Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  On 10 August 1974 Ford wrote personally to Saigon, assuring Thieu that he would honour the commitments made by Nixon; but such promises looked threadbare when Congress was seeking to reduce the aid allocation from $1 billion to $700 million, and indeed went on to do this. At a time when inflation had raised the price of ammunition and much other materiel, the impact on the ARVN was dire. On 13 September an exasperated Kissinger exploded that he found it inconceivable that his country should be giving a billion dollars to Israel – which it then was – while denying a matching sum to Vietnam, where so many Americans had died.

  Much has been written above, about the secretary of state’s pragmatism. Yet Kissinger here grasped an important moral, material and political point, from which Congress and most of the American people chose to avert their eyes. The withdrawal of direct military support was both inevitable and right. It was nonetheless indefensible for the US legislature thereafter to half-choke the aid pipe to Saigon, while the Russians and Chinese kept open their own to Hanoi. Mere money, at this stage, was most unlikely to change outcomes: Saigon’s armed forces were too feeble to stay the distance. But continuance of generous aid might have gone far to preserve America’s honour in this last phase of the war, while withdrawal tarnished it. Congress indeed bore responsibility for this unworthy deed, whatever earlier misjudgements and betrayals were properly attributable to the White House.

  In the final reckoning, Saigon received $945 million in 1974, but this was not remotely enough to sustain a million-man army trained, organised, conditioned, addicted to fighting on an American model. The VNAF was obliged to ground 224 aircraft, including sixty-five helicopters; operational hours for the remainder were almost halved. Half the army’s truck inventory was mothballed for lack of fuel; communications were impaired by shortages of radio batteries. In January and again in April 1975, Congress rejected desperate appeals, endorsed by the chiefs of staff, for funding to enable the South Vietnamese to purchase additional ammunition, fuel and spare parts. Many of Thieu’s soldiers now lived and fought in a state of chronic hunger; inflation shrank still further their miserable rations.

  Contemplating the condition of Saigon late in 1974, the CIA’s Merle Pribbenow said: ‘I was convinced this was not going to last long.’ His Vietnamese wife Thuy wanted to buy for her mother some land north of Bien Hoa, which the family drove north to view. On approaching the area, they were dismayed to see that no government flag flew in any neighbouring hamlet. They turned around and returned to Saigon without purchasing the land, suddenly very conscious that the Thieu regime was losing the ‘war of the flags’. In November Doug Ramsey came to Saigon as a guest of its government, for what proved President Thieu’s last celebration of National Day. Ramsey was grimly amused to sense that his guide was committed to the cause of Hanoi: ‘He knew stuff about communist dialectic that you can only know if you are one of them.’

  VNAF officer Nghien Khiem said: ‘We knew things were not going right. We still kept hoping and hoping, but our faith faded as we lost battle after battle.’ Frank Scotton predicted at a US embassy dinner that the regime could not survive beyond 1976. Most of the mission’s veteran field officers agreed that Hanoi would prevail in that year or in 1977, ‘the only debate being whether the end would be a slide through [political] coalition or battlefield collapse’. The Vietnamese navy’s chief of intelligence told Bob Destatte in January 1975: ‘The communists are not going to win this year, but they may do so next, and certainly will the one after.’ Destatte encountered a hoary old Vietnamese Ranger sergeant who threatened to kill him – because he was an American. The man said he had just come out of a battle on the Cambodian border in which his unit had suffered heavy losses and run out of ammunition, because of the US ‘betrayal’. A taxi-driver told the American he was sick of the war, just wanted to see his country out of it at any price – here was a dominant sentiment within the lower layers of Vietnamese society.

