“A rout beyond our wildest fears,” was how one “Western military analyst” in Saigon described the crumpling of the puppet troops in face of the advance of the liberation forces.
The disintegration and rolling hack of Thieu’s army – trained, equipped, and paid by the Pentagon – constitutes a massive defeat for imperialism. The defeat is irreversible. It marks the end of the road for Washington’s large-scale effort to gain a military beachhead on the Asian continent and to take over the French colonial holdings. It is Washington’s Dien Bien Phu.
“After 21 years, a million dead and devastating impact on life and thought here and across the seas,” said Dan Oberdorfer in a March 29 dispatch to the Washington Post, “the second Indochina war seems to be lurching toward its end.”
But the success of the operations conducted by the Provisional Revolutionary Government, along with the speed of the Saigon collapse, has made it a very rapid lurch. It has “begun to resemble a newsreel run at double, triple and quadruple speeds,” said Oberdorfer. “One day’s events cannot be recorded – or even comprehended – before being superseded and overwhelmed by another set.”
Province after province is being liberated, at the rate of about one a day. Tens of thousands of puppet troops are surrendering or going over to the other side. Millions of people have come under the control of the PRG. As one U.S. official quoted in the March 28 Wall Street Journal put it in an understatement, Vietnam is being “territorially redefined.” What the Pentagon and its puppets calculated would be a shrewd “strategic withdrawal” has turned into a major military and political disaster.
“The fall of China in 1949, when the Nationalists were completely defeated even though 4 million troops remained, is much in the minds and sometimes on the lips of Vietnamese and foreign observers here,” wrote Oberdorfer.
A graphic illustration of the extent of the rout was to be seen in the chaos reigning in Da Nang, South Vietnam’s second largest city, on the eve of its capture by the liberation forces.
The demoralized, fleeing puppet troops rampaged through the city. Mobs of soldiers set fires and openly looted shops and houses, killing anyone who resisted. “...soldiers fought each other, not the Communists, in shooting matches over food and other looted items,” Andrew Malcolm reported in the March 31 New York Times.
Da Nang airport was mobbed by soldiers and refugees. The last flight out was described as “a flight out of hell” by United Press International reporter Paul Vogle. People fought one another and died in the stampede to the plane, he reported.
“I saw a South Vietnamese soldier kick an old woman in the face....
“South Vietnamese soldiers fired with machine guns at hundreds of frantic refugees trying to get aboard....
“As we started rolling, insanity gripped those who had missed their chance. Government troops opened fire on us. Somebody lobbed a hand grenade toward the wing. The explosion jammed the flaps full open and the undercarriage in full extension.”
The pilot took off from the taxiway, running over soldiers and refugees who jammed the tarmac. “There was no way we could have survived the gunfire and got onto the main runway,” Vogle said. People clung to the undercarriage of the plane. Some fell to their death in flight. The mangled body of one soldier was retrieved from the undercarriage when the plane reached Saigon.
The plane had gone to Da Nang to pick up women and children. Only two women and one baby made it aboard. The rest of the 270 or so passengers crammed in were soldiers from the Black Panther unit, the “meanest” troops in Saigon’s army, according to Vogle. The floor of the plane was covered with blood.
The morale of Thieu’s army had been low and going still lower. The panic-stricken retreat from two-thirds of the country finished these troops as an effective fighting force.
Retreating soldiers are jettisoning not only their heavy equipment and rifles. They are trying to get rid of their uniforms and get into civilian clothes. In the retreat from Hue, thousands of soldiers threw away their boots, pants, and weapons and waded out to navy and civilian vessels offshore.
Saigon’s troops have already lost more than $1 billion in U.S.-supplied weapons and equipment, Bernard Weinraub reported in the March 29 New York Times.
“The abandonment of hundreds of artillery pieces, trucks, planes, mortars, tanks, armored personnel carriers, rifles and ammunition – coupled with the rapid retreat of army units – is viewed by Vietnamese and Western sources as a stunning and quite possibly irreversible military and psychological blow for South Vietnam.”
A senior Western official said it was “a catastrophic loss.” Dozens of planes and helicopters were left behind at Pleiku, as well as 100,000 tons of ammunition and signal equipment worth about $5 million.
Mass defections of Thieu’s troops to the side of the liberation forces have occurred. A broadcast by Hanoi Radio urged all Saigon troops, police officers, and administrative personnel to switch sides quickly. There were reports that the National Liberation Front was leafleting the troops calling on them to come over en masse, promising them the same pay, same rank, and the right to keep their units intact.
Tens of thousands of soldiers have deserted, defected, or surrendered. “We captured 10,000 at Hue alone,” said a PRG official. “They did not fight.”
