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North Vietnamese Navy
Vietnam People's Navy (VPN)

The PAVN Navy, begun in 1955 as the PAVN Riverine and Maritime Force, in 1959 became the Coastal Defense Force. Its "tradition day" is celebrated annually on August 5 to mark the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Second Indochina War. The PAVN Navy began a buildup in the mid-1960s with the arrival of twenty-eight gunboats from China and thirty patrol torpedo boats from the Soviet Union. At the end of the Second Indochina War, it assumed the normal dual missions of a navy, that is, coastal defense and sea surveillance.

In North Vietnam could mount only a modest defensive threat by 1964. Their first-line combatants were twenty-four Swatow motor gunboats acquired from the Chinese over a period of years. Swatows are small patrol boats that do not carry torpedoes. They are armed with relatively light 37mm guns and for this reason do not normally challenge destroyers. More threatening, however, were twelve Soviet-built motor torpedo boats delivered to Haiphong in late 1961, capable of fifty-two-knot speeds. These, in addition to a few minesweepers, subchasers and district patrol craft, represented the North Vietnamese navy.

The evidence suggests that after an original offer had been made in late 1964 to furnish KOMARs to the DRV, the USSR changed its mind after regular US bombing began in 1965, the Soviets being unwilling to run a serious risk of conflict with the US in the Gulf of Tonkin. Unlike other weapons the USSR has supplied to North Vietnam, it was not practical to ship the KOMARs by rail or air across China; they would have to travel from Soviet ports to Haiphong as deck cargo under US surveillance. The Soviets instead evidently offered, at some time between February and November 1965, to transfer the KOMARs to DRV control in Chinese ports, whence they could make their way to North Vietnam, as had Chinese patrol boats transferred to the DRV by the Chinese. The Chinese apparently refused, primarily for political reasons. It is also conceivable that the USSR was also reluctant to have the KOMARs in DRV hands at all because of concern at the possibility that the DRV would use themto attack major U.S. ships, with uncalculable possibilities of US counteraction.

A separate but related issue was the question of Soviet willingness to supply North Vietnam with short-range land-based coastal defense guided missiles, such as the 35-40 n.m. Samlet or the 22 n.m. SS-N-2 (Styx) -- the weapon carried on the KOMARs and OSAs. Supplying such weapons to the DRV would have been somewhat less dangerous for the Soviet Union than supplying KOMARs or OSAs. The Samlets or Styxs could be transported without great difficulty by rail, thus avoiding the painful question of who would carry them into Haiphong by sea past the waiting U.S. fleet. The USSR, however, would then have to be willing to allow these missiles to be examined minutely in transit by the Chinese -- a separate question. Also, short-range coastal defense missiles are much more clearly defensive in nature than the KOMARs, and while useful against hostile ships operating close to the North Vietnamese coast, are not asa rule usable against US aircraft carriers which would generally be well out of range. Thus the use to which the North Vietnamese could put these weapons, unlike the KOMARs, would be limited and predictable for the Soviets, and the probable U.S. response would also be more readily calculated in advance.

However, longer-range weapons, such as the 300 n.m. cruise missile Shaddock, would present a real threat to American carriers and other major ships. Their possession by the DRV would conjure up for the USSR many of the same worrisome problems that would be created by the DRV's possession of KOMARs. In addition, the Soviets would presumably be even more reluctant to expose this longer-range missile to Chinese scrutiny en route to the DRV than they would the Styx or Samlet. On either count, it may be concluded that if the Soviets declined to furnish the DRV with the Samlet or Styx, they were quite unlikely to furnish the Shaddock or longer-range guided or ballistic missiles.