This year marks the anniversaries for the end of World War II and the fall of Saigon, which signaled the end of the Vietnam War. For our April 12 editions on the 70th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we talked to local people about the impact FDR’s death held for them. Today’s story commemorates the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Saigon. And next Sunday we will present a special package on the 70th anniversary of V-E Day. Look for other anniversary stories throughout the course of the year as we look back at these momentus events of yesteryear and what they mean to our country going forward.
Vietnam timeline
May 8, 1954: The Viet Minh Communists defeat 13,000 French troops at Dien Bien Phu, ending France’s Indochina Empire, which had been opposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but backed by Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.
July 21, 1954: At an international conference in Geneva, Vietnam is temporarily partitioned, the North ruled by the Communists under Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi and the South by Premier Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon.
May 11, 1961: President John F. Kennedy orders 400 Green Berets as counter-insurgency advisers to South Vietnam to augment the 900 U.S. military advisers in the country, a number that will grow to 16,000 when he is assassinated in 1963 in Dallas.
November 1, 1963: Frustrated by Diem’s use of martial law to curb a Buddhist uprising, the Kennedy administration backs a coup by South Vietnamese generals, who murder Diem. The fall of Diem ushers in an era of instability in South Vietnam with one coup after another during next 20 months.
July 1964: North Vietnamese torpedo boats attack the U.S. destroyer Maddox in international waters. A second attack reported two days later by the Maddox never took place, but by votes of 88-2 in the Senate and 416-0 in the House, Congress approves the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which authorizes President Lyndon B. Johnson to use military force in Southeast Asia.
Feb. 13, 1965: Johnson authorizes Rolling Thunder, a three-year air campaign over North Vietnam which will last until Oct. 31, 1968. Johnson orders more ground forces to Vietnam, which will peak at 549,000 U.S. troops by the end of his presidency.
Jan. 31, 1968: Communist Party strongman Le Duan launches the Tet offensive throughout South Vietnam. Although the Le Duan’s offensive fails to spark a general rebellion in the South and topple the Saigon government, the attacks jolt American confidence that the war can be won.
March 31, 1968: Johnson announces he will not seek re-election, halts some of the bombing of North Vietnam and agrees to negotiations in Paris between the United States and North Vietnam.
Aug. 28, 1968: Thousands of police and anti-war protesters clash in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention where Vice President Hubert Humphrey is nominated for president.
Jan. 20, 1969: Republican Richard Nixon is inaugurated president.
Feb. 23, 1969: North Vietnam launches a new offensive in the South, striking 110 targets. President Nixon responds by ordering the secret bombing of North Vietnamese sanctuaries inside Cambodia near the Vietnamese border.
Sept. 2, 1969: Ho Chi Minh dies at age 79. His death does not change policy because Le Duan had already marginalized both the revolutionary leader and General Vo Nguyen Giap, the hero of Dien Bien Phu.
April 30, 1970: Nixon orders U.S. and South Vietnamese troops to attack North Vietnamese bases inside Cambodia. The move sets off furious protests on America’s college campuses.
May 4, 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen open fire during a war protest at Kent State University, killing four young protesters. More than 400 U.S. universities and colleges are shut down.
May 8, 1972: Nixon orders a renewed air campaign against North Vietnam, mines Haiphong Harbor, which cuts off war supplies from the Soviet Union to Hanoi.
Nov. 7, 1972: Winning 49 states, Nixon is re-elected over Democrat George McGovern, who had vowed to pull out all U.S. forces and end American backing of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu.
Jan. 23, 1973 – White House National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese Special Adviser Le Duc Tho, who is Le Duan’s top aide, initial the Paris Peace Accords, which leaves Saigon in Thieu’s control, North Vietnamese troops in part of South Vietnam, and allows the remaining 25,000 American forces and 600 U.S. prisoners of war to go home.
Aug. 9, 1974 – Nixon resigns the presidency to avoid impeachment because of his role in the Watergate cover-up. Vice President Gerald Ford becomes president.
Dec. 13, 1974 – Le Duan orders a new series of offensives with the hope of toppling Thieu by 1976.
April 17, 1975 – Khmer Rouge Communists defeat the pro-western Cambodian forces seize the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. During the next four years, more than two million Cambodians die under their rule.
April 30, 1975 – North Vietnamese troops occupy Saigon to win the war. The last Americans have helicoptered out of Saigon.
