Early Covert Action on the Ho Chi Minh Trail

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Throughout the First Indochina War (1946-54), Communist insurgents in northern Vietnam wrestled with the challenge of shuttling supplies from the People’s Republic of China to their comrades on southern battlefields. Complicating their plans was the fact that the narrow central ‘waist’ of Vietnam had a sizable presence of opposing French colonial forces. As an alternative to that direct route, Communist supply columns sidetracked into neighboring Laos and maneuvered down trails on the eastern side of the Lao (or Laotian) panhandle before veering back into Vietnamese territory.

After a brief respite during the mid-1950s, traffic began building on these trails once again in the spring of 1959, as Communist authorities in North Vietnam sought to stoke the simmering VC insurgency in the South. This revived effort followed from North Vietnam’s forces crossing the Laotian border on December 14, 1958, and annexing a remote corner of Laos immediately west of the DMZ. Soon the trails in the supply corridor gained a new collective nickname, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in honor of the Vietnamese Communists’ chief revolutionary.

It did not take long for both the Royal Lao and South Vietnamese governments to get wind that the trail was back in business. The trouble was, however, that the Lao government had little in the way of population or a military presence in the rugged eastern corridor, so Communist porters could move down the panhandle without attracting much attention.

All of this greatly concerned the South Vietnamese authorities in Saigon. In 1959, anxious to get better intelligence on infiltration along the trail, ARVN officials began negotiating with their Royal Lao counterparts for permission to mount shallow forays west from Lao Bao along Route 9, into Laos. To disguise their origins, the ARVN troops would wear Lao uniforms. Implemented by year’s end, the agreement resulted in a semipermanent South Vietnamese outpost across the border in the Lao village of Ban Houei Sane.

North Vietnamese use of the trail was soon overshadowed by events elsewhere in Laos. In August 1960 an obscure Lao paratroop captain named Kong Le seized control of the capital and declared Laos a neutral country. In the confusion that followed, right-wing military officers gathered in southern Laos to plot a countercoup, while the indigenous Lao Communist movement — known as the Pathet Lao — lent support to Kong Le. By December the warring parties had converged on Vientiane, reducing much of the city to rubble.

As seesaw battles erupted across the kingdom in January 1961, the Royalist 12th Infantry Battalion, which had been holding defensive positions in the eastern panhandle town of Tchepone, shifted west to the Mekong town of Thakhek. Into its positions at Tchepone moved the newly formed Bataillon Voluntaire (BV) 33.

Sensing an opportunity for a further land-grab — especially along the trail — the NVA, with Pathet Lao support, attacked Tchepone and neighboring Muong Phine on April 29, 1961. Both locations fell within a day, despite the reported 11th-hour arrival of a Thai army artillery battery sent to bolster the Royalists. Cut off to the west, BV 33 beat a hasty retreat east toward Ban Houei Sane.

North Vietnam’s plan now became evident. Six months earlier the Communists had eliminated another isolated outpost farther to the south at Sam Luang. The presence of Royalists at that locale had impeded the trail’s expansion through eastern Saravane and Attopeu provinces along a series of long-established paths leading to Vietnam. A company from BV 43, positioned at the village since August 1960, had been overrun on October 14. One week later, on October 21, two of the Communist columns had crossed into South Vietnam’s Kontum province and taken five villages north of Dak Pek. By November 8, they had finally been turned back. Those incidents marked the first time since the First Indochina War that northern troops had traversed Lao territory before attacking South Vietnam.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War