The Fall of Saigon

On 21 April 1975, speaking from Saigon’s Independence Palace in a televised broadcast to South Vietnam and the world, President Nguyen Van Thieu, South Vietnam’s longest serving national head, announced his resignation. As the North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam moved in on the southern capital, Thieu called it quits, blaming the betrayal of the United States for his nation’s current predicament. In his address he told the people of South Vietnam what, hours earlier, he had told the US: 

You found an honourable way out. And at present, when our army lacks weapons, ammunition, helicopters, aircraft, and B-52s you ask us to do an impossible thing like filling up an ocean with stones … You have let our combatants die under a hail of shells. This is an inhumane act by an inhuman ally. Refusing to aid an ally and abandoning it is an inhumane act.

Thieu then loaded his pockets with gold bars, was driven to the airport, and flown to safety in Taiwan, leaving behind a city quickly descending into chaos. Nine days later, on 30 April, Saigon was in communist hands, as were many of those who were trying, desperately, to get out. For those communist forces, their arrival in Saigon was the culmination of a long struggle against foreign control. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the revolutionary leader, dead since 1969, who some 30 years earlier had earnestly appealed to President Harry S. Truman and ‘the American people’ to support North Vietnam’s independence. His requests ignored, the country he had once led had to be taken by force.

War in Indochina

American involvement in South Vietnam had ended on 27 January 1973 with the signing of the Paris Accords, allowing Richard Nixon’s administration to extricate the US from the Second Indochina War, popularly known as the Vietnam War, with the claim of ‘peace with honour’. The last US troops left Vietnam on 29 March. To gain agreement from Thieu, Nixon had promised in writing that, were the North Vietnamese to substantially break the peace brokered with the Accords, the US would come to South Vietnam’s defence in full force. This was important: the Accords had left the North Vietnamese in control of the areas of southern territory that they already held, putting the North in a strong position to resume the war at a later point. But Nixon’s promise was made before the Watergate scandal. After his resignation in August 1974 his successor, Gerald Ford, faced a US Congress that wanted no more interventions in 
Vietnam. The US was tired of a war that it knew to be unwinnable.

For the North, the opposite was true. After decades of struggle under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh, as the largely communist fighters of the North were known, had liberated the colony of Vietnam from the Japanese occupation of 1940-45, as well as from French rule in the 1945 August Revolution – only to find the British eager to place the French back in control. The First Indochina War (1946-54) broke out when the French navy bombed the Viet Minh at the port of Haiphong, killing thousands on 23 November 1946, followed three weeks later by a retaliatory Viet Minh attack on any French people found in Hanoi on 19 December.

As the Cold War cast a shadow over all postwar colonial conflicts, the US became very interested in the outcome of the First Indochina War, which it saw as a battle against communism, rather than as a local, nationalist war. At Geneva in 1954 a peace was hammered out by the major Western and communist powers after a French force of 11,000, surrounded in the Dien Bien Phu Valley, had surrendered to the Viet Minh on 7 May 1954, one of the worst military defeats suffered by a European power in any colonial conflict.

The terms of Geneva confirmed the full independence and neutrality of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, which had previously comprised French Indochina. Vietnam was divided into two regroupment zones separated by a neutral zone at the 17th parallel: a communist zone in the north for the forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and a non-communist zone in the south for the forces of Bao Dai’s Associated State of Vietnam and the French forces there, fighting, in theory, on its behalf. Vietnam would then hold national elections in 1956 for a unified government with the general belief that Ho Chi Minh’s communists would easily win. The unified Vietnam would be, like Laos and Cambodia, neutral.

These agreements were between the French and the communists. Neither the US nor Bao Dai’s government signed the agreement, and this would be used to legitimise the violation of its terms. The US was very unhappy with an agreement that had officially established a legitimate communist political space in Vietnam. Fearful that Vietnam would become completely communist by 1956, the US immediately set about trying to build, in violation of the agreement, a permanent non-communist state in the south, the Republic of Vietnam, capable of withstanding communist North Vietnam. The Americans searched for a potential leader and settled on Bao Dai’s prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem. After a referendum, the Associated State of Vietnam became the Republic of South Vietnam, the existing head of state Bao Dai – final ruler of the Nguyen dynasty – was ousted, and Diem became president. The Americans rushed the remaining French forces out of South Vietnam and helped Diem suppress the gangsters who the French had allowed to run Saigon, while Diem eradicated his remaining political rivals.