Packed with 120 South Vietnamese civilians and a handful of Americans, the CH-53 helicopter lifted off a tennis court and into the night sky, illuminated only by bursts of lightning northwest of Saigon and machine gun tracers fired by enemy soldiers.
As Air Force Major John Guilmartin flew 90 miles to the safety of the U.S. aircraft carrier Midway, he thought of his college studies about the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and realized that on this night of April 29, 1975, he was witnessing an “entire civilization” dying.
For Guilmartin, now a history professor at Ohio State University, America’s lengthy war in Vietnam and Cambodia was over and “we had lost.” More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed along with as many as three million Vietnamese and Cambodians.
Those left behind in the hasty evacuations of Phnom Penh and Saigon 40 years ago this month would endure additional calamities. In the next four years, more than two million Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge Communists and 165,000 South Vietnamese lost their lives in North Vietnamese re-education camps.
To young Americans, the conflict is a distant and remote memory. But to baby boomers, Vietnam remains an open wound.
The conflict is so fresh that “when someone says ISIS is the Khmer Rouge with prayer rugs, you know it’s still there,” said Elizabeth Becker, who covered Cambodia in the early 1970s for the Washington Post and who wrote the 1998 book “When the War Was Over.”
The war ushered in many firsts. Networks and newspapers exercised unprecedented freedom to cover the conflict. Americans sitting in their living rooms saw dead U.S. soldiers on their color television sets. The World War II generation’s sons and daughters protested the war in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention and on college campuses.
Four young people were shot to death in May 1970 by Ohio National Guardsmen during one demonstration at Kent State University.
Fervent believers in American exceptionalism – that Americans were a special force for good in a tumultuous world – were jolted by the brutal reality of My Lai, where in 1968 U.S. soldiers shot to death scores of unarmed Vietnamese.
“It continues to affect our culture and politics, but in a very conflicted way,” said Christian Appy, a University of Massachusetts history professor and author of “American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and our National Identity.” “The way we look at the war ranges from those who see it as a noble failure or a tragic mistake, and those who see it as a shameful injustice.”
Festering wounds
Combined with the Watergate scandal and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the war left many Americans with a deep skepticism about the federal government’s ability to tell the truth.
The festering wounds divide Americans who believe the U.S. could have prevailed and others who say the war was a hopeless endeavor to salvage corrupt and inept regimes in South Vietnam and Cambodia.
“The war could have been won,” said Lewis Sorley, a retired Army officer and CIA official, and author of “Westmoreland – The General Who Lost Vietnam.”
But Marilyn B. Young, a professor of history at New York University, counters: “What did we achieve there? The unequivocal answer is we achieved death and destruction. Not another thing.”
In an ironic historical twist no one could have imagined in 1975, a unified Vietnam today has edged closer to its old enemy — the United States — a move fueled in part by neighboring China’s aggressive energy claims in the South China Sea. Having long ago jettisoned its Marxist economy, Vietnam today combines an authoritarian government with a vibrant market economy.
Saigon, re-named Ho Chi Minh City in 1975, shows few signs of the war. It is now a city of gleaming skyscrapers, nearly 10 million people, and streets choked with whizzing motorbikes. A massive subway project is underway in the heart of downtown, where international tourists stroll in search of street food.
To many, the city is still is known as Saigon. “Don’t call it Ho Chi Minh City,” a tour operator born after the war admonished an American tourist last month.
The war was a test of wills between five American presidents — who regarded South Vietnam as crucial to the security of the United States and its Pacific allies — and Le Duan, the general secretary of the North Vietnamese Communist Party.
By 1963, Le Duan had eclipsed both Ho Chi Minh, founder of the North Vietnamese government, and the legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap. Le Duan’s goal was clear — the utter elimination of the American-backed Saigon regime.
Convinced that Ho Chi Minh had foolishly agreed at Geneva in 1954 to partition the North and South, Le Duan launched one military offensive after another in the South, while simultaneously blocking serious negotiations with the Americans.
“Negotiations under the Le Duan regime were a dirty word,” said Lien-Hang Nguyen, author of the 2012 book, “Hanoi’s War” and a professor of history at the University of Kentucky. “Le Duan wasn’t ready to negotiate seriously until the summer of 1972.”
