Fall of Saigon (1975): The End of the Vietnam War

The Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975 ended the Vietnam War. After a rapid offensive lasting less than two months, North Vietnamese forces entered the South Vietnamese capital, and President Duong Van Minh announced the unconditional surrender of the Republic of Vietnam. In the final hours, a US helicopter evacuation carried thousands of Americans and Vietnamese out of the city, producing some of the most famous images of the twentieth century.

Background: after the Paris Peace Accords

The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 ended direct American military involvement but left North Vietnamese troops inside South Vietnam. The ceasefire broke down almost at once, and both sides fought for territory through 1973 and 1974.

South Vietnam’s position weakened steadily. US military aid was cut sharply by Congress, from about 2.3 billion dollars in 1973 to around 1 billion in 1974 and less again for 1975. The oil shock of 1973 hit the South’s economy hard, and the army faced shortages of fuel, ammunition and spare parts. In August 1974 Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, removing the president who had privately promised Saigon strong support.

In December 1974 North Vietnamese forces attacked Phuoc Long province, north of Saigon, and captured its capital on 6 January 1975. The United States did not respond militarily. Hanoi’s leaders concluded that Washington would not return to the war and decided on a major offensive.

The spring offensive

The campaign was commanded in the field by General Van Tien Dung. On 10 March 1975 his forces attacked Ban Me Thuot in the Central Highlands, which fell the next day. President Nguyen Van Thieu then ordered his troops to abandon most of the highlands and regroup on the coast. The withdrawal along a poor mountain road turned into a disaster, as soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians fled under fire.

Panic spread to the northern provinces. Hue fell on 25 and 26 March, and Da Nang, South Vietnam’s second city, collapsed in chaos on 29 and 30 March, with crowds fighting to board ships and aircraft. Within weeks the northern half of the country had been lost.

The South Vietnamese army made its most determined stand at Xuan Loc, about 60 kilometres north-east of Saigon. There the 18th Division held out from 9 to 21 April against much larger forces before being ordered to withdraw. By then the capital was surrounded.

Hanoi named the final assault the Ho Chi Minh Campaign. Its aim was to take Saigon before the start of the rainy season and before any political settlement could be arranged.

Washington and the final days

President Gerald Ford asked Congress for 722 million dollars in emergency military aid in April 1975, but Congress refused. On 23 April, in a speech at Tulane University in New Orleans, Ford said that the war was finished as far as America was concerned.

On 21 April Thieu resigned, blaming the United States in a long televised speech, and soon left the country. Vice President Tran Van Huong briefly succeeded him. On 28 April the National Assembly handed power to General Duong Van Minh, who hoped to negotiate a settlement. That evening captured South Vietnamese aircraft bombed Tan Son Nhut airbase.

Meanwhile thousands of people were already leaving. Operation Babylift flew orphaned and other children out of the country from early April; its first flight, a C-5A transport, crashed on 4 April, killing more than 130 people, many of them children. Fixed-wing flights from Tan Son Nhut evacuated tens of thousands more during April.

Operation Frequent Wind

Before dawn on 29 April, North Vietnamese rockets and artillery struck Tan Son Nhut. Two US Marines guarding the Defense Attaché Office compound, Corporal Charles McMahon and Lance Corporal Darwin Judge, were killed, the last American ground troops to die in action in Vietnam. With the runways unusable, Ambassador Graham Martin finally agreed to a full helicopter evacuation, code-named Operation Frequent Wind.

Armed Forces Radio broadcast the pre-arranged signal: a weather report of rising temperatures followed by the song “White Christmas”. Americans and selected Vietnamese gathered at assembly points across the city. Marine CH-53 and CH-46 helicopters, supported by Air America and Air Force aircraft, shuttled between the Defense Attaché Office compound, the US embassy and the ships of the US Seventh Fleet in the South China Sea.

Crowds besieged the embassy walls as people sought a place on the helicopters. Through the night the aircraft lifted people from the embassy’s courtyard and rooftop. Ambassador Martin left at about 5 am on 30 April, and the last Marines were lifted off the roof a few hours later, leaving behind many Vietnamese who had been promised evacuation.

