When the news reached Hanoi, North Vietnamese leaders were holding a series of strategy-planning meetings. Le Duan advocated a bolder military attack, with a two-year timetable for total victory. He argued that the failure of the United States to respond in any way demonstrated that we would not intervene even with our air power to prevent the defeat of Saigon. He called for a “widespread attack in 1975 to create conditions for a general uprising in 1976 to liberate all of South Vietnam.” But he was advising this option simply as the minimum. “If opportunities present themselves early or late in 1975,” he added, “South Vietnam should be liberated this year.”
• • •
On the eve of their battle for survival, our South Vietnamese allies were in their weakest condition in over five years.
Congressional cuts in military assistance for fiscal year 1975 had an immediate effect on South Vietnam’s armed forces because they needed to ration their fiscal 1974 appropriations even more strictly if they were to have any hope of getting through the following year.
Our $700 million aid package actually amounted to only $500 million because Congress now forced our ally to foot the bill for shipping and other expenses. South Vietnam’s needs for ammunition alone were $500 million at 1974 prices. Its army received only about 50 percent of what it required, and its air force only about 30 percent. Its fuel supplies would be so tight that it could afford to operate only 49 percent of its vehicles. Over 200 aircraft had to be put into storage. And any significant troop movements required the approval of the corps commander.
Our pledge to replace, piece for piece, all equipment destroyed or worn out during the cease-fire went out the window. By June 1974, South Vietnam had lost 58 ships. It received no replacements. It had lost 281 aircraft, but received only 8 primitive, propeller-driven Cessna 0-1’s in return. Furthermore, South Vietnam could afford only 33 percent of the spare parts it needed. Over 4,000 vehicles and aircraft stood idle awaiting repair.
This had a serious detrimental effect on air support. South Vietnam’s air force, knowing that no replacements or spare parts were available, could not afford to take any risks when attacking enemy positions. Bombing and strafing became far less effective as a result.
Availability of ammunition required severe restrictions on its use. South Vietnamese commanders in the field were begging their superiors for more as the fighting intensified. A comparison of the available supplies from July 1974 through February 1975 with the actual consumption rate under the intensive fighting during 1972 led to grim conclusions. In 1972, South Vietnam’s army had fired an average of 2.8 rounds per day from its 81mm mortars, 25.0 rounds from its 105mm howitzers, and 16.2 rounds from its 155mm howitzers. But now there were, respectively, only 1.1, 6.2, and 4.9 rounds per day available for these weapons. Less than a third of the firepower used by South Vietnamese forces in 1972 would be available to them during 1975.
In February 1975, stocks of critical ammunition were far below the sixty-day safety level. South Vietnam had a thirty-one day supply of munitions for the 5.56mm rifle, twenty-five days of the fragmentation grenade, twenty-nine days of the 40mm grenade, twenty-seven days of the 60mm mortar, thirty days for the 81mm mortar, thirty-four days for the 105mm howitzer, and thirty-one days for the 155mm howitzer. This constituted a crisis of the first order. Even if the combat rates stayed at the levels of late 1974, the fact was that South Vietnam would simply run out of all ammunition in May 1975.
The availability and quality of medical care for South Vietnamese casualties plunged. Wounded soldiers could not count on evacuation helicopters. Stocks of basic medical supplies were depleted to such critical levels that strict conservation measures were ordered. It was even necessary to wash bandages, surgical dressings, intravenous sets, rubber gloves, and hypodermic needles and syringes so they could be reused.
When these shortages made it painfully clear that Saigon urgently needed more military assistance, President Ford asked Congress for a $300 million supplementary appropriation for South Vietnam. He also requested another $222 million for Cambodia—which had even worse supply shortages.
These requests were the bare minimun necessary for our allies to survive.
• • •
None of these events went unnoticed in the North Vietnamese war councils. Hanoi’s leaders could not believe their good fortune as the antiwar majority in Congress did their work for them.
“Nguyen Van Thieu,” General Dung later wrote, “had to call on his troops to fight a ‘poor man’s war.’ ” He observed that the “decrease in American aid had made it impossible for Saigon troops to carry out their combat and force-development plans” and noted that there was a 60 percent drop in South Vietnamese fire support and a 50 percent reduction in mobility. “This situation,” he continued, “forced them to change over from large-scale operations and deep-penetration helicopter and tank assaults to defense of their outposts, digging in and carrying out small search operations.”
As North Vietnam started its final offensive, he wrote, the most significant point was that “as we increasingly took the initiative and grew stronger, the enemy grew weaker and more passive every day.”
After its victory in Phouc Long, Hanoi ordered an attack on Ban Me Thout, the capital of Darlac Province in the central highlands. On March 10, three North Vietnamese divisions advanced on the city. South Vietnamese defenses were manned with only one regiment of regular troops and three battalions of territorials. General Dung later wrote that his forces had advantages of 5.5 to 1 in infantry, 2.1 to 1 in heavy artillery, and 1.2 to 1 in tanks and armor. Yet despite these odds, South Vietnam’s troops did not cut and run—they stood and fought. It was a hotly contested battle. Antiaircraft fire and intense fighting at the city’s air strip made sending in reinforcements impossible, and the relentless hammering of enemy artillery soon forced the South Vietnamese to fall back. In the end, Ban Me Thout fell in less than 24 hours. But it was because the South Vietnamese were lacking not valor but numbers. When Hanoi’s forces had taken the city, its streets were strewn with the bodies of hundreds of South Vietnamese soldiers killed in action.