Major conflict
Two key events in 1963 transformed Vietnam from a sideshow into a major international conflict, once secret U.S. and Hanoi archives show.
The first was the Kennedy administration’s support for a coup to replace what many U.S. officials regarded as the ineffective and intolerant South Vietnamese Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, ending in his murder by rebellious South Vietnamese generals. Diem’s death led to one weak South Vietnamese regime after another.
The second came in December of 1963, a month after Kennedy’s assassination. Le Duan ordered a full-scale invasion of the South by not only Viet Cong Communists, but well-equipped North Vietnamese regiments.
“The end of 1963 was a major turning point, not just on the American side with the overthrow of Diem, but also in the North with the decision to go for a big war,” Nguyen said.
Lyndon B. Johnson, whose presidency was tainted by Vietnam, was faced with a difficult choice: Reinforce the 16,000 U.S. soldiers Kennedy had dispatched to South Vietnam or watch the Saigon government collapse.
In 1965, Johnson launched a ferocious air campaign known as Rolling Thunder against targets in North Vietnam and South Vietnam. Johnson also ordered additional ground forces to Vietnam in a ramp-up that would peak at 549,000 U.S. troops by the end of his presidency.
Johnson’s intervention temporarily saved the Saigon regime, but by 1968 many Americans at home had grown weary — even hostile — to the seemingly endless and bloody war. The insurgent presidential campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy resonated with anti-war Democrats, forcing Johnson to abandon running for a second term.
“You get so much time to win a war and if it takes six years to figure out what you’re doing, then you are going to be a loser,” said retired U.S. Army Col. Stuart Herrington, whose fluent Vietnamese allowed him to interrogate North Vietnamese and Viet Cong prisoners.
Richard Nixon took office in 1969 on a pledge to seek “an honorable” end to the war, one that preserved the Saigon regime. A number of steps — including Nixon’s use of air power to pummel Le Duan’s Easter offensive in 1972 — led to the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, which extricated most Americans from Vietnam. But Saigon remained a city under siege.
At home the war was enormously unpopular. A decision by Nixon to send American ground forces into Cambodia in 1970, coupled with a fierce bombing campaign, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 50,000 civilians.
Becker, who saw entire villages destroyed by U.S. bombs, argues that the U.S. handed the Khmer Rouge Communists “a propaganda tool” to recruit thousands of new rebels, transforming a small force of 5,000 in 1970 into a larger and more dangerous organization by 1975.
“I am not blaming America for everything,” Becker said. “But we are not innocent.”
Saigon’s fall
The Paris Peace Accords did not last. By the summer of 1973, Congress prohibited money for U.S. combat operations in Southeast Asia. That same year, Congress cut Nixon’s request for $1.6 billion for military equipment for the South Vietnamese to just $700 million.
Would continued U.S. help have saved Saigon? Nguyen said that the Saigon government headed by Premier Nguyen Van Thieu “was really just an awful regime. Saigon would have fallen under that kind of leadership.”
But Mark Moyar, author of “Triumph Forsaken – The Vietnam War,” and a senior fellow at Joint Special Operations University, dismisses that claim. “We had brought the war to such a position that the South Vietnamese could survive without American ground troops,” Moyar says. “Had the U.S. continued to provide air and logistical support, South Vietnam would have been able to survive.”
In early 1975, North Vietnam launched a new offensive in the South while the Khmer Rouge edged closer to Phnom Penh. As Southeast Asia crumbled, Americans turned away.
Many members of Congress believed the killing would end once the Khmer Rouge assumed power. But on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh and ruthlessly forced hundreds of thousands of people to leave, the beginning of the worst genocide since the Nazi Holocaust.
Guilmartin flew his helicopter out of Saigon for the last time less than two weeks later. And, at 5:30 a.m. the next morning, Herrington climbed aboard a CH-46 helicopter parked on the U.S. embassy roof. It was eerily quiet and the only lights seemed to come from the parking lot, where 420 Vietnamese who “we promised safe passage” were hoping to escape.
That safe passage disappeared when President Gerald Ford, fearing Saigon was disintegrating, halted the evacuation and left the Vietnamese behind.
That same day the CIA station chief sent a cable to Washington. “It has been a long and hard fight and we have lost,” he wrote. “Saigon signing off.”
(Daniel Malloy of the Atlanta Constitution contributed to this story.)
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