“They’ve succeeded beyond their fondest dreams,” said one Western source quoted by New York Times correspondent Bernard Weinraub even before the forces of the Provisional Revolutionary Government had liberated Da Nang. Since then they have swept through province after province with extraordinary speed.
“It was almost as if a pattern were set by the recent fall of the city of Da Nang,” Daniel Southerland said in the April 3 Christian Science Monitor. “Government officers lose confidence and start looking out for the safety of their families. Soldiers see their officers losing heart, and begin thinking about their own families. Officers start leaving, and suddenly no one is in control. Government soldiers begin looting. National Liberation Front cadres go to work spreading rumors and calling for an uprising. Prisoners are let out of jail. An internal collapse occurs, and Communist-led troops move in almost without having to fire a shot.”
Indeed, in many cases the puppet troops and government officials fled major cities even before the main PRG units were in the area. In a dispatch to the April 3 New York Times, Malcolm Browne reported that although Da Lat had been abandoned, it was not known whether Communist forces had yet reached there. “In any event, it was theirs if they chose to occupy it,” he said. The situation facing the PRG forces was described by the overseas news editor of the Christian Science Monitor in the April 4 edition as a “vacuum into which they have found themselves unexpectedly sucked over the past three weeks.”
The vacuum was created by the rottenness and disintegration of Thieu’s forces, as their backers in Washington now belatedly admit. But that was only one aspect of the collapse – the root cause was the overwhelming popular opposition to the continued presence of the American imperialist forces and their puppet regime in Saigon.
The process of disintegration is rapidly engulfing Saigon itself. The capital was described as a “tinderbox”. Observers felt that it could fall as soon as the insurgents made an effort to isolate the city or launched an attack on the airport.
“It’s just a question of when the Communists decide they’re coming into Saigon,” said a “well-placed observer” quoted in the April 2 Washington Post.
Desperate efforts were made to prevent the routed troops entering Saigon and spreading the “virus” of panic they brought with them in their retreat. Roads to the city were closed to them. American refugee ships carried thousands of former soldiers to a penal island off the south coast. However, several of these ships were hijacked at gunpoint and forced to put back into the mainland.
Violence directed against Americans rapidly increased. “Never mind the Vietcong,” said one American. “They are at least disciplined. The people to fear most now are those who feel we have betrayed them, that somehow we are to blame for this whole nightmare.”
Responsibility for the “nightmare,” of course, rests totally with Washington; and U.S. officials in Saigon are frantically trying to escape before everything collapses upon them. They are making every effort to be calm, denying that an evacuation is taking place or that Saigon is in any danger. Yet these “Nervous Nellies,” as the former President Johnson might have called them, are afraid that their very preparations to leave in a hurry may set off uncontrollable panic among their camp followers.
Embassy officials realize that the final evacuation will have to be done with lightning speed and are making plans accordingly. A new mobile radar unit has already been installed at Tan Son Nhut airport in case the main installation is overrun, as happened in the chaotic evacuations from other cities.
The first planeload of Americans arrived in the Philippines April 5. At that stage nine planes were already involved in the evacuation. Commercial flights are booked out weeks in advance, and international shipping companies are turning away customers – they have too much work packing and shipping for American and other embassy personnel. Most of the 600 members of the International Commission of Control and Supervision established by the 1973 cease-fire agreement have left or are packing. Embassies are burning files and sending staff out of the country.
American companies are getting out as fast as they can. Non-Vietnamese employees of Caltex, Esso, and Shell left April 3. The executives of the three major U.S. banks chartered jets April 4 for “consultations” with their home offices.
Not only did the speed of the collapse stun Washington and its puppets, it took the liberation forces themselves by surprise. The rout was totally unexpected by officials in Hanoi, reported Agence France-Presse correspondent Jean Thoraval.
Leaders of the PRG continued to stress that they were fighting to put the 1973 Paris cease-fire accord into effect. They called for talks with the Saigon regime to establish a National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, consisting of PRG, Saigon, and “third-force” delegates in three equal segments. Their only condition was that Thieu had to be replaced.
“We understand that General Minh is ready to negotiate for peace and we are ready to talk with him,” said PRG Foreign Minister Nguyen Thi Binh on her way to Paris April 2.
On April 3 the PRG announced ten rules it says it intends to apply in the liberated areas. (See text on page 511.) These included the protection of the property of industrialists and shopkeepers and the lives and property of foreigners.
A PRG official in Paris said that members of the third force were being given positions of responsibility in the liberated areas. A radio broadcast from Da Nang reported that houses throughout the city were flying three flags – one large central standard representing the Buddhist-led National Force of Reconciliation and Concord and, flanking it, two smaller flags representing the PRG and the Saigon regime.
