Hanoi hotel unearths Vietnam War bunker that sheltered Jane Fonda, Joan Baez
By MIKE IVES October 28, 2011 5:58PM
Kai Speth of the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam, checks a compartment of a Vietnam war underground bunker found beneath a bar in the hotel’s garden. | Na Son Nguyen~AP
if you go
METROPOLE HANOI:
15 Ngo Quyen St., Hoan Kiem District, Hanoi, Vietnam
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Updated: January 23, 2012 3:40AM
HANOI, Vietnam — The siren’s wail at the historic Metropole Hotel sent American folk singer Joan Baez and other guests scampering across a garden and into an underground bunker. Even through five feet of concrete, they could still hear the roar of American bombs raining on parts of Hanoi.
Nearly four decades have passed since the so-called Christmas Bombings rocked parts of Vietnam’s capital in December 1972. After the war ended three years later, the bunker was sealed and all but forgotten.
Its exact location remained a mystery until this summer, when a worker’s drill pierced its thick concrete roof during renovations of a poolside bar. Since then, workers have been excavating the flooded and low-ceilinged space. Not much has been found in the seven rooms: a wine bottle, a rusty paint can and a light bulb still in a socket. But a few tales remain, some involving famous guests.
“If these walls could talk, they would tell a lot of stories,” says hotel general manager Kai Speth. The bomb shelter “needs to be brought back into the life of the hotel as a reminder of what this hotel and this town went through.”
The North Vietnamese government used the French colonial-era hotel, a stately four-story building in the shadow of Hanoi’s Opera House, to house foreign guests during the war.
Nguyen Thi Xuan Phuong, now 82, remembers staying in the bunker during the Christmas Bombings with anti-war activist Baez. On one of the 12 nights that B-52s pounded areas around the city, the lights went out, prompting a few foreigners to scream in the darkness. “Can you sing a song?” Phuong asked the young singer. “We may not change the situation, but your songs may help calm people down.” Others who sheltered there included war correspondents and actress Jane Fonda, says Phuong, who worked for the government as a doctor assisting foreign guests.
Fonda’s visit ignited fury at home. She criticized U.S. policy on North Vietnamese radio and earned the nickname “Hanoi Jane” after posing for a photo atop an anti-aircraft gun. French entrepreneurs opened the Metropole in 1901, calling it the “the largest and best appointed hotel in Indo-China.” Over the years, it welcomed celebrities like Charlie Chaplin, who visited in 1936 on his honeymoon.
The Metropole was renamed the Thong Nhat (Reunification) Hotel after Vietnam gained its independence from France in 1954. But after communist forces won the Vietnam War in 1975, the hotel languished under state management as a reunified Vietnam struggled to recover from fighting.
It wasn’t until the early 1990s, after a French company assumed partial ownership, that the Metropole regained its earlier name and its place as one of the city’s spots to see and be seen.
Today, with Vietnam emerging as one of Asia’s fastest growing economies, Hanoi’s nouveau riche roll up in Bentleys and Rolls-Royces and toss down $70 per person on Sunday brunch. Mick Jagger, Angelina Jolie and Fidel Castro have all spent the night.
Discovery of the 500 square-foot bunker with its mildewed walls raises questions about how it will be preserved and who will be allowed to visit, especially since half of the hotel is indirectly owned by the government.
Historian Duong Trung Quoc says it should be opened to the public. While the bunker primarily protected foreign guests, he says it could play an important role in illuminating Vietnam War history.
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