MILITARY COLLECTOR GROUP POST, April 22/98 INDEX: ANNOUNCEMENTS; COMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT OF THE NORTH VIETNAMESE ARMY, & VIET CONG; Part I, By LTC William L Howard MEMBERS WRITE; HAL's WISH LIST; ON THE COMMERCIAL FRONT; HUMOR; *********************************************** ANNOUNCEMENTS; The Joplin hamfest didn't yield sqwat! Ike got a nice complete GRC-9 receiver section for $15.00. Me? I didn't get shit! Bob got an excelant spares kit for a Mod.19 MK-II, and a trashed BC-375. Me? I didn't get shit! Ray got a realy nice National Version II with coils for $100. Me? Nada! There was some nice boat anchor stuff, but nothin green, and I personaly wouldn't give $85 for an Elmac PMR-7! I don't understand, I left here Friday morning with $300 in my pocket. Drove a 250 mile round trip. I got home Saturday afternoon with $90 and nothin ta show for it but a dirty coffee cup, and less gas in the van. I got a question! What kind of museum buys, sells, trades, and does estate liquidations? I don't know either, but there was one of those there too. Shades of Ben Nock! I got the motor back in the Big Dodge, now gotta get it all hooked back up and runnin. Am desparate to get this all done in time for our trip to Little Rock this Thursday(we use it for our Hill Billy RV). It's gonna be a close call. Checking email messages has been reduced to twice daily(before, and after mechanicin) due to extremely nasty grease from head to toe. I haven't swapped a motor in more than 15 years, and now I remember why! I got another question, why is it, when yer hands get their absolute nastiest with grease, two things happin, ya gotta piss, or the phone rings? Well I fixed the latter, just leave the damn thing off the hook. But the other can be a real problem! Dennis *********************************************** COMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT OF THE NORTH VIETNAMESE ARMY, & VIET CONG; Part I, By LTC William L Howard In 1954 when the Geneva Agreements were signed ending the French Indochina War, communications in both North and South Vietnam were in poor condition. Military equipment much of it left over from WWII, was worn out. Since the French had handled both military and civilian communications their departure left the Republic of Vietnam with little equipment and no native expertise. On the other hand, North Vietnam inherited the resources of the victorious Viet Minh: experienced communicators and a battle tested military signal organization. While the South Vietnamese laboriously rebuilt military signal units with the logistical and training support of American advisers during the late 1950's, the North Vietnamese interlaced their homeland with an austere, but comprehensive, communications network. By 1960 a powerful North Vietnamese governmental agency, the General Directorate of Posts, Telecommunications, and Broadcasting, had rehabilitated the old French wire network and installed radio-telegraph stations in every province. Encouraged by promises of aid from several Communist allies, North Vietnam then boldly em-barked on an ambitious five-year modernization plan for telecommunications. The Communists intended to build a national microwave system, complete with automatic switchboards, to supplement the wire network. Automatic radio-teletype and voice radios would replace the existing radio-telegraph system, a slow, manual Morse net. Although few of those hopes for modernization were actually fulfilled by the end of the five-year term of the plan, the optimistic outlook for North Vietnamese communications probably influenced Communist strategists meeting in Hanoi in September 1960 to consider whether the time was ripe to step up the insurgency in South Vietnam. They knew what prodigious demands such a campaign would make on North Vietnam's communicators. Reliable domestic communications to every province in North Vietnam would be essential in coordinating mobilization of the nation's resources and movement of men and material to the southern front. Since the insurgency was to be orchestrated directly from Hanoi, communicators also would have to establish extensive long-distance networks to meet the needs of both the Communist Party's political administration of an underground government in the faraway provinces of South Vietnam and the military's strategic direction of campaigns against the South Vietnamese Army. To support tactical operations within South Vietnam, the military and political cadres actually conducting the insurgency would require lightweight easily concealed radios. Undaunted by those requirements for domestic, strategic, and tactical communications, the North Vietnamese in December 1960 announced the establishment of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. Communist leaders tried to insist that the National Liberation Front was a popular uprising of South Vietnamese nationalists displeased with Diem. Although the insurgents had a clandestine headquarters, called the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), in a remote jungle area near the Cambodian border, doubtless Hanoi maintained direct communications with the communist bases throughout South Vietnam in addition to funneling strategic direction through the new field headquarters. Probably to relay communications from Hanoi to remote areas