Russian media revealed: the inside story of the bombing of "Ho Chi Minh Trail" by Soviet traitors in Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War, due to the strong domestic anti-war forces, the U.S. Department of Defense had to do everything possible to collect cannon fodder, and many Ukrainians living in exile in the United States volunteered to go to Vietnam to "kill people and steal goods." Recently, the Russian Independent Military Review revealed this mysterious past.

"Bulba suggested"

During World War II, Nazi Germans occupied the Soviet Union and joined Ukraine. In order to fight against the Soviet Union, in June 1944, Hitler allowed Ukrainian nationalists who were hostile to Moscow to provide weapons, and also instructed Himmler, the head of SS, to form the 14th Armed Grenadier Division (also known as Galicia Division), most of whose members came from Galicia, western Ukraine, where anti-Soviet sentiment was strong. In the subsequent battle, the Galician division volunteered to defend the German army, and as a result, it was severely damaged by the Soviet army in the battle of zhitomir, and all the captured personnel were executed for "treason". After Germany surrendered in 1945, thousands of defeated troops of the Galician Division fled to the occupied areas of the allies. The United States refused to repatriate these "Nazi remnants" to the Soviet Union for the sake of confronting the Soviet Union.

Most of these Ukrainians were settled in the states on the east coast of the United States. They had a close relationship with various organizations in the United States, and advocated the western world to unite and "launch a jihad to destroy capitalism". The Vietnam War that broke out in 1964 was regarded by them as a prelude to the "jihad". Shortly after the U.S. Congress made a resolution to send troops to the war in August of the same year, Bulba, the leader of the Ukrainian-American community "Ukrainian People's Union", applied to U.S. Secretary of Defense McNamara to set up a "Ukrainian Corps" in the U.S. Army, with members from Galician division veterans and their children and grandchildren. Bulba even thought of a name for this unit, called "Zaporoge Camp", which was taken from the Ukrainian Cossack armed forces fighting to get rid of Polish rule the kingdom in the 16th and 18th centuries. The new "Zaporoge Camp" will be guided by the traditional yellow and blue flag of Ukraine, hoping to fight a bloody battle with * * * people in Vietnam. But the clever McNamara rejected this application, fearing that letting those "Nazi remnants" return to the battlefield would make the United States lose its reputation in front of world public opinion.

"Cossack Eagle"

Although Bulba's plan failed, many Ukrainian immigrants joined the US military in various ways and were sent to Vietnam. In 1966, the 1st Fighter Squadron of the US Air Force added a large number of new pilots, all of whom were Ukrainian college students. For a time, Ukrainian and Russian replaced English as the working languages of the squadron. For the sake of command convenience, the US Air Force approved Colonel Stepan Oleg, an American of Ukrainian origin, as the commander of the 66th Squadron, who was also a member of the Ukrainian People's Union. Oleg allowed Ukrainian pilots to paint the side of the plane with the unique logo of "Zaporoge with three halberds", which was next to the logo of "66S" (abbreviation of the 66th Squadron), and the squadron was nicknamed "Cossack Eagle".

in 1966, the 66th squadron went to Vietnam. On April 25, the F-15 fighter-bomber of the squadron was ordered to bomb Hanoi, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), because the US military thought that North Vietnam had assembled a large number of regular troops there to support the guerrillas in South Vietnam. During the operation, Oleg led the fleet to break through the air defense firepower of the North Vietnamese Army like a military parade, and dumped bombs on Hanoi, killing more than 1 people. A few days later, they bombed the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail, paralyzing this military communication line connecting North Vietnam and South Vietnam for many days. During the Vietnam War, the "Squadron * * * completed 5552 sorties, making it the only air force in the US military that participated in air raids on Hanoi and coastal defense at the same time.

