Hanoi Hilton

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This article is about the prison in Hanoi known under various names. For the 1987 film , see The Hanoi Hilton (film). For the hotel operated by the Hilton International Corporation, see Hilton Hanoi Opera Hotel.
The Hanoi Hilton in a 1970 aerial surveillance photo.
The Hanoi Hilton in a 1970 aerial surveillance photo.

Coordinates: 21°1′31″N 105°50′47″E / 21.02528, 105.84639

The Hoa Lo Prison (Vietnamese: Hỏa Lò), later known to American prisoners of war as the "Hanoi Hilton", was a prison used by the French colonists in Vietnam for political prisoners and later by North Vietnam for prisoners of war during the Vietnam War.

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[edit] French era

The name Hoa Lo, commonly translated as "fiery furnace" or even "Hell's hole",[1] also means "stove". The name originated from the street name phố Hỏa Lò, due to the concentration of stores selling wood stoves and coal-fire stoves along the street from pre-colonial times.

The prison was built in Hanoi by the French, in dates ranging from 1886–1889[1] to 1898[2] to 1901,[3] when Vietnam was still part of French Indochina. It was intentioned to hold Vietnamese prisoners, particularly political prisoners agitating for independence who were often subject to torture and execution. The French called the prison Maison Centrale[1] - a usual term to denote prisons in France. It was located near Hanoi's French Quarter.[2] A 1913 renovation expanded its capacity from 460 souls to 600.[2] It was nevertheless often overcrowded, holding some 730 prisoners on a given day in 1916, a figure which would rise to 895 in 1922 and 1,430 in 1933.[2] By 1954 it held more than 2000 people,[1] and had become a symbol of colonialist exploitation and the bitterness of the Vietnamese towards the French.[1]

The central urban location of the prison also became part of its early character. During the 1910s through 1930s, street peddlers made an occupation of passing outside messages in through the jail's windows and tossing tobacco and opium over the walls; letters and packets would be thrown out to the street in the opposite direction.[4] Within the prison itself, communication and ideas passed. Indeed, many of the future leading figures in Communist North Vietnam spent time in Maison Centrale during the 1930s and 1940s;[5] in the end the prison served as an education center for revolutionary doctrine and activity, and it was kept around after the French left to mark its historical significance to the North Vietnamese.[5]

[edit] Vietnam War

During the Vietnam War, the first U.S. prisoner to be sent to Hoa Lo was Lieutenant, Junior Grade Everett Alvarez Jr., who was shot down on August 5, 1964.[6] From the beginning, U.S. POWs endured conditions that were miserable, including poor food and unsanitary conditions.[7] The prison complex was sarcastically nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton" by the American POWs, in reference to the well-known Hilton Hotel chain. Beginning in early 1967, a new area of the prison was opened for incoming American POWs;[8] it was dubbed "Little Vegas", and individual buildings and areas were named after Las Vegas Strip landmarks, such as "Golden Nugget," "Thunderbird," "Stardust," "Riviera," and the "Desert Inn."[9] The naming was due to many pilots' familiarity with Las Vegas due to its proximity to Nellis Air Force Base.[8]

The Hanoi Hilton was merely one site used by the North Vietnamese Army to torture and interrogate captured servicemen, mostly American pilots shot down during bombing raids.[10] Although North Vietnam had signed on to the Geneva Convention of 1949,[10] which demanded "decent and humane treatment" of prisoners of war, the North Vietnamese saw U.S. bombing attacks against them as "crimes against humanity".[10] As a consequence, severe torture methods were employed, such as rope bindings, irons, beatings, and prolonged solitary confinement.[10][6][11] The aim of the torture was usually not acquiring military information.[6] Rather, it was to break the will of the prisoners, both individually and as a group.[6][12] The goal of the North Vietnamese was to get written or recorded statements from the prisoners that criticized U.S. conduct of the war and praised how the North Vietnamese treated them.[6] Such POW statements would be viewed as a propaganda victor in the battle to sway world and U.S. domestic opinion against the U.S. war effort.[6][9] In the end, North Vietnamese torture was sufficiently brutal and prolonged that virtually every American POW so subjected made a statement of some kind at some time.[13] (As one later wrote of finally being forced to make an anti-American statement: "I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine."[9]) Realizing this, the Americans' aim became to absorb as much torture as they could before giving in, then admit to each other what had happened, lest shame or guilt consume them or make them more vulnerable to additional North Vietnamese pressure.[11]

Regarding treatment at Hoa Lo and other prisons, Communist propagandists countered by stating that prisoners were treated with decency and that the prison was no worse than prisons for POWs and political prisoners in South Vietnam such as the one on Con Son Island.[citation needed] Mistreatment of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese prisoners and South Vietnamese dissidents in South Vietnam's prisons was indeed frequent, as was North Vietnamese treatment of South Vietnamese prisoners and their own dissidents.[14]

When prisoners of war began to be released from this and other North Vietnamese prisons during the Johnson administration, their testimonies revealed widespread and systematic abuse of prisoners of war. Initially this information was downplayed by American authorities for fear that conditions might worsen for the those remaining in North Vietnamese custody.[9] Policy changed under the Nixon administration, when mistreatment of the prisoners was publicized by U.S. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and others.[9] Beginning in late 1969, treatment of the prisoners became less severe and generally more tolerable.[6] Following the late 1970 Son Tay prison camp attempted rescue operation, most of the POWs at the outlying camps were moved to Hoa Lo, so that the North Vietnamese had fewer camps to protect.[15] This created the "Camp Unity" communal living area at Hoa Lo, which greatly reduced the isolation of the POWs and improved their morale.[15][9]

Future U.S. Vice Presidential candidate James Stockdale and decorated U.S. Air Force pilot Bud Day were held as a prisoners at the Hanoi Hilton, as was future Senator John McCain, who spent parts of his five and a half years as a POW there. Air Force colonel and record-setting parachutist Joseph Kittinger spent 11 months in prison there. Brigadier General Robbie Risner was the senior ranking POW, responsible for maintaining chain of command among his fellow prisoners, from 1965 to 1973.

