Vietnam Vehicles

French Armour in Vietnam 1945–54 uses a variety of photos from the private collections of two French generals of the campaign, and full color plates of rarely illustrated vehicles, to tell the complete story of the tanks and armored fighting vehicles that the French employed in their colonies in Indo-China.

Numerous wheeled armoured fighting vehicles have seen service in the US armed forces on and off for over 80 years.

Designed in the 1950s, the US Marines' M50 Ontos and the US Army's M56 Scorpion were both intended to be fast, light, air-droppable tank-killers for the Cold War battlefield – an answer to the cumbersome and ineffective World War II-vintage tanks that had taken to the battlefield during the Korean War. Although they shared the aim of bringing light, mobile and lethal antitank firepower to the infantry the two vehicles varied wildly in design to cater for their unique mission demands. They first saw service in the Lebanon intervention of 1958 but it was in the Vietnam War that they made their name, with the M50 Ontos seeing intense combat action in the Battle of Hue in 1968.