April 30 commemorates the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Ron Emmons recommends the sites worth visiting to mark the occasion.
The year 2025 is a big one for Vietnam, as April 30 marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second Indochina War.
Better known as the Vietnam War to most people, and the American War to the Vietnamese, it was the most widely broadcast conflict of the 20th century.
A decade of raging battles from 1965-1975 left literally hundreds of sites associated with the conflict, but here we’ll look at just half a dozen – three each in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
An obvious place to start is the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Ba Dinh Square, Hanoi, since without the man laid to rest inside, it’s unlikely that the country would be celebrating 50 years of independence. The role Ho played in the country’s reunification was immense, and the devoted expressions on the faces of Vietnamese visitors as they shuffle past the open casket show just how much he is still revered.
The mausoleum itself is a monolithic slab of marble that is not easy on the eye, but a few steps away stands the simple stilted house that Ho preferred to live in rather than the enormous Presidential Palace, originally built for the French Governor, that he only used to entertain foreign dignitaries.
Ho died in 1969 and so never saw his country liberated, and his wish to be cremated went unheeded, but if he could see his country today, he would be probably be pleased with its progress since the dark days of the war.
War command room at the Thang Long Citadel. Photo / Ron Emmons
Also in Ba Dinh Square is the Imperial Citadel of Thang Long (Thang Long was the former name of Hanoi), which was granted UNESCO World Heritage status in 2010 to coincide with the city’s 1000th birthday. This is where wars defining Vietnam’s shifting borders have been controlled since time immemorial.
The site is a mishmash of architectural styles, beginning with the huge, imposing Doan Mon Gate, built during the Le dynasty of the 15th century. The next structure, once the most important building in the Citadel, the Kinh Thien Palace, was razed by the French, but behind that is the prosaically named D67 Building, which functioned as the command center for the People’s Army of Vietnam during the war against the US.
Two aspects of this very ordinary building (so designed to avoid attention) are of particular interest – the conference table where military masterminds like Vo Nguyen Giap planned their next move, and the deep, reinforced bunker made to withstand a significant bombardment from above. The last structure in the Citadel is the Bac Mon (North Gate), built in 1805 and still showing damage inflicted by French cannons.
Hoa Lo Prison, aka Maison Centrale or Hanoi Hilton. Photo / Ron Emmons
A third site worth visiting in Vietnam’s capital city is the Hanoi Hilton – no, not the real one, but the one with the ironic name that American inmates of the Hoa Lo Prison gave to the place. The prison was originally established by the French to lock up opponents to their regime, and they had their own name for the facility – Maison Centrale. When the 13-storey Hanoi Towers was built on the site during the 1990s as the city developed rapidly, the prison was retained as a museum.
The exhibits here focus mostly on the inhuman cruelty carried out by the French on Vietnamese nationalist leaders. The photographs, dioramas and bas reliefs that depicted such activity are horrifying, though images of American captives smiling and playing basketball suggest they were treated much better.
A recently added activity for visitors to Hoa Lo Prison is an immersive evening tour on Friday to Sunday, called Sacred Night – Glorious Vietnamese Spirit, which recreates the frightening atmosphere of the war era. Through a carefully scripted combination of ambient sounds, dark lighting and life-size replicas of inmates, visitors are guided through the male and female cell blocks, and witness a daring escape attempt through the sewers.
In Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as it is still stubbornly called by its residents despite a name change 50 years ago, two sites in the heart of the city stand out as reminders of the chaotic end to the war – the Independence Palace and the War Remnants Museum. A third site – the Cu Chi Tunnels – requires a 50-kilometre ride out of the city.
The first thing you see on entering the grounds of the Independence Palace are replicas of tanks 834 and 390, which crashed through the gates of what was then the Presidential Palace on April 30, 1975, signalling the fall of Saigon.
On that morning, Duong Van Minh, in only his third day as President of South Vietnam, greeted Colonel Bui Tin of the north with the words, “I have been waiting since early this morning to transfer power to you”, to which the general replied, “Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you do not have.”
Independence Palace, Ho Chi Minh City. Photo / Ron Emmons
The furnishings and fittings of this four-storey, 95-room building are redolent of the 1960s. The offices and conference rooms on the first two floors are uninspiring, and the most interesting scenes are in the war command rooms in the basement, where huge maps on the wall, ancient telephones and clunky electronic devices are a throwback to a bygone era.
Though there are no distressing scenes at the Independence Palace, the War Remnants Museum requires a strong stomach. The grounds of the museum are littered with war equipment – cannons, tanks, helicopters and bombs – yet it is the photographs, documents, artefacts and dioramas in the several galleries of the museum that leave a lasting impression of the horrors of war.
The galleries have names like ‘Historical Truths’ and ‘Requiem’, this second being a display of images captured by correspondents from both sides who subsequently lost their lives in the conflict. In the ‘Agent Orange Consequences’ gallery are jars of deformed fetuses, while the ‘War Crimes’ gallery features a mind-boggling collection of hand-held weaponry, including bazookas, machine guns and rifles. The last gallery is dedicated to international opposition to the war, which softens the self-congratulatory tone of other galleries.
War Remnants Museum, Ho Chi Minh City. Photo / Ron Emmons
The Cu Chi Tunnels, located to the northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, are perhaps Vietnam’s best-known war site. They were dug initially by members of the Viet Minh in the 1940s to hide weapons from the French, but as the conflict between North and South escalated in the 1960s, the tunnels were developed into an underground network on up to four levels stretching over 200 kilometres that included kitchens, hospitals and military workshops. Repeated attempts to dislodge the Viet Cong by so-called ‘tunnel rats’ were unsuccessful as were later carpet-bombing raids. Indeed, the mere existence of the tunnels was a major factor in the outcome of the war.
Tourists are invited to clamber down into a section of the tunnels that have been enlarged to accommodate Western visitors, who are generally bigger than the Vietnamese. Back above ground, guides point out examples of tunnel entrances that are perfectly concealed, fearsome booby traps that were designed to maim and a clever system to disperse the smoke from fires in the underground kitchens.
Tourists exploring the Cu Chi Tunnels. Photo / Ron Emmons
The tunnels are a classic example of Vietnamese ingenuity and the last stop on this brief tour of war sites that act as poignant reminders of the country’s painful past.
