President Ford’s April 10 speech was designed to impress the world with the threat of resumption of full-scale American military intervention in the civil war in Vietnam.
Since the rout of Thieu’s army, the Pentagon has indicated in various ways that it is pressing to send in B-52s and U.S. troops. The excuse, of course, is “to protect American lives.” To show that it means business, the Pentagon has deployed naval forces off the coast of Vietnam. By April 10, 4,000 troops were standing by.
“Under the worst possible circumstances...,” reported John Finney in the April 11 New York Times, “as many as 40,000 troops could be involved” with air cover supplied by Navy aircraft carriers. Other Pentagon sources have put the minimum figure at 90,000 American troops.
A tremendous propaganda campaign has accompanied these moves. In addition to the excuse of intervening to evacuate Americans, the White House has also been plugging the need to save the puppet officials and former employees of the United States. Unless they are evacuated, there will be a “bloodbath,” said White House representatives. “Tens of thousands,” “hundreds of thousands,” even a “million or more” would have to be saved from the advancing Communist hordes, they claimed.
The press has cautiously supported the publicity. The return of American troops to Vietnam is an “ugly question” editorialized the April 12 New York Times, but “it may well be necessary to land military forces to protect American citizens as they leave.”
A test exercise was carried out in Pnompenh. The Americans could just as easily have left by plane, but twenty-four helicopters swooped in, and marines with automatic rifles at the ready held a few hundred gaping children at bay while Ambassador John Gunther Dean carried his American flag and Samsonite suitcase through the cordon of troops.
No one bothered to mention that the marines were there despite an act of Congress barring their use. That little legal deterrent will not hold them back in Saigon either. The Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, Thomas O’Neill, said there was “no question” that there was a moral obligation to make sure American citizens get out of Vietnam safely. Only the use of troops in a massive evacuation of Vietnamese is being questioned.
Any attempt to evacuate hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese would of course require a massive number of U.S. troops. These troops would have to hold an area around Saigon and the coast so that the evacuation could proceed by boat, an operation that would take months. George McArthur reported in the April 13 Washington Post that “even under good conditions at the Saigon port it would take a month or more to evacuate 200,000 Vietnamese by sea....”
Meanwhile, the situation in Saigon is getting more explosive day by day.
‘Mad as a March Hare’
U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin tried to keep a stiff upper lip. “I personally will be the last one to leave Vietnam,” he said. But Don Oberdorfer in a dispatch to the April 13 Washington Post attributed this posture to Martin’s cracking up when confronted with an “almost impossible job.”
“Some people, including a number in his own embassy,” said Oberdorfer, “believe him to be mad as a March hare and just about as elusive....”
“As U.S. policy here draws ever closer to total failure, some observers believe that Martin’s reasoned judgment and timely action have been impaired.
“There are signs of this, such as his continuing insistence that the lopping off of the unproductive northern provinces creates the basis for economic development of the remaining parts of South Vietnam. Within the past few days, Martin has been pushing new U.S. long-term investment programs.”
Despite the ambassador’s stance, however, foreign capitalists in Saigon are “voting with their feet.” Most of the U.S. and Japanese companies were evacuating their personnel, the April 8 New York Times reported. The oil companies and the three largest U.S. banks had cleared out earlier. When the bankers left, they took with them “all their U.S. dollars, travelers’ checks and other banking instruments,” according to the April 10 Washington Post.
Many embassies are getting out of Saigon. West Germany has closed its embassy, the Thai embassy has evacuated nonessential staff members, and both Britain and Japan have suggested that their nationals leave as soon as possible.
“At the modernistic U.S. embassy in downtown Saigon, ‘evacuation’ is the latest credibility victim,” wrote George McArthur in the April 13 Washington Post. “It is something you do while denying you are doing it.”
The American population of 6,000 has already been thinned out, and according to one official it was planned to be reduced to 2,000 within a few weeks. Some left by commercial flights, some on military transports, and some as “voluntary escorts” on planes taking orphans out.
Pedicabs Ordered Off Streets
Thieu’s tiny base of support in Vietnam is dwindling even further.
The patriarch of the United Buddhist Church, the officially recognized Buddhist church in South Vietnam, called on Thieu to resign. The larger An Quang Buddhist faction has long criticized Thieu. Roman Catholic Archbishop Nguyen Van Binh also called for new leadership and urged Catholics not to evacuate their villages whatever happened, but to unite with their compatriots to establish peace and concord among Vietnamese.
As a sign of his nervousness about the situation in the capital itself, Thieu ordered the thousands of pedicabs off the streets. He apparently feared that the pedicab drivers, most of whom are poor, might have been infiltrated by the liberation forces.
The Provisional Revolutionary Government reiterated its call for negotiations, if Thieu were deposed. Foreign Minister Nguyen Thi Binh said in an interview in Dar es Salaam April 9 that “we are still for the application of the Paris peace accord.”
There are quite a few figures willing to replace Thieu and open negotiations. According to a report in the April 11 Chicago Tribune, leaders of an underground coalition of generals, politicians, and intellectuals have proposed to Hanoi an immediate cease-fire. Included in the group was former Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky.
The newspaper quoted the Reverend Tran Huu Thanh, described as a founder of the “Government in hiding,” as saying that contact with Hanoi had been made through the French embassy. Thanh is chairman of the People’s Anticorruption Movement to Save the Country and Restore Peace that was formed last year.
