know the answer.

A few days later, I visited the Vietnam Military History Museum, the best place in Hanoi to learn about the war. This statue of Ho Chi Minh, flanked by a man with binoculars and another man with a field telephone, is more meaningful than you might think just by giving it a casual glance.

Ho Chi Minh understood that two essential components of winning a war are intelligence gathering and good communication. And that viewpoint carries over into the museum displays. The museum has all kinds of fighting equipment on display. But along the way, there is also an extensive collection of radio equipment with good explanations of how and when it was used. Photos of the radios in the museum would, by themselves, make for an interesting pictorial. But they are meaningless without understanding the context they belong to.

Two Thousand Years of Warfare

The use of radio communication in warfare has only been around for a little over a century, and this story begins long before that. That’s why the title refers to “The Vietnam Wars.” The Vietnam Military History Museum has three sections, and the first is totally focused on China. The story told in that room is long and complex. Two thousand years ago, Vietnam was ruled by China. Then in the year 40 CE, two sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, began a rebellion. They raised an army of 80,000 men and women (including numerous women generals) and successfully pushed the Chinese out of their region.

Three years later, a much larger Chinese army put the rebellion down and executed the sisters. But it didn’t end there. The Vietnamese people continued to rebel and eventually pushed the Chinese out. In the following centuries, China continued to attempt to rule Vietnam. Sometimes they succeeded, but the Vietnamese never accepted Chinese rule. Men and women, together, would rise up to fight the invaders. The lesson in this room is that the Vietnamese people have been fighting to keep foreign powers from controlling their country for over two thousand years. It’s a sobering thought.

By the 19th century, China was in decline but Southeast Asia was now a target for European colonialism. So the subject of the second section of the museum is France. In 1858, French troops landed in Da Nang, along the central coast. That initial attack was repulsed but the French regrouped and a year later attacked Saigon, in the south of the country. This time they established a foothold and the three years of war that followed resulted in France gaining control of three southern provinces. The next few decades were a series of wars followed by treaties intended to be broken until eventually France gained control of all of Vietnam as well as neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

Taking control of Vietnam wasn’t easy and neither was ruling it afterwards. The Vietnamese never stopped resisting French rule and major rebellions broke out every few years. But the best place to understand the scope of Vietnamese resistance is at the Hoa Lo Prison Museum, where John McCain and other American POWs were kept. The prison had seven cellblocks when the French colonial government opened it in 1901. Two cellblocks were for criminals and five for political prisoners. That’s an incredible ratio. And as bad as American POWs had it later, the Vietnamese political prisoners of the early 1900s had it far worse, as shown in this display in one of the actual rooms at the prison museum.

The Japanese Occupation

In June 1940, the French government surrendered to Hitler’s Germany, resulting in the formation of the puppet Fascist Vichy French government in the south of France. Most of France’s overseas territories, including French Indochina, came under control of the Vichy government. But France was a long way from Indochina, and their control was tenuous. In June 1940, Japan invaded northern Vietnam. Initially, there was some scattered fighting, but the two sides, both allies of Hitler’s regime, soon came to an understanding. The Vichy French would continue to nominally rule French Indochina, but the Japanese were really in charge.

Needless to say, the Vietnamese people did not acquiesce. And as bad as treatment from the French had been, the Japanese were worse. Once again the Vietnamese rebelled and gradually all the resistance forces became united under the leadership of the Viet Minh organization and its founder, Ho Chi Minh. For most of the war they were on their own, but by early 1945 the United States began air-dropping supplies and advisors from the OSS (later CIA).

On 15 August 1945, Japan announced its unconditional surrender, which would lead to the official surrender ceremony a few weeks later. It was understood that Japanese troops would remain in control of the various territories they had occupied until the European colonial powers could send in forces to replace them. The Viet Minh, however, did not agree. The very next day, Ho Chi Minh convened a meeting of the Viet Minh leadership. Also present were several American advisors.

The result of the meeting was what became known as the General Uprising. American-made radio equipment made it very easy to coordinate plans throughout the country. Over the next two weeks, Viet Minh forces marched in and took over cities and towns all across Vietnam. In one or two places the Japanese soldiers briefly resisted but mostly it was a peaceful takeover. The Japanese soldiers understood that the war was over and saw no reason to fight and die for French rule in Vietnam.

The Wireless Set No. 19 was developed in 1940 by the British War Office and saw heavy use in the North African desert campaigns. The Mark II models were primarily made by several manufacturers in Canada in 1942. Most of those had Cyrillic labels and were sent to the Soviet Union. A small number of Mark II models, including this one, were made in Chicago by the Zenith Corporation.

There were no markings to indicate who made this next set, which appears to be homebrew.

The next piece is truly a spy radio. The first photo shows the SSR-1-G unit, which was the receiver in the SSTR-1 set. The second photo, from Wikimedia Commons, shows the complete set.

The name stands for Strategic Services Transmitter Receiver Number 1. Developed by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in 1942, it consisted of a receiver, a transmitter, a power supply, and a box of spare parts. It could run off either AC or DC, and everything could fit in a small suitcase. The versatility and portability of the set made it perfect for use by resistance fighters in Europe during World War II and later by spies in the early days of the Cold War. And some units found their way to the Vietnam theater.

A New Beginning

On 30 August 1945, the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh controlled all of Vietnam. Over the next few days, the Viet Minh leadership, with assistance from their American advisors, drafted a Declaration of Independence. It was heavily modeled on the American Declaration of Independence and even directly lifted some phrases in a few places. On 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh read the declaration in public and over the radio airwaves. Vietnam was now a single united independent country, totally free of foreign rule.

Next: Part Two

Links

• The Trung Sisters’ Rebellion: https://www.history.com/articles/trung-sisters-vietnam-rebellion-han-dynasty
• The Mark II Transceiver: https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/mil_gb_wireless_set_no19_mk_iimk.html
• More about the Mark II Transceiver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Set_No._19
• A detailed look at the SSTR-1 radio set: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/spy/sstr1/
• Original 1942 instructional video on using the SSTR-1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQBFxirEmVw