Hoa Lo Prison: From French Colonial Jail to the Hanoi Hilton

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Hoa Lo means fiery furnace, or simply stove, a name inherited from a Hanoi street where vendors once sold wood and coal stoves. Between 1896 and 1901 the French colonial government built a high security prison there, the Maison Centrale, to hold Vietnamese dissidents. Designed for about 460 inmates, it held more than 1,400 by the 1930s and over 2,000 by 1954. Set in the middle of a crowded city, it leaked letters and contraband over its walls and gathered future Viet Minh leaders in the same rooms, turning a tool of control into a school for revolution.

This episode follows the same ground through its second life as the Hanoi Hilton. The first American aviator, Everett Alvarez Jr., arrived in August 1964, and prisoners later named a new section Little Vegas after casinos near Nellis Air Force Base. American memoirs and Senate reports describe solitary confinement, beatings, ropes, and irons, while North Vietnam insisted it followed the Geneva Convention and filmed a documentary called Pilots in Pajamas. The account ends with the demolition of most of the prison in the 1990s and the museum that remains.

• Bob Shumaker put the nickname on record by carving Welcome to the Hanoi Hilton on the handle of a wooden bucket to greet a newly captured pilot.
• Isolated prisoners talked through a tap code built on a five by five alphabet grid, introduced by Air Force pilot Carlyle Harris.
• Navy seaman Doug Hegdahl played the fool for his captors and memorized the names and details of 256 fellow prisoners to the tune of Old MacDonald Had a Farm.
• The failed Son Tay rescue raid of late 1970 panicked Hanoi into moving hundreds of prisoners into Hoa Lo, creating Camp Unity and ending their isolation.
• Most of the complex was demolished between 1993 and 1994 for Hanoi Towers, a 14 story office block and 27 story apartment building, and several original cells were later rebuilt in a Massachusetts museum.