Another potential challenge to Diem’s power were two religious groups who ran their communities like ‘states within a state’, the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai. The Hoa Hao had begun as a Buddhist millennial movement in 1940, while the Cao Dai was an older religious group founded in 1926 by the emerging Vietnamese middle class. Combining different elements of Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, and other faiths, it promoted harmony and belief in a single God, with a religious pantheon that famously included Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc, and Louis Pasteur. By 1954 both had about two million members primarily located in South Vietnam. They maintained their own governments, schools, hospitals, postal services, and armies, paid for by taxes that they collected. During the First Indochina War, the French had allowed both groups a great deal of autonomy because, being anti-communist themselves, they helped prevent communist victory in the south. But as a threat to state control in his new South Vietnam, Diem would aggressively bring both under the control of his government.

In 1960 southern communists, in collaboration with the North Vietnamese, formed the National Liberation Front and directed insurgents, known as the Viet Cong, against Diem’s rule. These forces were supplied from the North by a long route running through neutral Laos known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. From 1962, with the help of US Special Forces, Diem tried concentrating villagers into ‘strategic hamlets’, fortified villages designed to isolate the rural population from the Viet Cong. The initiative drew on lessons learned by the British during the Malayan Emergency (1948-60). Nevertheless, the programme was unsuccessful; villagers complained of feeling imprisoned and abused, and soon began cooperating with Viet Cong attacks on the hamlets.

By 1963 Diem had been unable to stem his increasing losses fighting the insurgency. The harsh authoritarian nature of his rule made him unpopular. After suppressing peaceful Buddhist protests and ignoring American advice to reform his approach to government (and to give the US a greater role in conducting the war), Diem was shot in a military coup on 2 November 1963, five weeks before John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. A series of follow-up coups led to a succession of military leaders until one, Thieu, was transformed from a member of the ruling junta into a civil leader as president after winning an election in 1967.

The Americans meanwhile sent in hundreds of thousands of troops from 1965, becoming bogged down in a quagmire. While Lyndon B. Johnson bombed rural and North Vietnam, in 1968 Richard Nixon won the presidency partly on the promise of a ‘secret plan’ to win the war. The exact contents of this plan never became entirely clear. Nixon would continue to bomb Laos, through which North Vietnam supplied insurgents in the South, Cambodia, which was believed to be where communist supply bases were hiding, and North Vietnam, where Nixon hoped to destroy the communists’ willingness to prolong the conflict. Ultimately, it was Nixon’s reputation as a ‘madman’ among the North Vietnamese leadership – an idea purposefully fostered by secretary of state Henry Kissinger – that gave the threat in the 1973 Accords of an American return any credibility.

Hostilities resume

Despite the agreements at the Paris Accords, both sides immediately began violating the ceasefire. Over the course of 1973 both the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese significantly expanded the rural areas under their control. Thieu declared the Accords dead in January 1974 and recommenced hostilities.

Despite the assurances that Nixon and Kissinger had made in secret to Thieu in 1973, the US would not intervene with military force. American popular feeling about the war had been souring throughout the Nixon presidency. Congress had responded to the vague wording of a strong US response in the Paris Peace Accords with the Case-Church Amendment, prohibiting the president from using American military forces in Southeast Asia from 15 August 1973 without advance congressional approval.

Matters were made worse for the South by the Middle East oil crisis, which had begun with the Arab oil embargo in 1972. While the North relied heavily on jungle irregulars and infantry, the South Vietnamese army (officially the Army of the Republic of Vietnam) was much more dependent on air power, especially helicopters and armoured personnel carriers, tanks, and other vehicles, all of which were fuel-dependent. But when Congress cut off aid with the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, South Vietnam, an agricultural country, began to run desperately short of bullets, shells, and replacement parts as their vehicles and aircraft began to break down. Without air or armoured support, the South Vietnamese infantry had not earned a very strong reputation, suffering from corruption in the officer class and an overdependence on the presence of American forces that was hard to shake. Although Thieu successfully retook 15 per cent of South Vietnam from the communists, these actions cost the South Vietnamese army resources that it could not restore now that US aid was disappearing.

News of the Americans’ decision not to back the South reached Le Duan, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam and leader of the North. In late 1974 he decided to push for the recapture of the South. The North did not plan to win a resumption of the conflict in one campaign, but instead intended to undertake a series of preliminary attacks to prepare for a major offensive in 1976. However, their decisive victory at the Battle of Phuoc Long in the Central Highlands in January 1975 demonstrated that the South Vietnamese army would struggle to cope with North Vietnamese conventional forces, and confirmed that no help was coming from the US. There was no reason to delay the retake of the South. In early March 1975 North Vietnam, considering the ease with which its army had defeated the South Vietnamese forces they had encountered, decided to go all the way south to Saigon – and to take it before Ho Chi Minh’s birthday on 19 May.

