The curtain came down on American imperialism’s thirty-year intervention in Vietnam April 29. The last American officials and military advisers were being plucked out of Saigon by a fleet of helicopters as angry Saigon troops threatened to swamp their final exit.
With Washington gone, the war was as good as over. Ford and Kissenger had delayed the final decision as long as they could, hoping that a negotiated settlement allowing them to retain a beachhead in Vietnam might be possible. But after holding off on the outskirts of Saigon for two weeks, the forces of the Provisional Revolutionary Government gave the teetering Saigon regime a final nudge on the morning of April 29.
All roads out of Saigon had been cut off by the PRG forces, and a barrage of rockets on Tan Son Nhut airport threatened to close the last exit for the U.S. forces. Two of the U.S. Marines guarding several thousand Vietnamese and Americans waiting to be evacuated were killed in the rocket attack. A U.S. C-130 cargo plane was destroyed, together with about a half dozen planes of the Saigon air force. Fighting was reported in the streets of Saigon the day before, and four unidentified planes bombed the airport.
The city was ready to “break wide open,” and the PRG could just march through Saigon, reported CBS-TV correspondent Eric Cavaliero, as the evacuation proceeded. Cavaliero, a British citizen, said he would stay behind in Saigon. He reported that the fighting was “very, very hot and heavy,” but suddenly stopped, as if the PRG were standing aside to allow the Americans to leave. The silence was deafening, he said. It was as if the Communists were saying, “Go, go quietly, but please go.”
The danger to the American evacuation came not from the PRG but from the puppet troops. The scene in Saigon was “a mess,” said one reporter. Saigon troops fired on the buses taking the Americans to the airport. Soldiers converged on the airport and swarmed around the compound of the American defense attaché. More than 800 marines landed to keep the crowd at bay. They punched and shoved soldiers and civilians to drive them back.
At the American embassy, the other emergency evacuation point, another mad scramble occurred. Crowds mobbed the building. People fought to get over the ten-foot-high embassy wall, only to be impaled on the barbed wire at the top, unable to move. American marines and armed civilians used rifle butts to bash the fingers of people clinging to the top of the wall.
Approximately 4,500 persons were lifted out in the final evacuation, including about 800 Americans. As the Americans left, their deserted apartments and cars were looted and ransacked.
The puppet troops also launched their own evacuation. Thailand reported that about seventy-five fighter-bombers and transport planes arrived carrying 2,000 airmen and their families. The Thai government announced that the refugees would be allowed to stay no longer than a month, and that it would return the U.S.-supplied planes to the next regime in South Vietnam. Helicopters loaded with Saigon troops tried to fly to U.S. ships off the coast. Seven managed to land safely. Ten others were ditched in the sea, and the troops and their families were picked up by the ships. One plane commandeered by puppet troops also landed at Clark air base in the Philippines.
A Last Attempt to Hang On
As Saigon hovered on the brink of collapse, officials in Washington and the U.S. embassy in Saigon fell over themselves in their haste to meet the PRG conditions for negotiations, Dictator Thieu, Washington’s loyal puppet for ten years, became expendable.
But Washington’s new-found flexibility did not come soon enough to save its stake in Vietnam. Both Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield and Republican leader Hugh Scott said April 21 that Thieu’s resignation had come too late.
A secret CIA report delivered to Congress April 16 was reported to have viewed the fall of Saigon as certain. “The only question is when,” said a source quoted in the April 17 Los Angeles Times. According to the Pentagon, Malcolm Browne reported in the April 24 New York Times, the Communists now have “unlimited military options.” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Frederick Weyand said they “have the capability to overwhelm South Vietnam if they want to.”
Thieu’s replacement, Tran Van Huong, proved unacceptable to the PRG, who called for removal of all remnants of the Thieu clique, not merely the replacement of Thieu alone “or some other flunkies in order to continue the old policies.” Duong Van Minh (“Big Minh”) was the only Saigon politician they seemed to favor. New York Times correspondent Malcolm Browne cabled from Saigon April 26 that the PRG “made a semiofficial statement today for the first time saying that General Minh, long an advocate of a policy of peace and neutrality, would be acceptable to them as head of the new government.” Then negotiations might begin for establishing a coalition regime, they indicated.
But the installation of Big Minh also came too late to stave off the final collapse. Minh’s inauguration address and his offer of a cease-fire proved unacceptable to the PRG.
North Vietnamese officials in Hanoi said that Minh’s return to power had come too late.
Despite Ford’s statement April 23 that the Vietnam war was “finished – as far as America is concerned,” right to the end the warmongers in Washington held on to a slim hope that imperialism might retain a presence there.
