This is coolbert: In the book "Devil's Guard", the German commander of the French Foreign Legion battalion consisting of Germans in French Indo-China does make comments regarding the radio insecurity of the French and the negative consequences of making poor, injudicious and insecure use of the radio in war time.

Here are some comments attributed to "Hans":

"We had our own codes in German, a definite advantage over the Viet Minh. The enemy intelligence had often broken the French Army code [or rather the Chinese or Russian experts had done the job for them]."

"I had my misgivings about such detailed wireless dispatches whether they were coded or not. I had often requested a change of code but all in vain. In the German Army we had changed field codes every other day. The Foreign Legion used the same keys for months in a row. Recent events events made me suspect that the 'ears' of the Viet Minh were wide open both in Hanoi and in the radio listening posts in the frontier areas and Eisner swore that some of them were manned by Russian signal experts. I would not have been surprised if the enemy had the key to our code."

"In this respect, however, I underestimated the Viet Minh. A few months later we learned that for over six months three German nationals from the Soviet Zone had been attached to the Viet Minh High Command. Their principal task was to keep track of our communications."

It was often thought by American forces in Vietnam and by the American public in general that the enemy being fought during the Vietnam could be best characterized as a bunch of peasants wearing black pajamas, wearing sandals made of discarded rubber tires, while firing at American forces with home-made zip gun type weaponry. In reality the enemy in Vietnam was quite sophisticated in some regards. Espionage and intelligence gathering by the VC and the NVA was very good and highly stressed by the communists. And part of that effort to glean intelligence about U.S. forces, and the South Vietnamese for that manner, was by radio intercepts. Radio intercept units that were very poorly equipped by American standards, but then you don't need a whole lot of sophisticated equipment to do work in the area of radio intercepts. What you do need are smart, experienced and dedicated people who know their job and do it with panache. My intuition tells me the enemy the U.S. fought in Nam was more than up to the task in this regard. Click here to read a web site about some of what Craig was talking about in a previous post of his.

coolbert.