In the meantime, Thieu had travelled to Washington to plead for more aid, but the recession in the US meant his requests were refused. Thieu would have to defend South Vietnam with what he already had.

The road to Saigon

Saigon had come under French rule when it was ceded to them by the Empire of Vietnam in 1862. Then a small port, the French built it up as a capital, first of the part of Indochina over which they exercised direct rule, Cochinchina, then, from 1946, as the capital of a puppet state they created, the Republic of Cochinchina. In 1948 Saigon became the capital of the Provisional Government of Southern Vietnam, then in 1949 the capital of the Associated State of Vietnam under the former emperor Bao Dai – in whose name the French fought much of the First Indochina War – and in 1955 it became the capital of South Vietnam.

By early 1975 Saigon was a city of around 2.5 million people. It was located close to the Mekong delta, far from the thin strip of central Vietnam that divided the North and the South at the 17th parallel, and some distance from the highlands that constituted the spine of Vietnam from the north to south. These highlands, very difficult to traverse, were a natural obstacle that protected the coastal lowlands from flanking by the North Vietnamese army. As the South’s highland positions began to fall, on 14 March 1975 Thieu controversially ordered the abandonment of the Central Highlands so as to draw troops to the lowlands to protect the main cities. This had the effect of opening up most of the coastal provinces to the North Vietnamese army.

It was a blunder, and a further series of confusing and contradictory orders from Thieu to his generals contributed to growing chaos within the South Vietnamese defence. The province of Quang Tri fell on 19 March. Hue, the old imperial capital, fell on 24 March. Da Nang, a city of two million people, fell on 29 March. Each defeat dramatically reduced South Vietnam’s resources and sped up the North Vietnamese advance. What might have been a slow, orderly tactical withdrawal became an all-out rout. South Vietnamese soldiers deserted their positions, returning to their home villages to help their families flee south. It was these refugees and deserters who, in congesting the roads, helped prevent the communists from reaching Saigon sooner than they did.

A further cause of concern for the South was the collapse of what remained of the American-backed Khmer Republic in Cambodia, established under General Lon Nol with a coup in March 1970. The Americans and South Vietnamese had followed this coup with their own invasion of the Cambodian border in an attempt to sweep out the communist bases that they believed were supplying and directing communist insurgents in South Vietnam. All this invasion achieved was to push the communists deeper into Cambodia. Intense US bombing from 1967 until 1973 drove hundreds of thousands of Cambodian villagers into communist camps as refugees. Together, these efforts swelled the size of the Cambodian communists, who became known as the Khmer Rouge. They took much of the countryside, surrounded the capital Phnom Penh, and subjected it to a two-year siege, finally taking the city on 17 April 1975. They entered Phnom Penh with a death list of government officials, whom they arrested and murdered. Later that day – on the claim of a fear that the Americans would bomb the city now that it was in communist hands – the Khmer Rouge drove the city’s population into the countryside. These people, known as the ‘April 17 People’, would become a kind of underclass among rural Cambodians. All this was known in South Vietnam, but the stories of the killings and starvation of two million Cambodians at the hands of the Khmer Rouge would not get serious attention from the outside world for several years.

The fate of Phnom Penh was an ominous portent for the South Vietnamese regime. Hundreds of thousands of people in Saigon had worked with, or for, the American military, intelligence, or civilian government, and many had families. There were also 6,000 or so Americans, mainly men, still in Saigon after the withdrawal of US ground forces, working as advisers, technical experts, intelligence workers, and in other capacities. Many of these had Vietnamese registered wives, common law wives, or girlfriends, as well as children. The US ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Anderson Martin, was the official with the authority to order an American evacuation, or American help to evacuate South Vietnamese. But Martin would not contemplate the fall of Saigon and, moreover, was afraid that any sign of preparations for an evacuation of American personnel might hurt the morale of the South Vietnamese government. It was also illegal, under orders of the South Vietnamese government, for South Vietnamese to evacuate. Martin would delay giving the order until just before the fall of the city. Instead, American military personnel began clandestine efforts to remove colleagues and friends from the country.

Exodus

Martin and other Americans were not ready to give up on the prospect of retaining a foothold in the delta. Thieu, Martin, and the CIA independently toyed with the idea of creating a South Vietnamese rump state that might continue to hold out against the communists indefinitely, given the right amount of American aid – and force a negotiated end to the fighting. On 10 April 1975 Ford turned to US Congress asking for emergency support to help preserve South Vietnam from complete collapse, and to buy time for an orderly evacuation. Ford asked for $722 million in emergency military assistance and another $250 million in economic and humanitarian aid. He also asked for clarification from Congress on his ability to deploy US troops to aid in the withdrawal. While Kissinger would later claim that Ford was doubtful that this would amount to anything more than a necessary gesture, Ford was deeply disappointed when this request was rejected. Congress believed the aid would be wasted, given that South Vietnam had not been able to do a better job of defending itself with the aid the US had already given the country. There was also reluctance to approve US troops being deployed in the evacuation on the grounds that it might, in fact, be a ruse for the reintroduction of US combat troops into the conflict itself.