in the South, North Vietnamese communicators established a large communications complex at Dong Hoi about fifty miles north of the border with South Vietnam. The oldest and most reliable strategic communications system available to the North Vietnamese was the clandestine communications-liaison network in operation since the Franco-Viet Minh War along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As infiltration increased in the early l960's, communications-liaison took on increasing importance. By 1964 two communications-liaison battalions were handling strategic communications and infiltration along the trail. To communicate general information, policy, and propaganda to South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese employed voice and telegraph radio broadcasting. The Vietnam News Agency, an operating arm of North Vietnam’s General Directorate of Information, managed the activities of both Radio Hanoi, the official North Vietnamese radio network, and Radio Liberation, a clandestine station located in South Vietnam near the headquarters of the Central Office for South Vietnam. Much of the broadcast equipment had been manufactured in the United States and captured from the French. Recognizing early the importance of undermining the South Vietnamese people’s confidence in and allegiance to their government, North Vietnamese propagandists began beaming specially prepared programs to South Vietnam over Radio Hanoi soon after the division of the two countries. By 1962, when the South Vietnamese domestic broadcasting network comprised only fifteen small transmitters, all less than 25 kilowatts in strength, North Vietnam had ten 100 kilowatt transmitters and several relays in Cambodia beaming Radio Hanoi’s signal throughout South Vietnam. To maintain the facade that the National Liberation Front was a legitimate revolutionary organization existing in-dependently of North Vietnam, Radio Liberation operated an international broadcast station. That transmitter, however, was located not in South Vietnam, but at the Radio Hanoi communications complex in Me Tri, a suburb of Hanoi. As Communist propaganda assumed an increasingly important role after the beginning of the Paris peace negotiations in 1968, the Me Tri complex grew to house twenty-three transmitters beaming broadcasts throughout the world in ten languages. Of many special communications networks established as the insurgency accelerated during the early 1960's, one operated by the North Vietnamese strategic intelligence service, called the Research Agency, was the most comprehensive and active. To manage its covert operations in South Vietnam, the Research Agency used a combination of radio broadcast, courier, and radiotelegraph. Organized into small cells of three or four agents with cover identities and false documents, the members of the Research Agency lived a seemingly normal life in South Vietnam while covertly gathering intelligence on American and South Vietnamese military and government activities. Because the cell's communicator was the only one routinely to make contact with any member of the Communist movement outside the cell, he had to be especially careful to preserve his cover. The communicators required only a radio receiver, usually a common Japanese transistor radio, to receive missions and instructions broadcast directly from Hanoi. To avoid arousing any suspicion, a cell communicator normally left his radio in plain sight at his place of business or home and at a specified time, on an assigned frequency, listened for his instructions broadcast in Morse code and encrypted. Couriers handled outgoing communications to avoid exposing the cell communicators to radio intercept. If an agent had an urgent message to send to the Research Agency, such as news of an imminent bombing attack, the communicator brought the message to one of several clandestine transmitters hidden throughout South Vietnam for just such a use. As a result, U.S. and Allied Forces captured large numbers of transistor radios. By the time the American air campaign against North Vietnam began, the Communists in South Vietnam, capitalizing on political and religious dissension, were well established politically and had accumulated enough military strength through infiltration and recruitment in the South to challenge major units of the South Vietnamese Army. By late 1964 the Viet Cong had an army of 34,000 full-time guerrillas and about 100,000 part-time insurgents and sympathizers, and the North Vietnamese Army was moving several regiments into the northern provinces of South Vietnam. From its jungle headquarters northwest of Saigon, the National Liberation Front controlled a territorial governmental structure comprising five military regions. Forming a Communist shadow of the legitimate governmental hierarchy within each region, the Viet Cong established committees down to the provincial and sometimes even the hamlet level. By mid-1964 they controlled more than half of the territory in twenty-two of South Vietnam’s forty-three provinces. Even after the size of the Viet Cong organization grew unwieldy, leaders in Hanoi were reluctant to relinquish control of the insurgency to the National Liberation Front. They continued to attempt to disguise their direct involvement in Viet Cong operations and to perpetrate the myth