Hanoi Hannah

Trịnh Thị Ngọ (; 1931 – 30 September 2016), also known as Thu Hương and Hanoi Hannah, was a Vietnamese radio personality best known for her work during the Vietnam War, when she made English-language broadcasts for North Vietnam directed at United States troops to demoralise them.

Early life Trịnh Thị Ngọ was born in Hanoi in 1931. Her father, Trịnh Định Kính, was a successful businessman who owned the largest glass factory in French Indochina. One of her tutors and mentors at the station was Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett. She also received and played recorded messages from Americans who were against the war, saying later that she thought these messages were the most effective of all as "Americans will believe their own people rather than the adversary".

A January 1966 Newspaper Enterprise Association article by Tom Tiede described the program:

Hannah's shows are invariably the same. After the news is an editorial denouncing U.S. escalation of the war. Then a recording by an Asian soprano who sounds as if she's having her ears pierced. Then, Mailbag Time ('write us for the truth, friends').

One of her typical broadcasts began as follows:

How are you, GI Joe? It seems to me that most of you are poorly informed about the going of the war, to say nothing about a correct explanation of your presence over here. Nothing is more confused than to be ordered into a war to die or to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on.

Few if any desertions are thought to have happened because of her work and the soldiers "hooted at her scare tactics". According to war correspondent Don North:

By zapping the truth through an ostrich-like policy of censorship, deletions, and exaggerations U.S. Armed Forces Radio lost the trust of many GIs when they were most isolated and vulnerable to enemy propaganda. It wasn't that Hanoi Hannah always told the truth - she didn't. But she was most effective when she did tell the truth and US Armed Forces Radio was fudging it. In interviews in later years, she consistently stated that she agreed with the purpose of the scripts and never deviated from them; she believed that the United States should not have sent troops to Vietnam and should have allowed the country to resolve its situation itself. Ngọ had two children, including a son who was a painter in the United States.

Ngọ has been referenced extensively in media about the Vietnam War. She was portrayed by Mary Woronov in Chelsea Girls and Veronica Ngo in Da 5 Bloods.