KBC Listing 1970

Here is a rare document that was published by postal section of the Army of Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) in 1970 and that was classified as “top secret”. It associates the military field post numbers (KBC) that were attached to a particular military unit to the type of the agency and its location. The first column lists the name of the agency, the second column the name of the city the agency was located in followed by the KBC number in the third column. Had it fallen into the hands of the enemy (in this case North Vietnam) it would have enabled it to determine the location of a particular unit after capturing mail from a military mail carrier. This would have greatly aided the troop and war planning of the enemy and as a result very few people in the military postal system had access to it.  One has to assume that the document was updated at least yearly as troop units continuously shifted around in the theater of war and so it has to be seen as a snapshot in time. The editor obtained this photo copy of the document from SICP member Andrew Crenshaw to whom he owes his appreciation and gratitude. The original document was tightly bound as it was copied with the result that sometimes the most right column actually appears on the next page. Also the quality of the photo copies was pretty poor to begin with, so even scanning the pages at 300 dpi, could not make up for some faint images. Nevertheless this is the only and hence best document we have as a philatelic community to better understand South Vietnamese military mail. The document has 182 pages which were all individually scanned and attached to this listing. The data volume that needs to be loaded is great, so be patient when loading this page for the first time. Given sufficient time all pages will appear. The editor would be interested to learn if someone else has additional KBC listings that may have survived the fall of the Republic of Vietnam. If ou do, please contact the editor using the communication feature on this website.

Registration Nr. 202000