How long saigon

Unaccountably, Thieu for another nine days clung to the hope of US intervention. Then, on April 21, he resigned, turning the government over to aging and feeble Tran Van Huong. South Vietnamese morale was not helped by rumors, which turned out to be true, that Thieu was sending personal goods and money out of the country.

In short order, the man followed his valuables into exile in Taiwan and then Britain. Xuan Loc fell on April 23, and there was now little to prevent or slow the Communist advance on Saigon. Duong Van Minh. The South Vietnamese leadership was out of options and had come to the fantastic conclusion that the Communists might negotiate with Minh.

This was far from reality; North Vietnamese regular army troops and tanks had by then surrounded Saigon, which became yet another city in panic. It had, however, lost confidence in its government. Despite many officials who did their jobs well, there were far too many high-ranking people who were not only corrupt but incompetent. It was not a government to inspire its people to fight to the last, but it was the government to which the United States had obligations.

It was also a government that the American Embassy had to keep functioning as long as possible in order to evacuate the maximum number of Americans and loyal South Vietnamese. Martin, the US envoy, had tried to shore up Thieu, lobbying for additional US military and financial aid.

His efforts were sincere but they delayed the implementation of plans to evacuate American and South Vietnamese supporters of the administration from Saigon until it was far too late.

Fortunately, two evacuation operations were already in action, and the execution of the third was in the hands of professionals. The first of these, Operation Babylift, had been conducted between April 4 and 14, and some 2, Vietnamese children were taken to the United States to be adopted.

Babylift was marred by a tragic accident on the first flight of the operation, April 4, A C-5A transport had taken off and climbed to 23, feet when an explosive decompression blew out a huge section of the aft cargo door, cutting the control cables to the elevator and rudder. Dennis Traynor did a masterful job of flying the airplane, using power for pitch and ailerons for directional control. He managed to bring the aircraft back to within five miles of Tan Son Nhut, where he made a semicontrolled crash.

Of the people aboard, were killed, most of them children. All subsequent flights were made safely. The Babylift operation later came under criticism for its overt attempt to create good public relations and for some of the criteria used in selecting the children.

In the end, Babylift could be evaluated as yet another good-hearted attempt by the United States to do the right thing under difficult circumstances.

The second evacuation had been going on quietly for many days, relying on standard civilian and military airlift and virtually anything that would float. Some 57, were flown out by fixed wing aircraft, and 73, left by sea.

About 5, Americans were evacuated—everyone who wished to come—plus many foreigners. South Vietnamese who were airlifted out were for the most part people whose service to their government or to the United States made them candidates for execution by the Communists.

McNamara, at great personal risk, commandeered landing craft to ferry hundreds of Vietnamese down the Bassac River to safety. Neither blinding rainstorms, South Vietnamese navy, nor North Vietnamese regulars stopped him. Tan Son Nhut had been hit by a small formation of Cessna A aircraft, led by the renegade South Vietnamese pilot, Nguyen Thanh Trung, who previously bombed the presidential palace from his F Then North Vietnamese rockets and mm artillery shells began dropping on the airfield, while SA-7 missiles were being used successfully outside the perimeter.

Finally, after a personal visit, Martin became convinced that Tan Son Nhut was no longer suitable for use by fixed wing aircraft. He reluctantly initiated Operation Frequent Wind. Some 6, passengers were removed to safety, despite severe harassing fire. To some, however, it seemed that the DAO area and the evacuation process itself were deliberately spared by the North Vietnamese.

At the embassy, large helicopters used the walled-in courtyard as a landing pad while small helicopters lifted people from the roof.

Despite the lack of time and inadequate landing facilities, crews performed with remarkable precision. On April 29 and 30, US military airlift flights took place between Saigon and ships 80 miles away.

Air America, the CIA proprietary airline, joined in, having flown 1, sorties in the previous month. The end came on April At a. Jerry Berry, transported Martin from the embassy roof to the waiting US fleet.

It left behind many South Vietnamese to , depending upon which source is consulted who had been promised escape. They were simply abandoned. It was the last of a long series of US betrayals in Vietnam. There were more evacuations to come, unplanned and totally chaotic. Every South Vietnamese helicopter was crammed with people and these were flown, like a swarm of bees, to the waiting ships of the 7th Fleet.

The helicopters would land sometimes on top of each other and their occupants would be disarmed and led away. What was the fall of Saigon? Image source, Getty Images. In the iconic photo from , people are seen boarding a helicopter on the roof of the CIA station in Saigon.

Is it a fair comparison to Kabul? This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.

Chaotic scenes at Kabul airport as people try desperately to flee. Related Topics. Published 16 August. While approximately 10, people clamored outside the embassy gates, marine guards faced the unenviable task of deciding who would be saved and who would be left behind. Through the day and into the night, helicopters landed at minute intervals on the embassy roof and in an adjacent parking lot.