[edit] Post-war

After the Paris Peace Accords implementation, neither the United States nor its allies ever formally charged North Vietnam with the war crimes revealed to have been committed there. Extradition of North Vietnamese officials who had violated the Geneva Convention was not a condition of the U.S. withdrawal and ultimate abandonment of the South Vietnam government. The present government of Vietnam firmly holds to the view that the Hanoi Hilton was a prison for criminals, not POWs, and that those held in the Hanoi Hilton were "pirates" and "bandits" who had attacked Vietnam without authority.[citation needed]

After the war, Risner wrote the book Passing of the Night detailing his 7 years at the Hanoi Hilton. Indeed, a considerable literature emerged from released POWs after repatriation, depicting Hoa Lo and the other prisons as places where murder, beatings, broken bones, teeth and eardrums, dislocated limbs, starvation, serving of food contaminated with human and animal feces and medical neglect of infections and tropical disease occurred. These matter-of-fact details revealed in famous accounts by McCain (Faith of My Fathers), Denton, Alvarez, Day, Risner, Stockdale, Johnson and dozens of others.[citation needed] In addition, the Hanoi Hilton was depicted in the eponymous 1987 Hollywood movie The Hanoi Hilton.

John McCain's flight suit and parachute, on display in the museum part of the Hoa Lo site.
John McCain's flight suit and parachute, on display in the museum part of the Hoa Lo site.

Only part of the prison exists today as a museum. Most of it was demolished during mid-1990s construction[3] of a high rise that now occupies most of the site. The interrogation room where many newly captured Americans were questioned (notorious among former prisoners as the "blue room") is now made up to look like a very comfortable, if spartan, barracks-style room. Displays in the room claim that Americans were treated well and not harmed (and even cite the nickname "Hanoi Hilton" as proof that inmates found the accommodations comparable to a hotel's). Former prisoners' published memoirs and oral histories broadcast on C-SPAN identify the room (and other nearby locales) as the site of numerous acts of torture.

There is now a Hilton Hotel in Hanoi, called the Hilton Hanoi Opera Hotel, which opened in 1999. It was built decades after the Vietnam War was over, but Hilton carefully avoided reusing the dreaded name "Hanoi Hilton".

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d e Logan, William S. (2000). Hanoi: Biography of a City. UNSW Press. ISBN 0868404438.  pp. 67–68.
  2. ^ a b c d Zinoman, Peter (2001). The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940. University of California Press. ISBN 0520224124.  p. 52.
  3. ^ a b Vietnam's Hanoi Hilton - Hell on Earth. Retrieved on 2008-04-23.
  4. ^ Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, p. 54.
  5. ^ a b Logan, Hanoi, p. 145.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g Frisbee, John L.. "Valor en Masse", Air Force Magazine, February 1989. Retrieved on 2008-05-17. 
  7. ^ Hubbell, John G. (1976). P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner-Of-War Experience in Vietnam, 1964–1973. New York: Reader's Digest Press. ISBN 0883490919.  p. 18.
  8. ^ a b Rochester, Stuart I.; Kiley, Frederick (1999). Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961–1973. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 1557506949.  pp. 292–294.
  9. ^ a b c d e f Lieut. Commander John S. McCain III, United States Navy. "How the POW's Fought Back", U.S. News & World Report, 1973-05-14 (reposted under title "John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account", 2008-01-28).  Reprinted in Library of America staff (1998). Reporting Vietnam, Part Two: American Journalism 1969–1975. The Library of America. ISBN 1883011590.  pp. 434–463.
  10. ^ a b c d Karnow, Stanley (1983). Vietnam: A History. The Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-74604-5.  p. 655.
  11. ^ a b Mahler, Jonathan. "The Prisoner", The New York Times Magazine, 2005-12-25. 
  12. ^ Hubbell, P.O.W., pp. 288–306.
  13. ^ Hubbell, P.O.W., p. 548.
  14. ^ Karnow, Vietnam, pp. 655–656.
  15. ^ a b Glines, C. V.. "The Son Tay Raid", Air Force Magazine, November 1995. Retrieved on 2008-06-08. 

[edit] Further reading

  • Coram, Robert. American Patriot : The Life and Wars Of Colonel Bud Day. Little, Brown and Company, ©2007. ISBN 0316758477 9780316758475
  • Denton, Jeremiah A; Brandt, Ed. When Hell Was In Session. Readers Digest Press, distributed by Crowell, 1976. ISBN: 0883491125 : 9780883491126 0935280006 9780935280005
  • Lenzi, Iola (2004). Museums of Southeast Asia. Singapore: Archipelago Press, 200 pages. ISBN 981-4068-96-9. 
  • McDaniel, Eugene B. Scars and Stripes. Harvest House Publishers, May 1980. ISBN 0-89081-231-4