Washington deliberately stalled on the second condition demanded by the PRG before negotiations could occur – the evacuation of American personnel assisting Saigon’s war effort. The American evacuation was delayed to the last, and then dragged out as long as possible. Philip Habib, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said April 25 that “policy does not provide for complete withdrawal.” The administration was still hoping for “a negotiated solution, a controlled situation in South Vietnam.”
Washington Brandishes Big Stick
By April 22 five aircraft carriers, twelve amphibious ships, and twelve destroyers were off the coast of Vietnam, with about 5,000 marines aboard. Another 1,500 marines were to be sent from Hawaii. F-4 Phantom jets specially equipped to jam radar-directed antiaircraft missiles were rushed to Thailand, together with additional aerial refueling planes.
“The Pentagon is seriously exploring the use of direct air strikes and ground military action if necessary to protect American evacuees,” wrote Guy Halverson and Godfrey Sperling, Jr. in the April 23 Christian Science Monitor.
Some Pentagon officials, they said, “are troubled that a limited use of troops could in fact spark a larger ‘military operation,’ since the Marines would presumably be given authority to use whatever force was necessary in their landing operations....
“But given a collapse, and a trapping of U.S. citizens in Saigon, that is a risk that the Pentagon appears prepared to take.”
As the end of Washington’s intervention in Vietnam drew near, more and more of the rats in Saigon sought to abandon ship.
On April 26, five days after his resignation, Thieu and his retinue slipped into Taiwan aboard a special U.S. military aircraft, along with ten tons of baggage. His wife had arrived earlier. The U.S. State Department said it would consider “with sympathy” any request by Thieu for asylum.
Thieu left only after he managed to assure safe passage out of the country for his gold hoard, estimated to be worth as much as $76 million. One airline refused to carry it at first.
Thieu’s brother-in-law, who is director general of Saigon’s bankrupt national airline, had left about four weeks previously. He departed for France with his family to try to collect up to $3 million owed to the airline by French insurance companies. He took with him the records and the foreign exchange checkbook and refused to return. “Meanwhile,” reported Malcolm Browne in the April 27 New York Times, “it was revealed that South Vietnam’s gold reserves have been shipped to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. The amount was not immediately known.”
The Pentagon’s Saigon office – the U.S. Military Assistance Command, more commonly known as “Pentagon East” – closed down on April 28, ending twenty-five years of continuous operation of U.S. military missions in Vietnam.
Almost as symbolic was the closing of the U.S. Post Exchange store at Tan Son Nhut air base, “the institution that symbolized the American presence to Vietnamese more than any other,” according to Fox Butterfield in a dispatch to the April 27 New York Times.
Most civil airlines had stopped service to Saigon by April 25 or were about to. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration halted all civilian flights to Saigon on safety grounds.
“The diplomats are going out all over Indochina,” said one embassy official quoted by H.D.S. Greenway in the April 25 Washington Post. The British, West German, Thai, Dutch, and Australian embassies had closed by April 24.
“In the past week ashes from papers burning in chancery gardens have been blowing in the wind,” said Greenway. “The more modern embassies have shredding machines.”
‘Just Like China in 1949’
As it became clear that the fall of Saigon was inevitable, the rush for the exits by those “loyal” Vietnamese who had grown fat off the American intervention developed into a stampede.
“It is just like China in 1949,” said one U.S. embassy official quoted in the April 25 Wall Street Journal. “You’re witnessing a massive liquidation of assets as people try to scrape up dollars for their escape.”
The black market rate soared to 5,000 piasters to the dollar by April 25, nearly seven times the legal rate of 755. In a few days, Saigon’s currency “will only be good for wrapping paper,” said one Vietnamese.
Crowds fought in near panic at Tan Son Nhut airport April 25 in an effort to get aboard the U.S. planes airlifting out refugees.
“The people seemed almost half-crazed with the idea they weren’t going to make the flight,” United Press International correspondent Alan Dawson reported.
“They jostled and knocked over kids trying to get their tickets stamped.”
Washington had airlifted out about 30,000 refugees by April 28. A glimpse of their social composition was provided in the April 26 Washington Post – “university professors, prostitutes, wealthy young draft evaders and upper class matrons....”
“As they walked down the plane ramps,” reported Washington Post correspondent Susan Guffey from Guam, “their arms were filled with everything from flight bags heavy with gold bars to stuffed animals and golf clubs.”
One Vietnamese in Saigon saw a positive side to the U.S. evacuation effort:
“Perhaps it is better if you take away all the war profiteers, the secret policemen and interrogators,” he told an American reporter.
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1975/IP1317.pdf#page=6&view=FitV,3