that the National Liberation Front was conducting a popular rebellion. To control and coordinate the activities of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army units operating in critical areas of the northernmost region of South Vietnam, Military Region 5, the high command established National Liberation Front headquarters there. Because of the protean evolution of the insurgency, there was little standardization of Viet Cong signal organizations or equipment. Most signal units traced their origins to a single communicator serving as both radioman anti messenger to a small Viet Minh cell during the 1950's. As the movement grew, so too did the communications organizations. In 1965 some uniformity in the organizational structure for communications began to appear: the Central Office for South Vietnam and Military Region 5 were each supported by 4 signal battalion, the other military regions and the infantry regiments all had organic signal companies, and provinces and battalions had signal platoons. Divisions of the North Vietnamese Army fighting in South Vietnam were supported by organic signal battalions. By late 1966 the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese had approximately 150 combat battalions in the field under the command and control of thirty-two regimental headquarters and seven divisional headquarters. Besides the organic signal units assigned at each level, that entire force was supported by three area support signal battalions. Dictated by the needs of the war and by available resources, command relationships, signal configurations, and organic equipment changed throughout the course of the conflict. Most communications units conformed to some type of tripartite organization- a battalion would have a radio company, a wire or telephone company and a messenger company. Whatever the organization, the quality and availability of Chinese, Soviet and captured American equipment usually dictated the actual capability of the unit. As the magnitude of the Communist military effort increased, new units assumed some missions of overburdened units. By 1972 for example, several signal battalions were supporting COSVN headquarters. For a more thorough analysis, the reader should consult Chapter 16 of the book, Military Communication, A Test For Technology, by John Berger, from which the foregoing was extracted. Let us now turn our attention to the tactical communication equipment used by the military forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. By the mid-1960's the Chinese began to increase the amount of aid they provided the North Vietnamese. As a result the NVA was equipped almost exclusively with radios made in China and these began to move south into the Republic of Vietnam where they were eventually captured by U.S. Allied Forces. The United States Army had several classified documents that dealt with foreign radios. The FOMCAT Foreign Material Catalogue (SECRET) and a small green book put out by USAEUR, the U.S. Army Europe, that dealt with Soviet radios and was classified CONFIDENTIAL. Therefore, since there documents were classified, we could not inform U.S. troops of these radios in an unclassified manner. We in Technical Intelligence did secure permission to write about items in and unclassified format if the set was captured in South Vietnam. By international agreement, the first “new” item captured in Vietnam went to the South Vietnamese government and subsequent items went to the U.S. Army. In July 1967, the only issue of the Technical Intelligence Bulletin was published by the Combined Materiel Exploitation Center (CMEC). Most of the known radios that were in service in Vietnam were covered in some detail in this T.I.B. The CMEC also had an extensive display of captured radios and other communication equipment and was on the briefing circuit for incoming intelligence personnel. THE WILLIAM L. HOWARD ORDNANCE TECHNICAL INTELLIGENCE MUSEUM e-mail wlhoward@gte.net Telephone AC 813 585-7756 *********************************************** MEMBERS WRITE; Just read my first group post.... Wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed it . Thanks. Hal Blaisdell ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dennis: Did you get bored with the military group post? Or are you just really busy and can't get to it right away? ed) Not board with it, but agrivated when it's not read. Had you read the last one, this question would not have been necessary. *********************************************** HAL's WISH LIST; Dennis here's my want (wish) list TA-312 Field Telephones AN/GRA-39 Radio Control Set An/GRC-53 Radio Set have the PRC77 need everything else AT-271/PRC, AB-591A/PRC MK-1964/URC Installuation Kit MK-1963/URC Installation Kit.. diplexer SCR-528 Radio set, have 603 need everything else (BC-604) CG-1773A/U Cable Assembly short lengths. AM-598 Hal Torchboots@msn.com *********************************************** ON THE COMMERCIAL FRONT; PRC-70 SELECTOR ASSEMBLY, UNUSED, FOREST GREEN. NSN 5820-01-092-5904, ALSO CALLED THE A1 MODULE. THIS IS PART OF THE FRONT PANEL, WITH 6 FREQUENCY KNOBS AND READOUTS, CONTROLS FOR POWER, MODE, VOLUME AND SQUELCH. INCLUDES THE PRINTED CURCUIT BOARD WITH MICROPROCESSER. $60 EA. PLUS SHIPPING I AM LOOKING FOR ONE NEW IN THE PACKAGE AS1730 LOWER ELEMENT. PREFER CARC STEVE HANEY HANEY ELECTRONIC CO tc0654@mesh.net ed) Steve has a list of manuals available on request via email. *********************************************** HUMOR; A drunk that smelled like a brewery got on a bus one day. He sat down next to a priest. The drunk's shirt was stained, his face was full of bright red lipstick & he had a half empty bottle of wine sticking out of his pocket. He opened his newspaper & started reading -- a couple of minutes later he asked the priest, "Father, what causes arthritis?" "Mister, it's caused by loose living, being with cheap wicked women, too much alcohol & contempt for your fellow man." "Well," the drunk muttered & returned to reading his paper. The priest, thinking about what he said, turned to the man & apologized. