In the year 2000, a visit by North Korea’s foreign minister to a cemetery in Bac Giang, Vietnam confirmed a long-rumored fact: dozens of North Korean pilots had dueled American Navy and Air Force pilots over the skies of Vietnam during the 1960s. And fourteen North Korean Air Force did not return alive.
Since these early vague reports, historians have uncovered much more about the activities of Pyongyang’s fighter pilots, revealing they made a substantial contribution to North Vietnam’s underdog air war against U.S. warplanes in 1967 and 1968.
The North Korean and North Vietnamese communists had long-standing ties, and North Koreans undoubtedly sympathized with the latter’s objective of forcibly reunifying with their southern neighbors.
More practically from Korea’s standpoint, the war in Vietnam drained U.S. and South Korean troops and political capital in equal measure, allowing North Korea to wage a campaign quixotically aimed at instigating a revolution in South Korea with minimal pushback from Washington, culminating in 1968 with the attempted assassination of South Korea’s president and the seizure of U.S. spy ship Pueblo in international waters.
In 2011, historian Merle Pribbenow published a dossier of translated Vietnamese documents revealing the arrangement began with a letter from North Korea received by Hanoin on September 21st, 1966 requesting permission to dispatch a regiment of North Korean air force pilots to support Hanoi’s war effort.
A committee chaired by legendary Vietnamese general Vo Nguygen Giap hashed out an agreement stipulating:
“The North Korean air force personnel would be called “specialists” but in reality they would be volunteer soldiers… With regard to command arrangements, we would be their superiors, but within the allied [North Korean] regiment they would directly command their own forces with the assistance of representatives from our side, who would give them their specific operational missions.”