  So desperate was Thieu that he considered strategic withdrawals from territory that his forces were too stretched to defend, including the entire north of South Vietnam. The embattled and embittered president clung to hopes that, even if his dominions continued to shrink, some fragments might remain defensible. Unfortunately for such hopes, in Hanoi there was a growing sense of urgency about initiating decisive action. The North Vietnamese leaders saw the United States in post-Watergate disarray, Congress and world opinion conspicuously unsympathetic to Saigon. The South’s economy was in straits almost as desperate as those of the North, while lacking its ruthlessly effective machinery of control. Hanoi noted increasing agitation on the streets, protests against corruption led by Catholic priests. Parts of the Southern army continued to fight effectively, but many of Thieu’s troops were visibly disaffected. In fierce fighting between August and December, the NVA gained high ground west of Danang, and thwarted counter-attacks by two Saigon formations. In six weeks of brutal fighting for Hill 1062, the elite Airborne Division suffered 2,500 casualties.

  Events in northern South Vietnam convinced Dragon Court that head to head, its army could now prevail on the battlefield. Its formations were poised to launch attacks from salients deep in Thieu’s territory; some communist troops stood within thirty miles of Saigon. Le Duan and his comrades, for once in concord with Giap, concluded that there would never be a better moment to strike. Seven of the eleven members of the Hanoi politburo are said to have endorsed the proposal to launch in 1975 a new ‘General Offensive and Uprising’, to complete the unification of Vietnam.

  27

  The Last Act

  1 INVASION

  In the northern hills of South Vietnam early in March 1975, Vietminh veteran Maj. Gen. Nguyen Huu An found himself gazing upon scenes that recalled youthful experiences at Dienbienphu: ‘There was mud, mud and more mud.’ His infantry and engineers struggled through driving rain to drag 105mm howitzers, captured in 1972, up steep ascents to positions from which they could harrow Southern firebases. An had been appointed a corps commander for Le Duan’s big push, unleashing overwhelming force to complete the unification of Vietnam: half a million men – fifteen infantry divisions together with seventeen sapper, ten armoured and fifty artillery battalions. The first phase, code-named K-175, was scheduled for March–May, to be followed by a second July–August offensive, if conditions seemed propitious. An’s corps was tasked to seize Hue and Danang, in operations urged onward by the slogans ‘Speed is Strength’ and ‘Go Like Lightning’. Yet An admitted that comrades who had experienced the crushing disappointments of 1968 and 1972 were privately sceptical whether K-175 would meet with any greater success. The North enjoyed the big advantage of being able to choose where to concentrate its strength, but the South retained a substantial superiority of mobility, firepower, air support.

  The plan had gone through eight drafts. The key imponderable was not ‘What will Saigon do?’ but ‘How will Washington react?’ The communists knew that neither China nor Russia would lift a finger to check any US intervention; everything instead hinged upon how the Republican administration gauged the will of the American people. Kissinger remained secretary of state, and a notably hubristic one: he lectured his uncerebral commander-in-chief about foreign policy, ordered wiretaps on allegedly indiscreet staffers and their media conduits, dominated meetings with monologues. What might his grand vision of history cause him now to urge upon President Gerald Ford? Good news, from Hanoi’s viewpoint, was that since the October 1973 Yom Yippur war and the subsequent oil crisis, Kissinger was preoccupied with the Middle East; Vietnam represented leftovers.

  Between 13 December 1974 and 6 January 1975, Northern troops conducted a two-division assault on Phuoc Long province, a hundred miles north-east of Saigon. Hanoi watched closely for a US response to an indisputable, unprovoked expansion of its territory. Washington dallied with committing aircraft from the Enterprise carrier group – then backed off, just as it remained passive while Khmer Rouge forces tightened the encirclement of Cambodia’s capital,
Phnom Penh. At a 21 January TV news conference, President Ford asserted that he could anticipate no circumstances in which forces would again be sent to Indochina. Two weeks later, Congress rejected new aid requests. North Vietnam’s premier Pham Van Dong asserted confidently to his politburo comrades that ‘the Americans would not return if you offered them candy to do so’. Yet no one could be sure. As Maj. Gen. An and his colleagues watched porters sweating beneath loads of munitions destined for gun positions on Route 14, they remained acutely conscious of the B-52s on Guam. Giap still anticipated that victory would require a conclusive campaign in the following year.