Even before the rout began in earnest, the desertion rate for the South Vietnamese army was estimated at 24,000 a month. About 100,000 troops had been stationed in the Da Nang area, and very few escaped south.
“I would say a good portion of the South Vietnamese Army – perhaps half of their combat divisions – have either been dispersed or are not combat effective,” said one “informed Western source” quoted in the March 29 New York Times.
The Pentagon recognizes that Thieu cannot recoup his losses. One U.S. officer quoted by Drew Middleton in the March 28 New York Times said that “the prospects for restoring the old situation in the north are pretty slight and everything rests on the four divisions around Saigon.”
“The officers studying the situation,” Middleton reported, “believe that the best the South Vietnamese Government can hope for is to hold the Saigon area with the forces now on that front.”
Faced with this reality, Pentagon chief Schlesinger is already trying to play down the enormity of the defeat. Southeast Asia was a “very slight weight indeed” in the world balance of power, he was quoted as saying in the March 23 Philadelphia Bulletin. The impact of the outcome, he affirmed, is “primarily psychological.”
As the retreat snowballed into a rout, the White House tried to cover up. Amid great fanfare an emergency airlift to evacuate 350,000 refugees from encircled Da Nang was announced. That was pure publicity. Once U.S. officials and their families, pets, and souvenirs were out, the airlift ended.
On March 29 Ford announced that he had ordered U.S. Navy ships and other vessels to evacuate “helpless refugees” from coastal cities in South Vietnam and to take them to “safe havens in the south.” In an effort to spread the responsibility around a bit, he also called on “all nations and corporations that have ships in the vicinity of the South Vietnamese coast to help....” The Labor governments of Britain and Australia obligingly offered their services.
Ford then took a plane for a nine-day vacation at Palm Springs, California. A few days before, however, he had expressed his “respect and admiration for the courage and determination South Vietnam had displayed in fighting the Communist invasion,” as paraphrased by Richard Madden in the March 26 New York Times. The “courage and determination” of the Saigon troops was not easy to see; but Ford’s speech writers were not just being cynical. They were grinding a political ax.
American imperialism and its puppet are each blaming the other for the disaster.
The rising tide of anti-Americanism in the Saigon-controlled areas is one indication of this. South Vietnamese soldiers at Chu Lai fired on an American helicopter that had evacuated the consulate staff from Da Nang. A crew member and a woman passenger were wounded. Some officials of the U.S. consulate in Da Nang had to flee over the back fence when an angry crowd smashed its way in, wrecking and looting and shouting accusations of abandonment and betrayal. U.S. embassy officials in Saigon are worried about possible assaults against Americans there.
Dr. Tran Van Do, former foreign minister under Nguyen Cao Ky, who signed the Geneva accords for South Vietnam in 1954, attacked “big brother” for betraying. “Nobody can ever believe in American promises,” he said.
Other newspapers and legislators also attacked the U.S. “betrayal.”
Many South Vietnamese have started to refer to the Americans as “chay lang,” a gambling term for persons who run away from a game after losing it, without paying the other gamblers their winnings.
Even Thieu has said: “Many Vietnamese now have the feeling that they actually have been lured into all this and then abandoned.” Thieu’s fear of personal abandonment must be growing rather acute, of course. In moves to strengthen his position against the possibility of a U.S.-assisted coup following mounting calls for his resignation, he has clapped some of his opponents in jail and transferred loyal generals and units to Saigon.
In Washington, the White House and Congress were blaming each other at the beginning. Now they have united in trying to shift all the blame for the debacle onto Saigon. The brass in Saigon is in a “funk”; there is a “failure of leadership up and down the line”; the army simply fell apart; the “strategic withdrawal” was a good idea (it was the Pentagon’s) but the execution was rotten; the corruptness and decay of the Saigon puppet clique made the defeat inevitable.
An editorial in the March 30 New York Times called for the overthrow of Thieu. It was obvious, declared the editors, that Thieu would be unable to “rally the armed forces to an effective stand north of the capital.” Therefore “the creation of a broadly representative government” was “an instant imperative.” Not for “continued warfare,” heaven forbid, but for “efforts to seek a political solution to the conflict,” they said.
The editors of this mouthpiece of the American ruling class have lowered their sights. They hope to establish a defensible enclave around Saigon, giving them time to negotiate a “political solution,” a continuing presence for imperialism.
But the only “political solution” acceptable to the masses in Vietnam is the complete removal of American imperialism and its puppets. There is nothing to negotiate about this, and working people in the United States and around the world must demand that Washington end its aid to the Saigon regime and get out of Indochina now.
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1975/IP1313.pdf#page=4&view=FitV,3