Hoa Lo Prison

Lieutenant Junior Grade Everett Alvarez Jr., who was shot down on August 5, 1964, was the first American detained at Hoa Lo during the Vietnam War. U.S. POWs experienced awful living conditions right away, including subpar food and unhygienic surroundings. The American POWs mockingly dubbed the prison complex the “Hanoi Hilton” in reference to the well-known Hilton Hotel chain. Some of the original POWs dispute who came up with the moniker, although F8D pilot Bob Shumaker was the first to record it, carving “Welcome to the Hanoi Hilton” onto a bucket handle to welcome Air Force Lieutenant Robert Peel.

Beginning in early 1967, a brand-new section of the jail known as “Little Vegas” was made available to incoming American POWs. Its numerous buildings and regions were given Las Vegas Strip landmark names including “Golden Nugget,” “Thunderbird,” “Stardust,” “Riviera,” and “Desert Inn.”

These names were chosen because Nellis Air Force Base, which is close to Las Vegas, served as a training ground for many pilots.

American pilots were sometimes already injured during their ejection or upon landing on the ground when they were caught, which frequently left them in poor condition.

One location the North Vietnamese Army utilized to imprison, torture, and question captured service members, especially American pilots downed during bombing flights, was the Hoa Lo.

Despite being a party to the Third Geneva Convention of 1949, which called for “decent and humane treatment” of prisoners of war, North Vietnam nonetheless used cruel forms of torture like rope ties, irons, beatings, and protracted isolation.

During the Johnson administration, prisoners of war were starting to be released from this and other North Vietnamese prisons, and their accounts indicated pervasive and institutionalized torture of prisoners of war.

Walter Heynowsk and Gerhard Scheumann, two East German filmmakers, claimed that their 1968 four-chapter series Piloten im Pyjama, which featured interviews with American pilots within the prison and was unscripted, was shot entirely on location. Heynowski and Scheumann questioned them over the inconsistencies between their sense of self and their actions in battle as well as between the United States Fighting Force’s Code and their conduct both before and after being captured.

The North Vietnamese retorted that captives were treated well and in conformity with the Geneva Conventions at Hoa Lo and other jails. They broadcast a number of quotes from American captives in 1969 that appeared to substantiate this claim. Additionally, the North Vietnamese insisted that its jails weren’t any worse than those used to house political prisoners and POWs in South Vietnam, such as the facility on Con Sn Island. It was common practice for North Vietnamese to abuse South Vietnamese detainees and their own dissidents, as well as Viet Cong and North Vietnamese prisoners, in the prisons of South Vietnam.

The treatment of detainees at Hoa Lo and other camps started to get softer and more tolerable starting in late 1969. The majority of the POWs at the remote camps were transferred to Hoa Lo after the late 1970s attempted rescue operation at Sn Tay prison camp, giving the North Vietnamese fewer facilities to guard. Due to the construction of “Camp Unity,” a communal living space in Hoa Lo, the POWs’ isolation was significantly decreased and their morale was raised.