After the unsuccessful bombing attack on Thieu’s palace by one of his own pilots April 8, many opposition politicians went into hiding to avoid an expected police crackdown. Thieu said the bombing was in no way a coup d’etat initiated by the armed forces or the air force as a whole, but was carried out by “a narrow exclusive group of men.”
‘Operation Kidnap’
The grabbing of orphans for adoption abroad has been met with revulsion and indignation as a transparent propaganda stunt intended to sway public opinion behind continued U.S. aggression.
In Rome an official of the Vatican’s relief organization, Caritas, called the airlift “a deplorable and unjustifiable mistake.” The International Red Cross in Geneva denounced it on April 9.
Fox Butterfield reported in the April 13 New York Times that “most Vietnamese reacted with anger.” The An Quang Buddhists condemned the “mass evacuation” and demanded the children be returned as soon as peace is restored. The PRG denounced the airlift as “kidnapping on a vast scale.” In Saigon opposition politicians, reporters, and government officials also attacked it.
“What future will they have in a racist country like the United States anyway?” asked one Saigon official.
The airlift itself has been conducted in a thoroughly callous way, with Ford and other politicians posing with an orphan in their arms before the television cameras. In addition to the more than 100 killed when the first planeload crashed, children have arrived sick and three have died during flights. One of these was reported to have died from “shock.” Dozens of children flown out of Vietnam as “orphans” were later discovered to have parents still alive. The children were not even allowed to retain their Vietnamese names – all were rechristened with American names. Some were tagged with names like “D-1.” “It was confusing with names, so we used numbers,” said their escort.
Tran Tuong Nhu, a Vietnamese anthropologist living in California, who was quoted in the April 9 New York Times, said she was “livid” about the airlift.
“ ‘What is this terror Americans feel that my people will devour children?’ she said. She said she believes that if the North Vietnamese or the Viet Cong defeated the South, the future of the children there might be brighter. ‘There are 22,000 day-care centers in the North,’ she said. ‘They love children and take care of them.’“
Liberation Forces Assure Safety
From the accounts of life in the newly liberated areas, it is clearly safer there now for adults as well as children than in the Saigon-held territory. As the battle intensified around Xuan Loc, military sources cited in the April 11 Washington Post “said the Xuanloc province chief radioed Saigon that an estimated 12,000 refugees were fleeing toward Communist lines north of the city.” H.D.S. Greenway reported in the April 7 Washington Post that some people in Xuan Loc had decided to stay.
“For example, there are two women selling tea and soft drinks outside their home. They say they are too poor to matter and that only the rich have run away. They say they have no money so it is better to stay home. ‘It doesn’t matter if the VC come,’ one of them says.
“They have the impression that the Communists do not bother poor people.”
According to refugees, said Fox Butterfield in the April 11 New York Times, the Communists “have generally succeeded in restoring order, getting water and electricity running again and taking a census....”
“In almost every case, the refugees related, local people long associated with the Vietcong have been appointed to new jobs in Communist civil administrations....” In Pleiku and Ban Me Thuot the new province chiefs were Montagnards.
The PRG press agency reported that in Hue, “more and more evacuees were coming back. The streets and eight markets in the city were again bustling with activity. The cleaning of the streets was done mostly by young people and students.” Another dispatch stressed that “the liberation armed force strictly abide by their 10-point code of conduct, which enjoins them from touching even a needle and thread” belonging to civilians.
The PRG has appealed for international assistance in caring for the people now in the liberated areas – a population grown from 5 million to 9.3 million in recent weeks according to the PRG foreign minister. The Catholic relief agency Caritas said it is working normally in areas now controlled by the Communists.
PRG representatives in Paris stated they were following a policy of “general amnesty” in the newly liberated areas. The head of the PRG delegation in Paris, Dinh Ba Thi, spoke with a group of Americans that included a congressman and several antiwar activists. He said the amnesty policy applied “even with regard to those who have been involved in the C.I.A. Phoenix program,” which was designed to assassinate Communist cadres, the April 10 New York Times reported.
So much for the “bloodbath” that the White House and its agents screamed about. In fact nearly all observers agreed that the worst danger was the Saigon troops. They collapsed into a murderous rabble terrorizing the population.
Thus Washington’s scare stories about the need to evacuate its loyal followers are exposed for what they are – part of the propaganda cooked up in support of Thieu’s murderous regime. Public opinion polls in the United States show the overwhelming majority of the population opposed to any more military aid to the Saigon dictatorship and even stronger opposition to the reintroduction of American troops, so Ford and Kissinger must twist and turn and delay as much as they can to prolong the American presence. Even the Americans in Saigon have become pawns in their political game.
As the military situation grows worse for Saigon, the puppets that Washington has created grow more desperate. According to an article in the April 13 Washington Post, intelligence reports say Saigon’s air force is prepared to attack U.S. craft at Tan Son Nhut Air Base to prevent American departure at least until and unless the Vietnamese commanders themselves are given a way out.
“The South Vietnamese may have only one battle left in them,” wrote James Reston in the April 13 New York Times, “and it could be against us, so the United States may have to face the ultimate irony of having to fight its way out of that tragic peninsula against its own ally.”
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1975/IP1315.pdf#page=4&view=FitV,3