At sea, South Vietnamese pilots flew their own helicopters to US ships, where crews pushed many of them overboard to make room for more landings. One South Vietnamese officer, Major Buang-Ly, landed a small Cessna observation plane carrying his family on the deck of the carrier USS Midway.

The surrender

On the morning of 30 April North Vietnamese columns moved into the city with little resistance. Around midday tanks broke through the gates of the Independence Palace, the seat of the South Vietnamese government, and soldiers raised the flag of the Provisional Revolutionary Government over the building.

Earlier that morning Duong Van Minh had ordered his forces by radio to stop fighting. After the palace was taken, he and his cabinet were held by the North Vietnamese, and Minh was brought to the Saigon radio station to announce the unconditional surrender of the Republic of Vietnam. The war that had begun in its American phase two decades earlier was over.

Key people

• Van Tien Dung (1917–2002), North Vietnamese army chief of staff and field commander of the 1975 offensive.
• Nguyen Van Thieu (1923–2001), president of South Vietnam from 1967 until his resignation on 21 April 1975.
• Duong Van Minh (1916–2001), the last president of South Vietnam, in office for about two days.
• Graham Martin (1912–1990), US ambassador in Saigon, criticised for delaying the evacuation.
• Gerald Ford (1913–2006), US president, who sought aid from Congress but accepted that the war was lost.

By the numbers

Consequences

Vietnam was formally reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on 2 July 1976, and Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Hundreds of thousands of former South Vietnamese officers, officials and others were sent to “re-education camps”, some for many years.

Cambodia had already fallen to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975, beginning the Cambodian genocide, and communist forces took full power in Laos in December 1975. From the late 1970s large numbers of Vietnamese, the “boat people”, fled by sea. Hundreds of thousands reached refugee camps across Southeast Asia, and many died at sea; estimates of the deaths vary widely.

The end of the war also brought a reckoning with its cost. More than 58,000 American service members had died in Vietnam. Estimates of Vietnamese deaths, military and civilian, on all sides between 1955 and 1975 range from about 1.3 million to more than 3 million, depending on the sources and methods used. Large parts of the countryside had been damaged by bombing, mines and chemical defoliants such as Agent Orange.

In the United States the defeat prompted years of debate over what had gone wrong, and the treatment of returning veterans became a lasting political issue. Diplomatic relations between Washington and Hanoi were not restored until 1995.

Myths and facts

Myth: The famous rooftop photograph shows the US embassy. Hubert van Es’s picture of people climbing to a helicopter on 29 April was taken at an apartment building at 22 Gia Long Street used by CIA and other US personnel, not at the embassy.

Myth: Saigon fell in a final battle. There was fighting on the outskirts, but the city itself was taken with little resistance after Minh’s government accepted that further defence was hopeless.

Myth: All South Vietnamese helicopters were destroyed by the Americans. Many were flown to US ships by their own pilots; some were pushed into the sea to clear deck space, and others were captured by North Vietnam.

Legacy

In Vietnam, 30 April is celebrated as Reunification Day, and one of the tanks that entered the palace is preserved as a national treasure. For many Vietnamese abroad, the date is remembered as Black April, the beginning of exile. In the United States, images of the helicopter evacuation became enduring symbols of a lost war and shaped debates about later withdrawals.

Timeline

• 1975, 6 January: North Vietnamese forces capture Phuoc Long.
• 1975, 10–11 March: Ban Me Thuot is attacked and falls.
• 1975, 25–26 March: Hue falls.
• 1975, 29–30 March: Da Nang collapses.
• 1975, 9–21 April: The Battle of Xuan Loc.
• 1975, 21 April: President Thieu resigns.
• 1975, 28 April: Duong Van Minh becomes president.
• 1975, 29 April: Operation Frequent Wind begins.
• 1975, 30 April: Tanks enter the Independence Palace and South Vietnam surrenders.
• 1976, 2 July: Vietnam is reunified and Saigon renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

Why it matters

The Fall of Saigon ended a war that had cost millions of lives and divided societies far beyond Vietnam. It completed the communist victory in Indochina, triggered one of the largest refugee movements of the late twentieth century and left a lasting mark on how the United States thinks about military intervention abroad.