Vietnam Postal History During The Vietnam War

This is one of the few covers with a postmark. APO 96495 at that time Quang Tri combat base. Apparently the 'Free' franked mail didn't require any cancellation.

John F. - Thanks for sharing one of your covers with us. I also think you should keep your letters all intact within your family. I had to look up the Quang Tri Combat Base and read about it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quang..._Combat_Base

Old covers tell a story, no matter what they look like,

Linus

This is a fascinating thread to me. I have no correspondence or covers from the Vietnam war period but I do have a fair number of single stamps, cancelled. I have been meaning to but have not yet started researching them. Can you tell me about the frequency of CTO's with stamps from Vietnam during the war years?

Funcitypapa -

During the war, there were two stamp issuers, North Vietnam and South Vietnam, and they both had CTO stamps. You can also find postally used from both, but from my perspective, living in the USA, I have way more postally used from South Vietnam than from North Vietnam due to more mail flow from the South. I have lots of CTO blocks of 4 from North Vietnam now in my WW block collection, and the frequency of CTO stamps is high from North Vietnam.

Hope this helps,
Linus

Three issuers, actually. The Viet Cong issued stamps specifically for use in occupied portions of South Vietnam. Scott doesn't list them, Michel does. CTOs are plentiful. Postal uses exist but are scarce; the stamps (like those of both North and South Vietnam) had value both as propaganda and as a source of raising funds from Western collectors, besides their postal use.

Here's one that I got at the PX. Most of the envelopes I sent my mail in are quite plain. As you can see the only 'postal' markings are my hand written 'Free' in the corner. Apparently none of the mail was cancelled in any way unless you had to pay for what you were mailing.

codehappy - Three issuers, I stand corrected, I need to get that Michel catalog, thanks for helping on this thread.

John F. - I had to Google: "18th Surgical Hospital Vietnam" out of curiosity. There are lots of pictures on the internet of where your covers came from and where you served. Your service is not forgotten.

From my collection, I have the ham radio "hand-out" card scanned below from a Sergeant Ed R. Hoover. I wish that it had been mailed and had a cancel, but there is nothing on the back. Does anyone happen to know what the buzz word "COB" stands for on this card?

Linus

Thanks Linus for starting this interesting thread! Here is a little earlier cover connected to event led to the war. It is a FDC of the set issued on October 11, 1955 to commemorate the evacuation of about one million Vietnamese from the North area to the South area of Vietnam. The slogan reads "One million of refugees? A great victory of the Free World against totalitarian communism".

Here is one stamp from the set, although this particular stamp is overprinted and issued on August 6, 1956:

This item is from Cambodia but has strong connection to Vietnam War. It is a censored cover with interesting story behind:

When the Vietnam War raged, Prince Sihanouk (later, King Sihanouk) steered a neutralist course in his foreign policy. Sihanouk's maintenance of Cambodian neutrality in the Vietnam War ended on March 18, 1970 when he was ousted in a U.S.-supported coup led by Prime Minister General Lon Nol that established the "Khmer Republic." Lon Nol supported the American struggle against the North Vietnam and the Vietcong forces and allowed US Air Forces to bomb Vietcong bases in eastern Cambodia.

About that time, Cambodia began to censor mail. The censored cover was handstamped with a censor mark on either the front or the back of the envelope. Four different handstamps are known. Here is one censored cover from my collection sent on March 6, 1971 from Phnom Penh to France:


The handstamp reads: "CENSURE / RÉPUBLIQUE KHMER / AGRESSÉ PAR IMPÉRIALISTES / VIETCONG ET NORD-VIETNAMIENS", means: "CENSORSHIP / KHMER REPUBLIC / ATTACKED BY IMPERIALISTS / VIETCONG AND NORTH VIETNAMESE":

Marshal Lon Nol on a stamp issued by Cambodia (Khmer Republic) in 1973:

The International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS) was created during the Vietnam War to replace the International Control Commission (formally called the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam (ICSC)) following the signing of the Paris Peace Accords ("Paris Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam") on 27 January 1973.