The efforts of the PRG to share power with the Saigon clique – who represent no one but the imperialists and the local landlords and capitalists – have so far been thwarted by the obstinacy of Thieu. He has refused to step down and has continued to arrest political opponents. He pledged that he would never accept a coalition government.
Thieu’s time is running out. The desire of the Vietnamese people for peace is overwhelming. The widespread support by the workers and peasants for the liberation forces is what has speeded their advance down the peninsula.
In Ban Me Thuot the liberation forces met almost no resistance, Malcolm Browne reported in the March 31 New York Times. Most of the Saigon government troops remained in the town with them. Soldiers crossed over to the side of the PRG in their thousands. In Da Nang alone nearly 5,000 puppet troops were reported to have defected.
The Western news media did their best to portray the thousands of refugees as fleeing Communism or “voting with their feet.” Glimpses of the real picture did manage to seep through, however. New York Times correspondents in Vietnam interviewed hundreds of refugees and had to admit they could not find a single one who was fleeing Communism. They were afraid of being caught in the fighting. They were afraid of being bombed by Thieu’s forces. “The Communists have no airplanes,” one pointed out. In other cases the fleeing refugees were Saigon officials and soldiers and their families, who usually accompanied the troops.
In Saigon, Buddhists held a demonstration March 31 demanding Thieu’s resignation. They were driven back by police, and on April 3 the commander of the Saigon military district issued new decrees forbidding mass meetings or demonstrations. “Local authorities have orders to shoot and kill on the spot those violators who try to resist or flee,” a communiqué said.
Even Thieu’s handpicked Senate passed a motion, with only one dissenting vote, calling for a “government of national union” to end the war.
In the context of the widespread popular support for the liberation forces in Vietnam and the overwhelming opposition of the American people to any escalation or continuation of the war, the Ford administration is floundering. Washington’s publicity stunt of airlifting orphans from Saigon must be one of the most cynical and disgusting atrocities in the history of the war.
The “humanitarian” motives were exposed April 6 when opposition politicians in Saigon made public a letter from a top government official that quotes the views of U.S. ambassador Graham Martin:
“He stressed that this evacuation along with the millions of refugees abandoning Communist-controlled zones, will help create a shift in American public opinion in favor of the Republic of Vietnam. Especially when these children land in the United States, they will be subject to television, radio and press agency coverage and the effect will be tremendous.”
The opposition politicians in Saigon called the export of Vietnamese orphans an “inhumane” propaganda campaign and demanded that it be halted immediately.
But the White House fumbled even this operation. The very first planeload of “Babies on the Cheap” – which President Ford was to meet with television cameras and reporters – crashed just outside Saigon airport killing more than 100 children.
“It is nice to see you Americans taking home souvenirs of our country as you leave – china elephants and orphans,” a South Vietnamese army lieutenant remarked bitterly after the crash. “Too bad some of them broke today, but we have plenty more.”
With the crumbling of the Saigon forces, the requests for more U.S. aid have become increasingly irrelevant. More than $1 billion worth of equipment was abandoned by the fleeing troops, and neither the American people nor Congress will be keen to grant more. In fact one retired general commented that granting more aid may only provide North Vietnam with some expensive military hardware. Most observers are also admitting that it was not through lack of U.S. military aid that Thieu’s armies crumbled.
More and more commentators in the U.S. press are realizing that the end of the road for American imperialism in Indochina is drawing near. The New York Times is now stressing the need to cut the losses, unite the nation, and “save the future.”
But the White House is still holding out two faint hopes for preserving a toehold in Vietnam.
One is that the PRG may yet be able to install a coalition-type government in Saigon, that the liberation forces will somehow fail to fully exploit their military victories and stop short of a final attack on Saigon.
The other possibility is a last-ditch intervention by American troops into Saigon “to protect American lives.” Under this cover – a pretext already used by the Pentagon to intervene in the Dominican Republic and Lebanon – Washington might hope to hang on to an enclave around Saigon. The April 7 New York Times reported that Ford “had ordered every available ship to Indochina waters and that more would be on the way, perhaps as a signal to Hanoi that the President is determined to protect Americans in South Vietnam.”
Four aircraft carriers, three destroyers, a half-dozen amphibious ships, and elements of a marine division were already in the area.
As many as half a million American troops in a war that lasted more than a decade were unable to hold back the struggle of the Vietnamese people, and any new mad gamble by Ford is not going to succeed either. A new intervention would spark off protests in America that would dwarf the million-strong demonstrations that stayed the hands of previous occupants of the White House.
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1975/IP1314.pdf#page=4&view=FitV,3