Hanoi Hannah: The War for American Minds
This is the story of Hanoi Hannah, the voice that turned the airwaves into a battlefield for the American Psyche.
In between frequent static breaks, the sultry voice of Hanoi Hannah rings through the humid air of the thick jungle. Its weary audience listens keenly, welcoming any reprieve from the constant noises of battle during their few moments of rest.
“Defect, G.I. It is a very good idea to leave a sinking ship. They lie to you, GI. You know you cannot win this war”
Trinh Thi Ngo (Hanoi Hannah)
Hanoi Hannah, nicknamed so by the American servicemen she taunted, was born Trinh Thi Ngo in 1931. Her father owned Vietnam’s largest glass factory, cementing the family into the upper echelons of Hanoi society long before she would become North Vietnam’s chief voice of propaganda. As a girl she was enamored by Hollywood films and longed to be able to watch her favorite, Gone with the Wind, with no Vietnamese or French subtitles. Her father enrolled her in English classes and she quickly mastered the language, developing the authoritative cadence that would become her trademark. She joined Vietnam’s national radio broadcaster, Voice of Vietnam, as a volunteer in 1955. Her English fluency set her apart, and she was soon offered a full time position as a newscaster for English speaking countries in Asia.
As the Vietnam war raged on, its dense jungles became not only a battleground of weapons, but also a battleground of minds as both sides funneled out constant propaganda to discredit their adversaries and further their own cause. By the arrival of the first US combat troops in 1965, Trinh Thi Ngo was primed to assume her role as the poster girl for North Vietnam’s propaganda machine. It was at this point that Voice of Vietnam began its propaganda efforts, headlined by Trinh, who broadcast under the name Thu Huong. Coached by controversial Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, her scripts were penned by North Vietnamese propaganda experts with advice from Cuban intelligence, precisely curated to erode the resolve of the freshly stationed American troops.
At her height, Voice of Vietnam aired her program in three thirty minute segments every single day – so frequently that she came to be considered “public enemy number 2” to her audience, second only to Ho Chi Minh himself. Meticulously researched, Hanoi Hannah’s broadcasts echoed the growing anti-war sentiment gaining momentum back in America. In between folksy anti-war tunes by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez she asked the dejected troops,
“Isn’t it clear that the war makers are gambling with your lives while pocketing huge profits?”
With each passing year, the US troops morale continued to decline as they realized they had severely underestimated their opponents. Hanoi Hannah took advantage of this, emphasizing the inevitability of their impending defeat and encouraging soldiers to kill their commanding officers and desert their posts. The broadcasts also served as a news agent, though taken with a grain of salt as it soon became obvious to the troops that Hanoi Hannah rarely reported on North Vietnam’s losses or America’s successes. It was this skepticism that allowed Americans to brush aside the first report of the 1968 My Lai massacre. Long before the story of the carnage at My Lai became headline news in late 1969, Hannah accurately named the location and estimated death toll of the massacre in one of her broadcasts. However, she named the wrong army division responsible, a fact her audience used to dismiss the entire report as misinformation.
To the troops, most of them disempowered young men from rural America struggling to adapt to the unforgiving terrain and the ferocity of the Viet Cong, some of Hanoi Hannah’s reports seemed almost supernatural in their accuracy. She listed the full names and hometowns of fallen soldiers, lifted unbeknownst to her audience, from American military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Knowing they were listening, she would call out to soldiers by their names as she tried to convince them of the futility of their cause, going as far as to question the faithfulness of their wives and girlfriends back home. In one broadcast, she hauntingly addresses the troops,
“Your rich leaders grow richer while you are dying in a swamp G.I. They will give you a medal G.I. But only after you are dead. Your government lies to you every day, poor soldier. You have lost this war, G.I. Your army will leave you behind. Imperialists made you fight this war, G.I. They do not care about you. G.I, your government has betrayed you. They will not return for you, G.I.”
In light of America’s historic defeat in Vietnam and our current understanding of the war as a hopeless endeavor that doomed a generation of young men to their early graves or a lifetime of trauma, it is easy to assume that Hanoi Hannah had a devastating effect on the psyche of American ground troops in Vietnam. However, the truth is, her broadcasts were treated as little more than entertainment. With little else to do in their sparse moments of downtime, the troops tuned in to Hanoi Hannah and laughed at her attempts to inspire defections. Far from instilling dread, her voice came across as alluring, so much so that the men couldn’t help but wonder if she was as lovely as she sounded. Though her speeches showed a strong understanding of the colloquialisms of late 1960s and early 1970s America, her delivery retained an unshakable foreign inflection that kept listeners at arms length. Some soldiers grew tired of the repetitive broadcasts, opting not to tune in and chastising their peers who did. One audience Hanoi Hannah could count on was the masses of American troops captured by the Viet Cong and confined to P.O.W camps such as the “Hanoi Hilton”. Here, the men had no choice but to listen to the broadcasts, often as their only source of information.
Despite failing to inspire mass defections, Hanoi Hannah’s reporting on America’s many racial injustices was, at the very least, thought provoking to many soldiers. Due to higher poverty and lower education rates, black men were significantly more vulnerable to the draft than their white counterparts. Black men were also disproportionately targeted by Project 100,000, a controversial program that allowed for the conscription of soldiers who would previously have been considered below the military’s mental and medical standards. As a result, 300,000 Black Americans served in Vietnam, comprising 16.3% of the overall U.S. armed forces and up to 25% of the Army but only 2% of officers across all branches.
Though the preceding decade had brought monumental strides in civil rights, awareness of their continued subjugation was at an all-time high among Black soldiers, fueled by the activism of influential figures like Malcolm X.
Preying on this vulnerability, Hanoi Hannah reported the following on Billy Dean Smith, a black soldier who was court martialed in 1972, accused of premeditated the murder of two white officers;
“A Vietnam black G.I. who refuses to be a victim of racism is Billy Smith. It seems on the morning of March 15th, a fragmentation grenade went off in an officer’s barracks in Bien Hoa killing two gung-ho lieutenants. Smith was illegally searched, arrested, put in Long Binh Jail and brought home for trial. The evidence that showed him guilty was being black, poor, against the way are refusing to be a victim of racism.”
While American military radio kept troops in the dark about the racially motivated 1967 Detroit Riots that left 43 dead, Hanoi Hannah broadcast details of the violence down to what guard unit was called in and what weapons were used. One black Vietnam veteran recalls this as a sobering moment which sparked the realization that Black Americans were being treated no differently by their own government than Viet Cong.
By 1973, American troops had withdrawn from Vietnam, allowing for the war’s eventual conclusion in 1975. Her work done, Hanoi Hannah left her beloved Hanoi for Ho Chi Minh City, where she worked in television until her retirement a decade later. When interviewed, she would go on to state that though she wholeheartedly believed in the ideals of the Viet Cong, she harbored no resentment towards the Americans, choosing to see them as adversaries rather than enemies. She cited the bombings of Hanoi as the sole moments she felt genuine anger towards American forces.
Trinh Thi Ngo passed away on September 30 2016 and was buried alongside her husband and his family in Long Tri, Vietnam. She is survived by her only son, who left Vietnam in 1973 and now lives in San Francisco.