The Hanoi Hilton - Hoa Lo Prison

November 23^rd, 2024

The Hoa Lo Prison was constructed in the late 1800s by the French colonists in Indochina to house political prisoners.  Later it was used to imprison US POWs (primarily aviators) in the Vietnam War.  The name “Hoa Lo” means “fiery furnace” or “Hell’s hole”.  Sounds lovely doesn’t it?  A lot of the prison was demolished in the 1990s to make way for some high-rise apartments, but what was left has now been turned into a museum.

I'm ready to go for the audio tour...I'm smirking as I sent this to Naomi as she getting her hair done, and she hates audio tours.

The audio tour started in the “Maison Centrale”, which is French for Central House.  This is where the dangerous and long sentence detainees were kept.  Two long platforms lined the long sides of the rectangular room which served as the beds for the prisoners.  At the inner side of the platform were iron shackles for the legs of the prisoners and at one end were two very rudimentary toilets.  It was definitely not a pleasant place to be.

The main door to the "Maison Centrale" (Central House) which was reserved for those who were considered dangerous or had long sentences.

The exhibition in the Maison Centrale.

Here's what it looked like...terrifying conditions.

The men would have one leg in irons most of the day.

This was the toilet at one end of the cell...no privacy at all.  There were just buckets underneath and if the prisoners were unruly, the guards stopped emptying them for a while.  But the political prisoners used this to their advantage and hid documents inside the buckets.

The Dungeon, where prisoners who broke regulations were kept for sometimes weeks at a time.  Inside there was barely any light.  The inmates legs were alway bound in stiff shackels with the floor sloping slightly downwards so if they lied down, blood would go to their head so they often returned puffed with oedema.  They were always chained up and would have to relieve themselves where they were lying.

The number of convicts in the prison rose from 460 in 1913 to over 2000 in 1954.  The inmates were held in subhuman conditions to say the least.  When the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was founded in 1954, the prison was converted to an education center for revolutionary doctrine and kept as a reminder as to the incredible sacrifice the political prisoners had made and the terrible mark the French had left on this country.

A memorial to the political prisoners.

This elm tree was a place of respite, where they could sit in the shade on hot days and relax.

A replica of how some prisoners cut through iron bars in the sewer to escape...imagine how terrible those conditions would be.

A cell for women, and their children if they had no extended family to take care of them.

The actual guillotine that was used in the early days of the prison.  One day, 7 prisoners were killed in under 5 minutes.

The death row prison cell.

With the outbreak of the Vietnam War, American prisoners of war were incarcerated at the prison, which was later dubbed the “Hanoi Hilton” by its occupants.  The first prisoner arrived in 1964 and the jail was in use until the end of the war.

Air defence in Hanoi during the Vietnam War.

An aerial reconnaissance photo from 1970. 

The prsion garb of the first US pilot who captured and placed in the Hanoi Hilton. 

I found it interesting that the Vietnam War exhibition section really tried hard to paint a picture that the prisoners were treated very humanely.  They were well fed, allowed to play games like checkers, chess and cards, exercise regularly and were never treated badly.  Well, if you do some research, that doesn’t quite seem to be the case.  A famous incident was when POW Jeremiah Denton was on a televised press conference which he was forced to participate in by his captors to state to the World how well he was being treated.  Feigning that he was having trouble with the bright television lights, he blinked T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code.

John McCain's  flight suit and parachute.

He later became a senator and ran for the US presidency a couple of times.

This was on the walk back to the hotel.  In the bottom right corner, the green box is a product from Schneider Electric, the company that bought Power Measurement, where I worked in IT from 1997-2010.  Check out whose running the store...yup, that's a duck!

All in all, it was quite an interesting museum.