Meanwhile, South Vietnamese air force pilots commandeered helicopters, loaded their families on board and landed on the decks of American ships. So many South Vietnamese helicopters besieged the fleet that crews were forced to push helicopters into the sea in order to make room for others to land. Martin repeatedly refused to leave his post to ensure as many people as possible were airlifted. At a. Ford ordered Martin out of the embassy and stipulated that only Americans would be evacuated on the remaining flights.

Hoc tap , as it was called, would eventually touch almost everyone. Former officers were called in, grade by grade. Was there to be, at least for a while, a separate southern state? What role would be played by the provisional revolutionary government, which had been such a feature of wartime propaganda?

Not for long, and very little, were the answers, but our time was so short and the new authorities so opaque in their workings that we had only slender notions of what was going on.

We had a sense that we — or rather the countries we represented — had been demoted, even if, with one part of our minds, we saw that as a long-deserved comeuppance. That feeling was reinforced by the fact that, while we journalists were not prisoners, we were not free agents either. We could not decide for ourselves whether we would stay in Vietnam or leave. We admired them and their discipline — what we thought was their revolutionary purity — but something about their unbending attitude was disconcerting.

It seemed to rule out the possibility of a national reconciliation based on even limited compromise. It was sometimes galling to be as excluded as we felt we were.

Most of the small group of British correspondents holed up during the day in a spacious villa belonging to a British bank. It came with a big, good-natured dog, who was very pleased to see people, as dogs often are. One evening a North Vietnamese patrol arrived, posing some polite questions about why we were there, but often looking pointedly at the dog.

A little while later, we British, together with most of the or so journalists who had stayed, were politely thrown out of the country and put on a Russian Antonov passenger aircraft to Vientiane in Laos. The Americans sent in marines to rescue the crew, who, it turned out, were probably not in any danger. The operation then somehow got ludicrously pumped up as a counterweight to the humiliation of 30 April in Vietnam and the earlier fall of Pnomh Penh.

In reality it was a botched and stupid affair in which the Americans lost a lot of people while attacking Khmer Rouge forces who — in a foretaste of the future — were in fact preparing to defend what they saw as their territory against the new masters of South Vietnam. In its poor intelligence, wasteful firepower and bloody confusion, it encapsulated much that had been wrong about the war that had just ended.

The Mayaguez affair was the first indication that you could take the United States out of Vietnam, but you could not take Vietnam out of the United States. In the decades since, the US has never ceased to fight the war.

It continued to fight it, in the most immediate sense, by vindictively isolating the new Vietnam economically and politically. This it later took to a monstrous extreme by effectively favouring the Khmer Rouge regime remnants who were resisting the new Vietnamese-imposed government in Pnomh Penh.

The two countries are now almost as friendly as Ho Chi Minh had hoped they would be in , when his appeals to the US for help in achieving independence from France went unheard. But if the US has finally stopped chastising Vietnam itself, the war still goes on in other ways. Everything the US has done in the world since then has been conditioned by its fear of the consequences of trying to reassert itself militarily — and by its compulsion to do so.

The fear is of another Vietnam, another quagmire, another debacle. The compulsion, though, constantly seeks out other places where something like Vietnam can be taken on again, but this time won, cleanly and conclusively. The US has sought this compensatory victory again and again, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. The war never went away in America, at the most fundamental level, because it became a test of how Americans saw their country.

The young regular army officers who served in Vietnam returned home determined to create a new army. It would be a professional, all-volunteer force, and thus less subject to public pressure over casualties. It would have technology that could replace boots on the ground. But if there had to be boots on the ground, the new army would have skills in counter-insurgency of a kind it had lacked in Vietnam. Finally, it would not go to war without a guarantee that there would be no constraints on the full use of its resources — constraints that, in the view of many soldiers, had cheated the US army of victory in Vietnam.

It was all in vain. The US public proved almost as sensitive to the deaths of volunteers as it had been to those of draftees.

New technology created as many problems as it solved. Counter-insurgency strategies were still ineffective. And the guarantees that the use of force would not be constrained simply did not happen, because that is not how governments function. At least three different Vietnam wars have competed for American attention, and for space on the heavily loaded shelves of books about the conflict.

In a second, it did win, because its aims of containing China and Russia and preventing a domino-fall of other south-east Asian countries into the communist sphere were actually achieved. In the third, the mission was undertaken in ignorance, quite aggressively, in the expectation that setting up a South Vietnamese equivalent of South Korea would be relatively easy, and then lurched out of control. Which war really happened?

The final lesson is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory. For a homely reminder of how the war once touched nearly every American household, consider the buffy. Buffies are ceramic elephants about two-and-a-half feet high, with a flat top on which you can put a drink or a pot plant.