Ngoc Trao Resistance Base

A forest knife lies still in a display room. Beside it are a bamboo basket, several sets of Mường clothing, a few pages of French secret police files, and a newspaper called Tự Do. There is no polished rifle and no bright flag. Yet these quiet objects hold the story of the first guerrilla unit in Thanh Hóa.

The display room is part of the memorial house of the Ngọc Trạo Resistance Base, in Ngọc Trạo commune, Thanh Hóa province. The house is built as a Mường stilt house and divided into three rooms. The Mường are an ethnic group of northern Vietnam whose language is closely related to Vietnamese. Each room tells one stage in the birth and the work of the guerrilla unit. Together the objects take visitors back to 1941, more than eighty years ago.

Those were stifling years. The French colonial government was working hard to crush the people's struggle. The revolutionaries needed a foothold. It had to be hidden enough to keep people safe, yet close enough to the roads to stay in touch with the outside.

In mid-1941, the Thanh Hóa Provincial Party Committee chose Ngọc Trạo. The place had everything in its favor: the right moment, the right ground and the support of its people. From here, a line of contact could link up with other bases in the province. It could reach farther still, all the way to the Bắc Kỳ Regional Party Committee. Bắc Kỳ was the name then used for northern Vietnam. In July, the base was founded. A quiet mountain area had become a resistance base.

In the middle of the base is a rock cave called Hang Treo. The cave has two mouths, and each one once opened onto the land of a different commune. It was inside this cave, on an autumn night, that the story began.

The night was September 19, 1941. In the darkness of Hang Treo, twenty-one people stood in a line. They were ordinary people of the mountains, not figures of legend. One by one, they read the oath. It was a heavy oath: to give their lives and to fight to the last drop of blood for the liberation of the nation.

That night, the Ngọc Trạo guerrilla unit was born. It was the first guerrilla unit of Thanh Hóa province. It was also the province's first full-time armed unit. That meant its members left their families entirely to follow the path of revolution. Later, people in Thanh Hóa called the unit the forerunner of the province's armed forces. They also called it the firstborn child of the region's organized guerrilla forces.

The oath in Hang Treo did not ring out alone. Before it, uprisings had broken out in Bắc Sơn and in Nam Kỳ. Nam Kỳ was the name then used for southern Vietnam. That September night in Ngọc Trạo carried the same spirit forward, in another mountain region of the country.

Then came a surprise. In just two weeks, the unit grew from twenty-one members to eighty-three. Word of the base spread across Thanh Hóa. It crossed into Ninh Binh and Thái Bình. It reached Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh as well. Many young people from inside and outside the province came looking for the base and asked to join its ranks. A fire lit in a rock cave had, only fourteen days later, grown far brighter than most people expected.

The objects in the memorial house today speak of exactly those days. The forest knife, the bamboo basket and the Mường clothes are everyday things of the mountains and forests, not military gear. The files of the French secret police tell another side. That agency specialized in watching the patriots of the time. Its papers show that the other side was not sitting still either.

But the base did not hold out for long. At dawn on October 19, 1941, exactly one month after the night of the oath, French troops launched a secret attack on the base. The guerrillas fought back hard, in hand-to-hand combat with the attacking troops. Then they withdrew to preserve their forces. By the end of October, the base had been broken up by repression and intimidation.

From July to October 1941, the Ngọc Trạo Resistance Base lasted only a very short time. But what its people learned was not lost. How to build a base, how to raise an armed force, how to fight a guerrilla war: all of it was kept and passed on. Four years later, in August 1945, the people of Thanh Hóa joined the whole country in an uprising that took power into the people's hands. Part of that fire had first been lit in a rock cave at Ngọc Trạo.

In 1994, the site was designated a national historic site of the revolution. It was later restored and improved. Today the complex includes a central area with a monument and a memorial space, and the Mường stilt house that holds the memorial rooms. It also includes Hang Treo, Ma Mầu hill and many other places linked to the old base. Every year, people from the area offer incense at the monument to the Ngọc Trạo guerrilla base and report their achievements.

In the stilt house, the forest knife still lies beside the bamboo basket and the newspaper Tự Do. Outside, Hang Treo still opens its two mouths into the mountain, as it did on that night of September 19, when twenty-one voices first rose in the darkness.