With the fall of Ban Me Thout, North Vietnamese forces held the western approaches to Saigon. President Thieu therefore called a meeting of his military strategists and commanders at Cam Ranh on March 14. He did so with a heavy sense of pessimism. On March 12, the House Democratic Caucus had voted 189 to 49 against the Ford administration’s request for $300 million in supplemental appropriations, and the next day the Senate Democratic Caucus had affirmed this verdict 38 to 5. Thieu knew, as did Hanoi, that there was no way to overcome those majorities. He now had to recognize the painful fact that his forces could no longer afford to defend the entire country.
Thieu told his commanders that he was switching to a strategy of “light at the top, heavy at the bottom.” He explained that the government was going to withdraw forces from the central and northern provinces to reinforce its defenses in the Saigon area and the Mekong delta, where most of the country’s population lived. It was a desperate gambit—but as North Vietnam’s offensive took shape, South Vietnam was in desperate straits.
At the Cam Ranh conference, Thieu took his first step toward implementing his new strategy: He ordered the abandonment of the central highlands. He knew this meant that the Communist forces in the region would sweep to the coast and thereby divide the country. But he also knew that his two divisions there could not hold out indefinitely against Hanoi’s four unless major reinforcements were sent in. None were available. Cuts in military aid had left South Vietnam without any reserves. Therefore, he reluctantly told his generals to withdraw South Vietnam’s forces from Pleiku and Kontum and redeploy them for a counterattack to retake Ban Me Thout.
Thieu’s strategic withdrawal was more easily ordered than executed. North Vietnamese forces had interdicted all major roads running eastward from Pleiku and Kontum. South Vietnamese troops would take a severe pounding if they tried to punch through along Route 19
or 14. Thieu therefore decided to have them take Route 7B, an old logging road that had not been used in years. This turned out to be a disastrous mistake. No one took the time to find out if Route 7B was usable. Not until it was too late did the South Vietnamese discover that the road had been overgrown with brush and was missing an important bridge.
On March 15, as South Vietnamese soldiers prepared to pull out, Pleiku City and Kontum fell into chaos. No one had the slightest intention of being left behind. A mass exodus of their entire populations—over 200,000 people—made it impossible to conduct an orderly military retreat. As civilians got mixed into the ranks of soldiers, progress slowed. Poor road conditions soon brought the march down to a snail’s pace.
Although the surprise withdrawal at first threw General Dung off-balance, he quickly recovered. On March 18, a full division attacked the convoy at the town of Cheo Reo, where a key bridge was out, and succeeded in cutting Saigon’s forces in half. Military and civilian losses were heavy. Cheo Reo was littered with corpses. South Vietnam’s remaining forces pressed toward the coast, limping along as North Vietnamese units struck at them repeatedly. On March 25, Saigon’s ragged columns reached the coast. Out of the eighteen battalions that started out on the withdrawal, only three managed to finish it.
In March 1975, when South Vietnam had no longer had any room for error, President Thieu had made an enormous one with this hastily arranged withdrawal. It was a tragic mistake—although probably an academic one given the votes of the Democratic Caucuses—that precipitated the collapse of South Vietnam.
After vacillating about whether to withdraw his best forces from the northern front to defend Saigon, Thieu realized that there was no alternative to this after the disaster in the central highlands. His plan called for his northern forces to retrench in coastal enclaves around Hue and Danang. North Vietnam’s offensive in the area, which began simultaneously with the attack on Ban Me Thout, had made little progress. But as South Vietnam’s best forces prepared to withdraw on March 18, the area’s commanders were forced to redeploy their troops in tighter lines of defense.
No one was under any illusions about how difficult the maneuver would be. A strategic retreat is a perilous operation under the best of circumstances. South Vietnam’s northern commanders now had orders to pull back under the worst of conditions, as the growing intensity of enemy attacks jeopardized their ability to establish a new line of defense. On March 19, North Vietnamese tanks rolled across the cease-fire lines. Quang Tri Province soon had to be abandoned. Thousands of refugees fled the Communist advance and streamed south toward Hue. Then, when pressure mounted on Hue, over a million refugees set out for Danang.
As the front deteriorated, what came to be known as the “family syndrome” set in. Because the war required South Vietnam’s soldiers to spend years in the service, they were allowed to have their families live near their posts. Now, hundreds of troops were abandoning their units to get their wives and children to safety. As chaos set in, three divisions evaporated almost overnight.
On March 25, Hue fell to the North Vietnamese. Danang quickly came under attack from over 35,000 Communist troops. As Saigon tried to evacuate whatever organized military units remained, mass hysteria seized the city. Over 2 million people milled in the streets, looking for family members or trying to find transportation to escape to the south. Thousands waded into the sea in a desperate struggle to reach barges and fishing boats offshore. Among them was the commander of South Vietnam’s northern army, who had striven valiantly until the last moment to salvage his disintegrating forces. On March 30, almost exactly ten years after American troops first landed on its beaches, Danang was overrun by the North Vietnamese.