Problems were mounting for Thieu’s own position. The North Vietnamese government had let it be known in early April that a negotiated settlement might be possible with a South Vietnamese government that did not include him. In the weeks ahead, the South Vietnamese senate and military leadership, which blamed his order to evacuate the Central Highlands as the cause for the very quickly deteriorating strategic situation, also pushed for his resignation.

But Thieu still had hope. As three North Vietnamese divisions approached Saigon, a single South Vietnamese unit, the 18th Division, reinforced by elements of other units, blocked their way in what became the Battle of Xuan Loc, which lasted from 9 to 21 April. Later described as ‘South Vietnam’s Thermopylae’, it was by all accounts some of the best fighting the South Vietnamese army had conducted during the entire war. With US permission, the South Vietnamese dropped the most powerful conventional bomb in the US arsenal, the CBU-55, in the battle, killing hundreds of North Vietnamese troops. But when the defenders could hold out no longer, Thieu knew all was lost. He resigned on 21 April 1975, fleeing to Taiwan soon after.

The vice president, General Tran Van Huong, took Thieu’s place. The North Vietnamese refused his call for a ceasefire and he resigned on 28 April. Tran’s place was taken by General Duong Van Minh, who had better relations with the communists and seemed more likely to achieve a negotiated surrender, but his efforts were also refused by Hanoi.

The reality of the situation finally hit Ambassador Martin and he gave the order to evacuate. On 29 April 8,000 people were flown by helicopter relays out of Saigon to US naval vessels moored off the coast in the South China Sea as part of Operation Frequent Wind, making use of whatever rooftops or other landing spaces they could. The rooftop in Hubert van Es’ famous photograph of a line of Vietnamese boarding an Air America helicopter is not actually, as often believed, that of the US embassy, but an apartment building that was being used as a CIA communications centre.

But the sheer number of Vietnamese who wanted to flee Saigon made a total evacuation impossible. Making matters worse, due to Martin’s delay in giving the orders to evacuate, many of the embassy’s confidential files had not been destroyed, including the lists of those South Vietnamese who had been informants or worked in some other capacity for the CIA. In the process of trying to evacuate while burning the files, they were kicked up by the suction of helicopter blades and distributed over a large area. The communists would later use these files to identify and execute thousands of South Vietnamese. On the morning of 30 April the last American helicopter departed from the roof of the embassy building. All told, by various means, 130,000 South Vietnamese were evacuated from South Vietnam in April and May 1975. But many were left behind.

That same morning, the North Vietnamese army overran Saigon, a tank breaking through the gates of the presidential palace. There, the last president, Duong Van Minh, agreed to order the remaining South Vietnamese units to surrender. As with Phnom Penh, the victors tried to reduce the population of Saigon, which had grown during the war to an unmanageable size. Although hundreds of thousands of civilian employees and soldiers of the South Vietnamese government would be sent to re-education camps, and many were tortured and killed, the endgame was far less horrific for most than was the fall of Phnom Penh. Saigon was renamed in honour of the great Vietnamese nationalist leader as Ho Chi Minh City, although many would continue to refer to it as Saigon.

Communist Indochina

In the areas of the delta that had not yet fallen under communist control, South Vietnamese generals began committing suicide, shooting themselves with their revolvers after calling their loved ones. Pilots who could grab what serviceable helicopters remained flew their families out to sea blindly searching for American ships. A ragtag assortment of ships, many of them leaking and broken, were gathered by US navy vessels and led as a refugee armada to the US-friendly Philippines.

With the fall of Saigon, only one of the three non-communist capitals of what had been Indochina remained: Vientiane in Laos. It would be occupied more peacefully on 23 August 1975. Indochina was now entirely in the hands of wartime communist allies.

The ending of one war, however, set the stage for another. Now that their common enemies had been ejected from the region, Soviet-backed North Vietnam, which was reunified into a single Vietnamese state on 2 July 1976, would face an increasingly hostile Cambodia under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. The Third Indochina War began when Vietnam invaded Cambodia on Christmas Day 1978, followed by an invasion of Vietnam by China in February 1979. The former Indochina would not see peace until 1991.

Michael W. Charney is Professor of Asian and Military History at SOAS, University of London.