  The 1975 strategic plan was the North’s most imaginative of the war. Principal objective for its first phase was Ban Me Thuot, a city of a hundred thousand people that was capital of the Central Highlands. Surrounded by coffee plantations offering useful cover, it straddled a junction on the north–south Route 14 between Kontum and Saigon, thirty miles from the Cambodian border. Col. Gen. Tran Van Tra, COSVN’s vain and ambitious military chief, bore a lingering stigma for his role in the tactical failures of Tet 1968: now, he yearned for glory to redress that defeat. Tra afterwards claimed credit for proposing the 1975 thrust through the Central Highlands, though Lt. Gen. Hoang Minh Thao urged the same course – and was given local direction of it.

  Instead of immediately hurling troops into a direct assault on Ban Me Thuot, the communists first isolated the city, cutting roads around Pleiku, a hundred miles further north, in a series of coordinated attacks that began early on the morning of 4 March. NVA chief of staff Gen. Van Tien Dung assumed overall command of the Central Highlands operations, in which four divisions were committed to strike where Southern forces were relatively weak. Success would give Hanoi a good chance of splitting South Vietnam, cutting off Saigon’s powerful formations further north.

  The Thieu regime received considerable intelligence warning about the threat to Ban Me Thuot, not least from NVA prisoners. As usual, however, there was also plenty of ‘noise’ – as intelligence officers characterise multiple conflicting indicators – to mask the ‘signal’, Hanoi’s real purpose. The North’s attacking formations sustained radio silence, while generating deception wireless traffic around Pleiku. On 8 March they severed Route 14 north of Ban Me Thuot, then Route 21 to the coast. The communists completed the befuddlement of the hapless Thieu by simultaneously launching new attacks east and north of Saigon, in the delta, and in Thua Thien and Quang Tri provinces, where Gen. An’s formations stood poised.

  At 0545 on 8 March, An’s guns began firing on nearby Southern firebases; an infantry assault followed. Files of grimly expectant soldiers of the 324th Division advanced across a landscape shrouded in early-morning mist. Those first actions generated no easy communist triumph. The Northerners’ command and control, always a weakness, proved muddled as ever: some attacking units got lost, others were ravaged by ARVN artillery and mortars. Next day, the 9th, the South Vietnamese launched successful counter-attacks. The contest for one key position, Hill 224, persisted for a week, with neither side giving way, Southern guns firing 4,600 rounds a day. An wrote with unexpected frankness about his own men: ‘The corps’ combat efficiency during this phase was low.’ After eight days’ fighting, there had been no communist breakthrough in the north – which deserves emphasis, in view of the widespread belief that South Vietnam’s entire army crumpled from the outset.

  Yet even as those battles were taking place – and increasing Saigon’s confusion about Hanoi’s intentions – in the Central Highlands a grim saga unfolded, at first in accordance with Dragon Court’s script, then dramatically outperforming its expectations. On 9 March NVA infantry, supported by just two 105mm guns with fifty rounds, overran Duc Lap, fifty miles south-west of Ban Me Thuot. The first abject collapses took place, of three Saigon battalions. The attackers captured fourteen guns and twenty armoured vehicles before heading north towards Ban Me Thuot, where sappers and small bodies of infantry had already infiltrated the city. These spearheads made for the airfields and ARVN HQ when the general assault began early on 10 March, involving twelve regiments led by sixty-four tanks and APCs. Infantryman Bao Ninh viewed with amazement and indeed awe this gathering of power, on a scale few communist soldiers had seen before: ‘Almost all our fighting had been as guerrillas, in company strength.’ Morale was high, because while they had no notion of how swiftly victory would come, none doubted its inevitability: ‘We knew that without the Americans, the Southerners were half what they had been.’