However, the flight of the 66th Squadron over North Vietnam was thunderous step by step. The North Vietnamese air defense forces rely on the great assistance of the Soviet Union, causing heavy casualties to American planes. In particular, the Soviet Union continued to supply advanced surface-to-air missiles to the North Vietnamese army and shot down more than 2, American planes. But Oleg and the 66th Squadron were lucky. The plane they were flying was not hit once. After the war, Oleg was awarded the Air Force Cross. On June 15, 1968, Oleg completed the most terrible flight in his life-transporting a group of special soldiers to the United States. They were all mentally ill people who were driven crazy by the war. Because they lived in a terrible fighting environment for a long time, they had a mental breakdown.

"Xishan condemned prisoner"

The terrible fighting environment led to a mental breakdown. In addition to the Air Force, Ukrainian Americans who participated in the Vietnam War were mainly concentrated in the Marine Corps and airborne troops, and they were usually sent to the most dangerous areas for duty. At the beginning of 1968, the North Vietnamese Army and the US Marine Corps launched an offensive and defensive war that shocked the world at Xishan, the main point of the "17-degree line" dividing North and South Vietnam. On January 21st, the North Vietnamese army began to compress the encirclement outside the Xishan Mountain and bombard it with large-caliber artillery. The American soldiers guarding the Xishan Mountain were all one in a hundred, and Sergeant Vladimir Stepaniako, an American of Ukrainian origin, was one of them. Previously, he was an adviser to the South Vietnamese army of the 2nd Airborne Brigade of the US Army.

By the beginning of March, the North Vietnamese army had successfully dug the tunnel near the positions of the American defenders. Every night, a group of North Vietnamese soldiers approached the American trenches through the tunnel, and then they launched a surprise attack before dawn, which made the sleeping Americans die between sobriety and ecstasy. In this way, the North Vietnamese army successfully encroached on most positions in Xishan, and every American soldier fighting in Xishan felt like a prisoner sentenced to death, looking forward to the moment of execution all day long. In contrast, Stepanak was lucky. He was transferred to Saigon for treatment by a US military helicopter because he was injured in the battle. A few months later, the Americans finally gave up Xishan, and its fall was the worst tragedy in the history of American war.

For young Stepanak, the mountain stream is not his only hell. He only stayed in the US military hospital in Saigon for three days, and then applied to Hue to take part in a bloody battle there. The fierce battle in Hue is far more severe than that in Xishan, because the two sides fought hand-to-hand in the urban area, usually a wall is the muzzle of the enemy, and the North Vietnamese army and the South Vietnamese guerrillas were not brave in fighting, so that the US military had to pay huge casualties to seize a ruin. In the last few days of the street fighting in Hue, Pantesnyak carried a Ukrainian national flag with him. He told his comrades that if he died, he must put this flag on his body. However, Stepanak finally left Vietnam alive.

Ukrainian cannon fodder

After the two wars of Khe Shan and Hue, the call for withdrawing troops from Vietnam is getting louder and louder in the United States, and the public can't accept that one by one live soldier is lying in a cold zinc coffin to return home. On October 31, 1968, US President Johnson announced that he would stop air strikes against North Vietnam. The following year, his successor Nixon announced the order to withdraw troops from Vietnam. However, at the same time of withdrawing troops, Nixon intended to eradicate the military bases of the North Vietnamese Army in South Vietnam and its neighboring countries, Cambodia and Laos, so as to ensure that the South Vietnamese regime could survive after the US military left.

On May 1, 197, the US military brazenly entered Cambodia from South Vietnam on the pretext of "assisting Cambodia in expelling North Vietnamese militants". The White House gave a rather grandiose name to this action of igniting a new war-"absolute victory". However, the U.S. military was stubbornly resisted by Cambodian people's armed forces and the North Vietnamese army. In addition, the North Vietnamese army from the Ho Chi Minh Trail also actively launched attacks on various battlefields in South Vietnam, dragging down the reinforcements of the U.S. military. In the end, the "absolute victory" turned into an "absolute defeat". The Cambodian North Vietnamese Army base was not destroyed, but the American army suffered many casualties. Sergeant Leshchinski of the 82nd Airborne Division of the US Army became the last Ukrainian to die in the battlefield in Southeast Asia, and he also put a tragic end to the war adventure of Ukrainian cannon fodder in this distant land.