Ho Chi Minh Trail
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The "Ho Chi Minh Trail" was a network of routes from North Vietnam to South Vietnam in the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia to provide logistical support to the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War. It was a combination of truck routes and paths for foot and bicycle traffic. Parts of the trail had actually existed for centuries as primitive foot paths that facilitated trade in the area. The network was expanded by Group 559, a PAVN unit established in 1959. At its peak, over 40,000 people worked constantly to maintain the network of roads that made up the trail.
The name, taken from North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh, is of American origin. Within Vietnam, it is called the Đường Trường Sơn, or Truong Son Road, after the mountain range in Central Vietnam.
While thought of as a trail running north to south, the reality was never that simple. For example, from 1965 to 1970 military supplies were offloaded from China and Russia into Cambodian ports (with Cambodian knowledge and approval) and then moved into South Vietnam. The trail also involved base areas inside Laos and Cambodia. Rather than a trail, it would be better described as a zone of military occupation in Laotian and Cambodian territory along the entire border north to south.
The United States could not block the Ho Chi Minh trail with ground forces because of a variety of political decisions with regard to the scope and scale of the war. For the first few years of the war, it could not even block the northern border of South Vietnam effectively. Between 1965 and 1968, a series of bases along the border were developed moving ever westward toward the border with Laos. But there were never enough men or enough fortifications to ever seal even the Vietnamese border completely. In the west, Laos was officially neutral and it was not in the interests of the US to expand the war into Laos in a big way out of fear of provoking a head-on conventional battle with North Vietnam. Covert methods were preferred because, if provoked, the North Vietnamese could have quickly overrun the entire country. Landlocked mountainous Laos was not a place where the US wished to fight a head-on war. There was also a strong desire among the American senior leadership to avoid any situation that might lead to a situation similar to the last years of the Korean War. The US did not want to fight a war with North Vietnam for fear of Chinese Intervention. The US also did not want to end up with the burden of having to station a very large conventional force in fortifications along the border on a permanent basis (as in Korea).
In 1972, the South Vietnamese army attempted a large incursion into Laos but was driven back with considerable losses. Extensive aerial bombing by the US had little effect on the movement of hundreds of tons per day of food and war supplies as well as personnel down the Ho Chi Minh trail to the south. The infrastructure of the trail was so simplistic and distributed that there were no real targets of any value for bombers to hit. In a recent documentary film, Vietnam: Ghosts of War (2004), a former Vietnamese general claimed that the number of personnel moved down the trail was far in excess than the official US estimates [link].
On November 11, 1968, Operation Commando Hunt was initiated by the U.S. and its allies. The goal of the operation was to interdict men and supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through Laos into South Vietnam. By the end of the operation, 3 million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos, which slowed but did not consistently disrupt trail operations. The movement of men could not be stopped by any amount of bombing and any slowdown in the movement of supplies south from Laos was more than made up by increases in supplies coming through Cambodian ports directly to the front in South Vietnam.
See also
External link
- [Vietnamese (English Language) article] containing a map of the Ho Chi Minh trail.
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