"The Viet Cong Used German WWII Weapons Against the USA" Topic

"When the United States entered the war in Vietnam, the country's political situation had already been extremely complicated. What started out as an anti-colonial conflict against France ended up in a bloody civil war between the USSR-backed North and the USA-backed South…"
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Armand

A whole lot of civil defense groups inn the south were also armed with MP40 and whatever else could be found too!

The NVA side had everything from Mausers to Maxims via Russia and China. It was only the late sixties where the Soviet bloc stuff started to predominate.

Thanks.

Guess that some of them were taken from the French….

Armand

Surprisingly a lot was also given as German kit captured by the Russians both directly or indirectly through the chinese.

That is indeed true.

There is a lengthy US DoD report lurking on the web (try DTIC) that goes into exhaustive detail on this, including numerous photos of quantities of captured weapons). This aid was not restricted to infantry small arms either; mortars, MG34s, MG42s, etc were also commonly encountered. Quantities of ex-German Flak weaspons (20mm, 37mm, up to 88mm???) were also provided for air defense over North Vietnam.

B

Thanks also…

Armand

Somewhere around the year 2000, I remember seeing news reports of PRVN destroying obsolete weapons. They had stacks and stacks of Mausers, MG34s, MG42s and even STGW44 stacked like cord wood and lit them ion fire like bonfires.

I suspect it had more to do with clearing out old and broken weapons they could not sell, get replacement parts for or were of non-standard cartridge calibers.

In the late '70s and into the '80s they sold M16s to a lot of fellow beleivers world wide. Notice it was cash only. They still had nearly a million left over to adopt into their own inventory, not to mention tons of Garands, BARs and M1 carbines that are used by local militia and police to this day.

I remember in graduate school reading a book that mentioned how the VC in the early 60s had so many M1 Garands, M1 carbines, .45 caliber smgs, and other US weapons that they requested the North stop sending Soviet weapons and just send US ammo. A lot of the early US military aid was pretty quickly transferred from ARVN to VC.