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to come on so strong -- how long have you had arthritis?" "I don't, father, I was just reading in the paper that the Pope has it." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Noticing that her boss' fly was open, the embarrassed secretary told him, "Your garage door is open." The bewildered exec didn't know what she meant at first until she pointed. He quickly zipped up and said. "I hope you didn't see my super deluxe Cadillac." "Nope," she replied, "Just an old pink Volkswagen with 2 flat tires." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A man took his pregnant wife to the hospital to give birth. The doctor told them that he had developed an experimental machine and asked if they'd like to try it. He explained carefully that the machine could take some of the pain of childbirth from the mother and pass it on to the father. This was accomplished through the use of DNA analysis, then separating father's from mother's gene contributions. Then, radio signals specifically patterned to each parent were intensified or reduced through the use of a rheostat which could be focused to effect, in varying intensities, the mother or the father. Through this complicated process of frequency switching, both parents could share the "regulated" pain. Both the husband and the wife thought this was a wonderful idea, and decided to give it a try. The doctor set the knob on the machine to ten percent for starters, explaining to the man that even ten percent was probably more pain than he had ever experienced in his life. But the man was surprised at how little pain he actually felt when the knob was turned. He then told the doctor to go ahead and turn it up until he said to stop. The doctor twisted the knob up to twenty percent, and checked the husband's blood pressure, respiration, and pulse which appeared fine. Amazed, the doctor continued to monitor the husband as he turned the knob again, increasing the husband's pain threshold to fifty percent. Still feeling little, the husband encouraged the doctor to let give him ALL the pain. He loved his wife and thought it would be a fine gesture to prove his love. Dumbfounded, the doctor hesitatingly agreed and increased the husband's load to one hundred percent. After his wife had given birth, the man stood up, stretched a little, and helped his wife into the car, both of them feeling fine. When they got home, they found the mailman dead on the doorstep, letters, newspapers, and small packages scattered throughout their front yard. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A blonde gets an opportunity to fly to a nearby country. She has never been on an airplane anywhere and was very excited and tense. As soon as she boarded the plane, a Boeing747, she started jumping in excitement, running over seat to seat and starts shouting 'BOEING! BOEING!!BOEING!!! BO....'. She sort of forgets where she is, even the pilot in the cock-pit hears the noise. Annoyed by the goings on, the Pilot comes out and shouts 'BE SILENT!'. There was pin-drop silence every where and everybody is looking at the blonde and the angry Pilot. She stared at the pilot in silence for a moment and all of a sudden started shouting, 'OEING ! OEING!! OEING!!! OE...'. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- An army Major visits the sick soldiers, goes up to one private and asks "What's your problem, Soldier?" "Chronic syphilis, Sir" "What treatment are you getting?" "Five minutes with the wire brush each day." "What's your ambition?" "To get back to the front, Sir." "Good man." says the Major. He goes to the next bed. "What's your problem, Soldier?" "Chronic piles, Sir" "What treatment are you getting?" "Five minutes with the wire brush each day." "What's your ambition?" "To get back to the front, Sir." "Good man." says the Major. He goes to the next bed. "What's your problem, Soldier?" "Chronic gum disease, Sir" "What treatment are you getting?" "Five minutes with the wire brush each day." "What's your ambition?" "To get the wire brush before the other two, Sir" *********************************************** (The preceding was a product of the"Military Collector Group Post", an international email magazine dedicated to the preservation of history and the equipment that made it. Unlimited circulation of this material is authorized so long as the proper credits to the original authors, and publisher are included. For more information conserning this group contact Dennis Starks at, military-radio-guy@juno.com) ***********************************************