The Thua Thien-Hue History Museum, established in 1976, exhibits 30,000 relics at the Imperial Academy. Several exhibited weapons were used during the wars against the U.S. and France, such as planes, tanks and cannons.
In 2020, with the support of the Thua Thien-Hue military command, the war relics have been transported to the new headquarters of the museum, located on Dien Bien Phu Street of Hue City.
The land plot for the museum spans 7,500 m2, where the provincial mobile soldier battalion used to be stationed at.
Nguyen Duc Loc, director of the museum, said the facility exhibited 14 tanks, cannons and planes outside.
Some of them were abandoned, while others were collected.
After over 40 years of being exposed to the elements, several relics have been degraded to an irrecoverable state, such as the M41 and M48 tanks.
The continuous tracks have been damaged, so the museum has to use iron bars and wires to hold them in place.
The hull of the M-132A1 armored flamethrower, which was used by the U.S. army from 1972, has gone rusty and is covered with moss.
During the war, this vehicle could travel over different terrain, and was used to burn down villages in southern Vietnam.
The paint on the wings and hull of the A-37 Dragonfly attack aircraft is fading away over time. The aircraft was used by the U.S. army to bomb southern Vietnam in 1967. During the war, over 500 A-37 aircrafts were brought to Vietnam, of which over 200 were shot down.
A M107 self-propelled gun, manufactured by the U.S., has been renovated by the museum by painting it for reservation. The 175 mm gun is the largest caliber that the Vietnamese Army ever possessed and has been nicknamed the "King of the Battlefield."
Nguyen Duc Loc, director of the museum, said the yearly budget for preserving the relics is limited, so it must be done intermittently and not on a large scale.
"Right now, the museum has created a proposal to find the budget to preserve relics stored outside, and the proposal is expected to be presented to the higher-ups within this year. After the preservation and the repair is done, the unit will continue to request for the construction of canopies to prevent the relics from being degraded further due to weather conditions," Loc said.