Within less than a month, Thieu’s forces had lost half of South Vietnam’s territory. But they had little to show for it. Thieu’s strategy of withdrawing from the north to concentrate on the defense of the south had utterly failed. Its success was absolutely dependent on whether South Vietnam’s forces could be pulled out intact. After the disastrous withdrawal in the central highlands and the panic-stricken collapse of the northern front, Thieu’s plans resulted in just a handful of organized military units reaching the Saigon area.
Meanwhile, Cambodia was in its last hours. On March 16, the United States Embassy had started to evacuate its nonessential personnel. Ever since Congress had cut off our bombing in 1973, Communist Khmer Rouge had had free run of most of the country. Their forces had encircled Phnom Penh and now were on the verge of strangling it. Artillery barrages were deliberately fired at crowded refugee camps. Stories circulated about brutal atrocities committed in Communist-occupied territories. But the United States did little to alleviate the situation. Congress had imposed restrictions on aiding Phnom Penh that were even more draconian than those on helping Saigon. On April 16, with supplies and ammunition running out, Phnom Penh capitulated to the Khmer Rouge.
Our Saigon embassy did not begin its evacuation until April 4, because it was feared that if the South Vietnamese realized we were pulling out, their resistance would crumble. The delay had consumed precious time, however. Now, although the United States would be able to pull out all of its personnel and dependents it would be impossible to get out all the South Vietnamese civilians who had worked for us over the years and who faced a serious risk of being executed immediately after the Communist took power. In the final days, American helicopters shuttled thousands from the embassy roof to our ships offshore. But many thousands more were left behind.
Hanoi was now throwing everything it had into the offensive. From September 1974 through March 1975, North Vietnam had sent over 120,000 additional combat troops into South Vietnam. With Saigon on the ropes, Hanoi went for the knockout punch. In April it hurled in another 58,000 troops. Saigon was dazed. No one expected defeat to come so quickly. Thieu, whose counterattack on Ban Me Thout had long ago become fantasy, now sought to regroup his forces to defend a truncated South Vietnam. But with North Vietnamese reinforcements piling into his country, events overtook his every move. Almost as soon as he proposed a new line of defense, it became unfeasible to defend.
On April 9, the final significant battle of the third Vietnam War began at Xuan Loc. It looked like a total mismatch on paper. But Xuan Loc’s defenders put up fierce resistance despite the enemy’s huge superiority in numbers. North Vietnam’s forces ravaged the ranks of South Vietnam’s troops with some of the heaviest artillery barrages in the entire war.
On April 10, as the North Vietnamese offensive swept across South Vietnam, President Ford went before a joint session of Congress to request emergency assistance for our allies. He asked for $722 million in military aid and $250 million in economic and humanitarian aid. In light of the gravity of the situation, he also requested that Congress respond no later than April 19. It was an act of great political courage, because he knew that seeking assistance for Saigon would win him no friends in Congress.
When Ford later met with leaders of Congress, he ran into strong opposition to helping Saigon. “I will give you large sums for evacuation,” said one senator, “but not one nickel for military aid.” Another said, “I will vote for any amount for getting Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting Vietnamese out.” They were willing to give money to retreat but none to avoid defeat. Since the 1974 elections, antiwar majorities controlled the House and Senate more firmly than ever. A flurry of hearings were held, but Ford’s request never came to a vote on the floor. It died in committee.
Meanwhile, South Vietnamese soldiers at Xuan Loc were repulsing multiple assaults in hand-to-hand combat, with over 1,200 enemy troops left dead on the battlefield. North Vietnam’s forces hammered away at our ally’s positions with thousands of rounds of artillery. South Vietnamese lines held back the onslaught until April 15, when the tattered remains of their units finally fell back, unable any longer to continue the fight.
With the fall of Xuan Loc, there was little left to stop the North Vietnamese Army’s advance along the roa
d to Saigon. Other battles were being fought all around South Vietnam, but on April 20 an eerie stillness settled over the country for almost a week as all eyes turned to see what would happen in Saigon. Over 120,000 North Vietnamese troops in sixteen divisions surrounded the capital and were preparing for a massive, three-pronged attack on its 30,000 defenders. It was clear that, except for the paper work, the third Vietnam War was over.
On April 21, President Thieu resigned with the hope that a successor would be able to spare Saigon from total destruction in a final battle. He was soon replaced with General Duong Van Minh, who intended to open negotiations with the enemy. It was a hopeless undertaking. Saigon had nothing left to bargain with. Hanoi, sensing imminent victory, was interested not in conversation but in conquest.
On April 30, 1975, with South Vietnamese forces totally demoralized, North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the streets of Saigon. At this point, it would have been the height of futility to resist Hanoi’s invading armies. After one armored unit crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace, General Minh and his government were taken prisoner. A North Vietnamese soldier scrambled onto a balcony to wave the flag of the victors. Soon it was flying all over Saigon.
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