Hanoi Metropole Opens Wartime Bomb Shelter as Memorial

05-14-2012

 

 

Recently discovered Hanoi bunker anchors ‘Path of History’ hotel tour

 

HANOI (14 May 2012) — Forty years after the bombs stopped falling on Hanoi, and less than one year after a chance discovery of an air raid shelter in its back garden, the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi is cutting a red ribbon on the excavated bunker May 21 as the anchor attraction in a new Path of History tour.

 

“Hotels are always opening new outlets,” said Kai Speth, the hotel’s general manager. “New restaurants, new bars, new spas. But it’s not everyday that a hotel opens an old bomb shelter as a new memorial.”

 

The 40-square-meter bomb shelter has been preserved in its original state as a tribute to the hotel’s wartime employees, who ushered guests into the relative safety of the underground chamber from the mid-1960s through the Christmas Bombings in 1972. A Filipino journalist, Gemma Cruz Araneta, described the shelter this way in a May 1968 journal entry:

 

“The hotel shelter is a long, narrow, semi-subterranean room of concrete which I thought would have made a groovy discotheque. It is lined with green wooden chairs and though there was no electricity, I noticed an electric fan. Really, the Vietnamese are such thoughtful hosts.”

 

Araneta will attend the May 21ceremony. So will Bob Devereaux, an Australian diplomat who scratched his name into a wall of the shelter in 1975. And so will Andreas Augustin, an historian who has written a book about the hotel’s history and, now, an exhibit that details the story of the 1901-built colonial French landmark, including a section on the shelter.

 

The exhibit commemorates 110 years of Metropole history along 18 meters of hotel corridor. The 13 exhibition plates include restored images of the hotel’s early years, a timeline, introductions to more than 300 guests from Charlie Chaplin to Jane Fonda and Joan Baez to Angelina Jolie and a section on travel.

 

Augustin, who is president of the Most Famous Hotels in the World organization, is training a team of six local historians to accompany hotel guests on a tour that culminates with a descent into the wartime shelter.

 

“Vietnam is famous for underground excursions at the Cu Chi Tunnels and the Vinh Moc Tunnels, and for bunkers at war memorials like Khe Sanh” said Augustin. “The Metropole’s contribution to this heritage adds a completely new dimension to the story of Vietnam at war.”

 

Though the hotel had long known there was a bomb shelter buried near the shallow end of the swimming pool, it was only with the reconstruction of the hotel’s Bamboo Bar that the location was fixed. Speth approached the first re-encounter with the space at the end of last summer with a mix of ambition and trepidation.

 

“We had no idea what we were going to find after we jack-hammered through that roof,” he said.

 

What they did find was water, and plenty of it. Over the years, groundwater completely flooded the warren of chambers and corridors. After the hotel’s engineering crew pumped out the water, they discovered a few relics — an old wine bottle, a still intact light bulb, air vents, metal blast doors and the Bob Devereaux graffiti.

 

When Devereaux read an account of the shelter’s rediscovery in an Australian newspaper last fall, he contacted the hotel to report that, indeed, he was the man who’d scratched his name in the wall one day in August after the war was over, though he doesn’t quite remember doing so.

 

“I may have been at a loose end finding that the bunker was flooded again – possibly with no electric light either – and so may have scratched my name on the wall in between fishing under the water for an elusive bottle of Australian wine,” he said. “I don’t remember the bunker being sealed up. I left Hanoi in 1976, and as far as I can recall the bunker was still open when I left.”

 

The bomb shelter will be open to hotel guests and staff, as well as local Hanoians.

 

ABOUT SOFITEL LEGEND METROPOLE HANOI

 

Opened in 1901, Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi reigns as the Grande Dame of Vietnamese hospitality and one of Southeast Asia’s most iconic hotels. In 2009, the hotel became the first in the
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