Description of the attraction
The Museum of Military History is also called the Museum of War, Museum of War Victims, War Relics, etc. It is located near the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum and, despite the heavy content of some of the expositions, is almost the most visited museum in Vietnam.
The museum opened in the fall of 1975, almost immediately after the end of the largest military conflict of the second half of the last century. Then it was named the Museum of the History of American War Crimes. The name was not given in the heat of the moment: the exhibition contains many photographs and other evidence of the consequences of the use of various types of chemical weapons. In 1993, after the normalization of relations with the United States, it was named the Museum of Military History.
On an area of 12 thousand square meters, there are a variety of exhibits that tell about the struggle of the Vietnamese people, first against French colonization, then against the American invasion. The place where you can go with children is the courtyard of the museum. It is full of captured military equipment: tanks, helicopters, fighters and attack aircraft. And in the corner are bombs and other ammunition. The highlight of the collection is a captured American attack aircraft. It retains the US Air Force insignia.
And you should definitely not take your children to the halls where photographs of the atrocities of the American military in the village of Songmi, the terrible consequences of the use of napalm, phosphorus bombs and other equally dangerous defoliants are exhibited. And not just photographs. The Vietnamese even put up vessels with alcohol-containing embryos that mutated due to the use of dioxin. In one of the buildings there are cells in which political prisoners were kept, as well as torture chambers for prisoners and a guillotine for their execution.
The hard ten-year war has affected the history of not only Vietnam and the United States. In one way or another, neighboring South Korea, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, as well as the PRC and the USSR were drawn into it. That is why the Museum of Military History is under the protection of UNESCO - as an instructive reminder of what such wars lead to.
