09/10/2026
OSS operatives trained Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap in guerrilla warfare tactics in the last days of World War II. Years later, these two men would be the two most senior communist leaders in the war in Vietnam.
In May 1945, OSS Team 13, code named DEER parachuted into French Indochina to train Viet Minh irregulars to harass Japanese supply lines, rescue downed Allied pilots and provide local intelligence. The team met with Minh, Giap, and a few dozen others, providing modern weaponry for 80 men.
At the time, Minh was gravely ill. Medic Paul Hoagland helped nurse him back to good health, likely altering the future course of world history. The next two months were spent in weapons and tactics training, until news arrived in early August 1945 that the Japanese had surrendered. The OSS team then accompanied the Viet Minh on the march north to Hanoi, attacking a holdout Japanese garrison along the way.
During the team’s stay with the Viet Minh, Ho Chi Minh and Giap disguised their communist ideologies from team leader Major Allison Thomas. Thomas sent many glowing reports about the leadership potential of Ho Chi Minh right up until his final day in Hanoi, after the OSS had disbanded.
Minh and Giap went on to defeat French forces at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which ended French control over Vietnam. The peninsula was then divided by treaty into North and South Vietnam.
After the defeat of the French in 1954, Giap and Minh set their sights on the South Vietnamese government. After more than 10 years of brutal warfare and hundreds of thousands of casualties, the South Vietnamese government collapsed in 1975, and the peninsula was reunified. The South Vietnamese capital city of Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
In 1995, fifty years after he first arrived in French Indochina, OSS translator Henry Prunier returned to Hanoi with the US Indochina Reconciliation Project. At dinner one evening, retired General Giap recognized Prunier from across the room. Smiling, he picked up an orange off the table and pretended to lob it like a gr***de towards Prunier; exactly as the OSS had trained him in 1945.