  Saigon’s local corps commander was Pham Van Phu, a forty-seven-year-old veteran of Dienbienphu, who proved ill-suited to direct a defence against a complex communist onslaught. Phu had convinced himself that Pleiku was the enemy’s main objective, and concentrated his strength accordingly. Fierce flak drove off VNAF air strikes, and after thirty-two hours of fighting Gen. Dung was able to report to Hanoi the capture of the 23rd Division’s headquarters and huge ammunition stocks, in exchange for only light losses. Yet Southern troops continued staunchly to defend the wired and fortified base of the 53rd Regiment, at the airfield three miles east of the city. The North Vietnamese, cocky after their earlier successes, on 14 March risked committing armour to night attacks, which descended into farce. One tank smashed its gun by hitting a tree; another fell into a ditch. Communist infantry were repulsed with heavy loss, some of them shot off tank hulls: base commander Lt. Col. Nguyen Vo An showed himself a determined and effective officer, whose stand at the head of five hundred men deserves to be remembered.

  The communist attack was renewed on the evening of 16 March, when sappers accepted severe losses to lay bangalore torpedoes which breached the perimeter wire. Nine hours of fighting followed, during which the attackers made little headway. However, at 0500 on the 17th four tanks broke through; the base was overrun three hours later. Lt. Col. Vo An and some survivors escaped – he reached the coast on the 24th, at the head of thirty men. The North accepted that some of its units, and especially tank commanders, displayed the sort of ineptitude that had become familiar in 1972. Yet a key reality persisted: the communists were victorious. Four hundred South Vietnamese casualties were abandoned in Ban Me Thuot’s hospitals.

  Saigon’s chief of staff Gen. Cao Van Vien said of the fall of the city: ‘This was the most critical juncture of the entire war … Our armed forces now faced a showdown with an adversary who continuously upped the ante.’ President Thieu succumbed to panic, prompting him to make a succession of disastrous decisions. First, he removed a locking pin from the north’s defence by ordering the crack Airborne Division to abandon its positions and join the garrison of Saigon. Then he demanded a counter-attack east of Ban Me Thuot, which failed miserably. Following the communist breakthrough, Kontum and Pleiku were deemed indefensible: troops there were ordered to pull back towards the coast along the old, crumbling French Route 7b. Vien warned Thieu of the likely consequences, recalling the 1954 disaster the Vietminh had inflicted on France’s Groupe Mobile 100, in the same region and in similar circumstances.

  The president neither consulted US officers about the decision to abandon the Central Highlands – announced to his own commanders at a 14 March crisis meeting at Camranh Bay – nor informed them that he had made it. Frank Snepp believed this was because ‘he was simply terrified that the Americans would go mad and withdraw support from him’. Thieu’s order, far from being impulsive, reflected personal thinking that had evolved through the previous year. He cherished a belief that, if he could shorten the impossibly long defensive perimeter imposed by the shape of South Vietnam, his forces might yet successfully hold its rich southern bulge. While this was implausible, worse was his insistence that within days twenty-five thousand men retire 150 miles, through mountainous terrain, to the coast. He ignored the huge issue of soldiers’ families quartered in the Highlands, not to mention the civilian population. Gen. Phu is alleged to have burst into tears on the flight from Camranh Bay back to Pleiku, saying that neither he nor South Vietnam any longe
r had a future. He himself withdrew eastward by helicopter, leaving a brigadier to supervise the leaden motions of his corps and its stupendous array of men, vehicles, munitions and equipment down the long, rough road through successive passes.

  Air America pilot Fred Anderson said later: ‘I will never forget the sight of the highway out of Pleiku. It was a solid mass of bodies walking and carrying what they had. And you just knew there would be thousands dying.’ AA flights evacuating US personnel were spasmodically fired on by bitter and frightened South Vietnamese. Another pilot said: ‘A lot of it was out of frustration. People get excited; they want out and don’t think. It was sheer anarchy, man reduced to his lowest level.’