The force was composed of military and civilian personnel from two communist nations, Hungary and Poland, and two non-communist nations, Canada and Indonesia.

On 29 May 1973 the Canadians announced that they were withdrawing from the ICCS because they had come to supervise a ceasefire but instead were observing a war. Hence, Canada remained a member of the ICCS from 29 January until 31 July 1973.

Here is an internal cover sent from Saigon on May 12, 1973 by the Canadian Delegation of the ICCS:



The MCCD stands for "Military Component Canadian Delegation":

Yesterday, I posted a cover sent by a member of Canadian delegation of the ICC in Vietnam during the war. For those of you who are interested in this peace keeping force postal service, here are 4 pages from my album about ICC stamps in Indochina. These pages show the stamps used in Vietnam. There are more pages in the album show the stamps issued to the ICC forces in Laos and Cambodia. Collectors that want a PDF copy of the album (fully color illustrated), please contact me and provide me your mail address. Note: pages are not sharp since I had to reduce resolution to post here:

Indian FPOs in Viet Nam (1954–1968)

FPO 743 Ha Noi
(Sep 5,1954-Jul 12,1966)

FPO 742 Sai Gon
(Sep 9,1954-Dec 5,1968)

There was no dispatch or receipt of mail at FPO 742 during Nov 11-13,1960 due to the closure of Sai Gon Airport following a coup by ARVN.

Indian FPO in Kampuchea (1954–1958)

FPO 745 Phnom Penh
(Sep 10,1954-Jun 26,1958)

FPO 745 later functioned as a mobile FPO in Phnom Penh and Ha Noi every alternate month.

Indian FPO in Lao (1954–1968)

FPO 744 Viangchan
(Sep 8,1954-Jul 24,1958)
(May 22,1961-Dec 1,1968)

Postal work at FPO 744 was temporarily suspended from Sep 1–15,1966 due to floods.

The Devnagari acronym for ICC stands for Antarrashtriya Niyantran Ayog.

Few Minor Points: 1. The term FPO in "Indian FPO stamps" should be replaced by Military or Forces.

2. The second sentence of the second paragraph in the second page should corrected to "India did not participate in ICCS" or "India was not part of ICCS".

Thanks, Joy, for the additional information you added about the ICC and thanks for the correction of the sentence in the second page which I will correct.

I have one more ICC cover from FPO 744 (Vientiane, Laos) franked with the Indian overprinted stamps, sent registered on January 29, 1955 to India. Arrival postmark applied in Cumballa on the back:

From 1963 until 1976, North Vietnam issued stamps for the "National Liberation Front for South Vietnam" (Vietcong) for use by the Vietcong forces in South Vietnam.

Letters franked with the Vietcong stamps, sent until May 1975, are very rare. Few covers franked with Vietcong stamps from 1973-1974 are known. It seems that the Vietcong stamps were used more as propaganda for the North Vietnamese Communists regime than as postage stamps for postal use.

In May 7, 1975, the post office in Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City, was reopened. Due to the fact that the two parts of Vietnam weren't formally unified, more stamps were issued for the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam by North Vietnam. These stamps were in use in the Southern area of Vietnam until the end of 1977.

There were many covers sent from the Southern provinces franked with these stamps in this period. Usually, the postmark bears the settlement name from which the letter was sent, in addition to "M. N. Viet Nam" (Mien Nam Viet Nam). Such covers are not rare and can be obtained for a reasonable price. Here is one example of such cover from my collection:



Question: I have a complete collectin of the stamps issued for the Vietcong. Should I post them in this thread or maybe should I start a new one?

LaoPhil -

Thanks for injecting new life into this topic thread! I am not an expert in the Vietnam area at all, but I do collect it and find it very interesting. So post away, anything you got, as my original intent was to learn from what others post here. I could use your complete Vietcong stamp collection as a reference source, so go ahead and post it here.

One of your covers, shown above, was addressed to R.K. Malott, with a rubber-stamped address. I have been told by our member Bobstamp, that Malott was a Canadian and that these kind of covers were philatelically created by him in various quantities. I have a Malott cover, with a similar rubber-stamped address, in my collection, scanned below:

Linus