The Ho Chi Minh Trail was a system of clandestine logistic routes that ran from North Vietnam to South Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam) and through the neighboring kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia, crossing the parallel 17°. The eastern portions of these two neighboring countries were not only part of the network of paths but they were also used as sanctuaries into which the Vietcong guerrillas ran when they were attacked during the Vietnam War (1959 – 1975). They were the same type of routes that had been used by the Vietminh guerrilla army between China and Northern Vietnam during the French-Indochina War.
These network of paths constituted the vital supply line that kept the communist guerrilla operating and fighting. Not only Chinese war materiel were carried through these trails but also manpower in the form of new recruits and experienced North Vietnamese cadres to train them so that they were incorporated into the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, which was derogatively referred as the Vietcong.
The trail was a complex maze of clandestine truck dirt roads, paths for foot and bicycle traffic, and river transportation systems which functioned as important supply lines for the Vietcong in their war against the South Vietnamese Army and American forces deployed there. The name, taken from North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, is of American origin. Although the trail was mostly in Laos, the communists called it the Truong Son Strategic Supply Route, after a mountain range in central Vietnam. According to the U.S. National Security Agency’s official history of the war, the Trail system was “one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century.”
The Ho Chi Minh Trail was devised and consolidated by the North Vietnamese Army to carry war supplies to the south. This network of jungle paths was originally coded 559, but eventually became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The trail’s construction began on May 9, 1959, with the establishment of Military Transport Division 559, which was composed of 440 young men and women. Despite intense American air strikes, the trail carried more than one million North Vietnamese soldiers and vast quantities of supplies to battlefields in South Vietnam over the next 16 years.
Below, a map of Southeast Asia, which shows Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, with the Ho Chi Minh Trail
