Mon, May 18, 2009 page5

• Vietnam’s ‘trail of blood’ turns 50

  • AFP
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  Vietnam will mark on Tuesday the 50th anniversary of its “trail of blood,” the Ho Chi Minh Trail that allowed it to defeat the US and is now being turned into a national highway.

  Ceremonies, TV shows and other events have, since the beginning of the year, been commemorating the trail and the young soldiers and volunteers who died on it.

  “It is a trail of blood. A lot of people were sacrificed,” said retired Lieutenant General Vu Xuan Vinh, who commanded a military base on the route.

  

  Former volunteers from the Ho Chi Minh Trail attend a meeting to mark its 50th anniversary at a museum in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Saturday.

  PHOTO: AFP

  “I don’t know how many people fell during the trail’s construction, but it’s a trail of blood and sweat,” Vu said.

  Millions of soldiers and millions of tonnes of weapons and other supplies were moved back and forth on the trail which initially was little more than a network of mountain and jungle paths.

  They were later enlarged by military engineers to become roads and some were even paved.

  The term “trail” is a something of a misnomer, however, as there were several linked perpendicular and parallel roads.

  There is no clear figure for how many people died building and defending the routes. Even the Ho Chi Minh Trail Museum in Hanoi provides no death toll, but the trail “is one of extraordinary sacrifice, particularly of women,” said Carl Thayer, a specialist on Vietnam who teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

  “I was not afraid of death. I was ready to sacrifice for the South,” said Trong Khoat, who led an arts and performance troupe that entertained soldiers.

  Khoat, 80, said he spent 11 years in the trail’s key Truong Son mountain area.

  The trail may have claimed its toll in blood but it was also a lifeline to communist forces trying to liberate then-South Vietnam which was backed by the US.

  “This trail played the role of blood, which came from the heart to supply the South — with personnel, medicine, weapons, ammunition, to transport the cadres of the army of the North,” Vinh said.

  While parts of the trail network already existed, the all-out effort to expand it began in 1959 after the North Vietnamese leadership decided to use revolutionary warfare to liberate the South.

  The defeat of French colonial forces in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu had led to Vietnam’s division into the communist North and pro-US South, setting the stage for two more decades of war.

  “On May 19 we had a small secret ceremony” and construction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail began, Vinh said.

  The trail took its name from Vietnam’s founding president, whose birthday was May 19.

  Routes were initially improved to allow marching by foot, said retired lieutenant-general Nguyen Dinh Uoc, a former military commander who is also a historian and journalist.

  “But that wasn’t enough for our needs. Gradually we had to widen the route for vehicles. This was used to move heavy equipment like trucks and food,” Uoc said.

  “It wasn’t just a road but a rear base,” he said.

  Vinh described the road network as a cobweb, much of which passed through Laos and Cambodia.

  “The trail was finished little by little, year by year,” Vinh said.

  US forces heavily bombed the routes and even tried to plant electronic monitors on it but they could not stop the flow of men and supplies.

  The museum in Hanoi says the network included a petroleum pipeline 1,400km long, with 113 pumping stations.

  The battle against US forces and their surrogate regime cost at least 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American lives before the war ended on April 30, 1975, when the country was reunified.

  The trail had done its job.

  “If we had not had this trail it would have been very difficult to liberate the South,” Vinh said.

  “Absolutely,” Thayer agreed. Very few guerrilla movements have won without such sanctuaries, he said.

  “It’s an epic — and a successful epic.”

  Commemoration of the trail’s 50th anniversary follows the 55th commemoration of Vietnam’s victory at Dien Bien Phu on May 7 and the April 30 remembrance of the country’s reunification.

  In a country where two-thirds of the population are younger than 35, with no memory of the wars, the commemorations are important, Thayer said.

  “It brings home an element of the history that the Communist Party is proud of,” giving the country’s rulers a chance to spread their message that they have brought prosperity through struggle and adversity, he said.

  Uoc sees a new strategic role for the trail through its transformation into a national highway linking the country’s far north with the extreme south by 2020.

  The first phase between the Hanoi area and central Kon Tum Province is essentially complete, the ministry of transport says, but there is not yet enough funding to finish the second phase.

  Completing the 3,167km highway is important economically as well as militarily, Uoc said.

  “With the highway, we have the chance to defend the homeland and protect the unified country,” he said.
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