From the book:

Daring Missions of World War II

William B. Brewer

p. 59

Castle Books

American Medics Save Ho Chi Minh

Although in the backwaters of a savage global conflict, Vietnam, with a population of some twenty million, was the site of a bloody struggle between occupying Japanese forces and native resistance groups. The Japanese had seized Vietnam to serve as a base for widespread invasions in Southeast Asia when war erupted in the Pacific in December 1941.

Most of the fighting against the Japanese was done behind established lines by the Communist-dominated Viet Minh guerrillas, whose announced goal for the country was independence from France. Although officially not involved with the Viet Minh, members of the cloak-and-dagger U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) helped anyone who was battling the common enemy, the empire of Japan.

At one aid station in the fall of 1942, an OSS doctor tended to a resistance member whose medical tag identified him as Ho Chi Minh. The man was apparently dying from malaria, dysentery, and other debilitating diseases usually spawned in jungles, of which Vietnam had no shortage. The fifty-three year old patient was treated with modern drugs and soon made what the physician regarded as a remarkable recovery.

Ho was not without gratitude to the American doctor and his male medical staff. He offered them the company of any of the pretty young Vietnamese women in his large entourage.

Seventeen months earlier in mid-1941, Ho Chi Minh (an adopted name meaning "he who enlightens") had been in China when he founded the Viet Minh (League for the Independence of Vietnam). Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist strongman, had Ho arrested as a Communist agitator, but after the United States was bombed into global war at Pearl Harbor, the prisoner was released-at the request of the OSS to organize anti-Japanese intelligence throughout Vietnam.

Ho performed his mission for three years, but when it appeared that the war in the Pacific was nearing its end in early 1945, he pulled his sizable force of guerrillas and secret agents into the highlands to prepare for seizing power once the shooting stopped. Taken into hiding with him were many tons of U.S.-supplied weapons and ammunition.

When a Japanese delegation signed surrender papers on the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the Viet Minh were the only organized force in Vietnam. So the guerrilla leader promptly marched into Hanoi, forced Emperor Bao Dai to abdicate (ending a thousand-year monarchy), established the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and proclaimed himself as president.

Twenty years later, Ho's tough, wily Viet Minh jungle fighters were embroiled in a bitter war with the United States. Would history in Southeast Asia have been different had not the OSS doctor saved the Communist leader's life years earlier?7

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from an anonymous source:

A few years after South Vietnam fell, the Soviet Union negotiated the use of the port of Cam Ranh Bay for it’s Navy. Russian sailors also fraternized with the Vietnamese with one main difference - the Vietnamese called Russians “Americans with no money”.

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“The Rise of North Vietnam’s Air Defenses”, VIETNAM  June 2016, p 41-45

This magazine article says that until the end of 1963, North Vietnam had 22 search radars and one German WW2-era  Wurtzburg fire-direction radar controlling 16 batteries of WW2 German 88mm AA guns, all supplied by the USSR.