by Max Hastings
The first two days of the withdrawal, 16–17 March, passed without much incident, save that a throng of refugees closed in behind the troops. The troubles began at the small town of Cheo Reo, fifty miles down the road, where nine hundred vehicles jammed a narrow thoroughfare. Anarchy descended, with scavenging, looting and shooting by renegade soldiers. Then communist troops made a dash to block the pass ahead. After a clumsy Southern night attack failed to break through, on 18 March Rangers succeeded, only to fall victim to a misplaced friendly air strike which killed their colonel and cut a swathe through the ranks. As the Northerners began to shell the mass of humanity and vehicles trapped in Cheo Reo, some tanks and trucks sought alternative escape routes across country. A Ranger battalion was among the few that maintained cohesion, smashing through successive communist blocking positions to reach Tuy Hoa at 2100 on 27 March, having lost half its strength. One in four of the twenty-five thousand troops in the Central Highlands eventually straggled through to the coast, together with some five thousand dependants and civilians. Gen. Vien estimated that three-quarters of the combat capability in II Corps – central South Vietnam – had been destroyed in ten days. The communists afterwards acknowledged nine hundred Northern troops dead in the Central Highlands campaign, most of those losses probably sustained in its opening days.
Events following the fall of Ban Me Thuot created the first of what became a succession of human tragedies, embracing millions of people. Gen. Vien described the retreat as ‘ignominious’, reflecting a failure of leadership at every level. On the road eastward, Saigon journalist Nguyen Tu wrote of refugees ‘who now have nothing left but the dusty, sweat-soaked clothes on their backs. Their feet are swollen and their eyes lifeless and devoid of hope. Small children … struggle along behind.’ Mass desertions by soldiers desperate to protect their own families became an ongoing feature of the campaign; so did crowds of civilians and their vehicles clogging roads that became impassable for government troops, even before the enemy intervened. The cauldron of chaos and misery into which the region subsided was kept bubbling by sporadic communist shell and mortar fire.
On 18 March Giap in Hanoi informed the politburo that the critical moment had come: they must exploit the Northerners’ stunning local successes by launching a general offensive. It had become plain that the Americans would not commit air power; that many of Thieu’s soldiers had exhausted their will to fight. Despite much written later concerning South Vietnam’s shortage of munitions, there is no reason to believe that the events of early spring would have unfolded differently, even had more arms been available. South Vietnamese exile historian Nguyen Ky Phong suggests that the regime still possessed a year’s worth of war materiel, and this is evidenced by the huge quantities that later fell into the NVA’s hands – eighteen thousand tons in the Central Highlands alone. The fact that much equipment and ammunition was in the wrong places, because the South Vietnamese logistics system was crippled by inefficiency and corruption, cannot justly be blamed on the US.
Ambassador Graham Martin, visiting Washington in March, appealed directly to leading congressmen to support a new aid package – and met a stone wall. Martin was a poor advocate, but at this point it is unlikely that a veritable Cicero could have induced the legislature to succour the Saigon government. Most congressmen and senators perceived that the will of their constituents demanded disconnection of South Vietnam’s life-support machine. Yet this did not prevent the ambassador from penning a deplorably mendacious letter to President Thieu, delivered in Saigon on 15 March, which asserted: ‘I can give you the most categorical assurances that the President and Secretaries of State and Defense are determined that when the Washington battle is over you will have the resources you need.’
Martin then retired for ten days to his North Carolina farm, to recuperate from dental surgery. It is unlikely that anything he could have said or done would have altered events, but his conduct was ignoble, as was that of Congress. The refusal of mere money to the nation’s longtime client, arguably also its victim, sent an unmistakable signal to both sides in the war: the American people, yearning for a closure, had hardened their hearts – in Frank Snepp’s words, ‘shown themselves stunningly uninterested in the fate of the Vietnamese’. The moral impact of aid cuts was more important than the material one. Scarcely a Southern soldier from general to private failed to understand that the Saigon regime had been disowned by its patron; it thus became hard to believe that a doomed cause merited further sacrifices from themselves. In South Vietnamese minds, an enduring legend was born, of America’s ‘stab in the back’. The collapse of the Central Highlands merely imposed an immediate disaster upon the deeper sense of destiny that already suffused Thieu’s formations. Only US air power could have shifted the odds, and in Washington a weak president recoiled from defying congressional opposition to such action.
A dramatic directive was now issued by the Hanoi politburo, ordering its forces by May to complete the conquest of South Vietnam. ‘The situation changed at a dizzying pace,’ said Maj. Gen. An. In the north on 20 March, his artillery redeployed towards the vital north–south Route 1: within hours of opening fire, shelling closed it to traffic between Hue and Danang: scores of vehicles seeking to escape southwards were obliged to turn back. A local Vietcong female cadre interrupted a corps conference to report that thousands of enemy deserters were fleeing through her village. She sought help to mop them up, and was duly given some men to collect weapons. Fugitives might run free, she was told; caged, they would merely become a burden. An said: ‘I realized that the enemy formations were collapsing.’ Southern units ceased to encrypt wireless messages, sometimes hurling plain-language obscenities at each other across the ether.
Throughout these last months, Saigon’s forces operated in a fog created by lack of intelligence about the movements and intentions of their enemies. Contrarily, Hanoi was thoroughly informed by Saigon traitors – notably a sergeant clerk in the ARVN chief of staff’s office – about almost every detail of its enemies’ doings, including Thieu’s strategic decision to abandon swathes of territory. Giap’s great fear was that South Vietnamese forces would withdraw into enclaves around such cities as Hue and Danang, from which they might prove difficult to dislodge; this increased his sense of urgency about disrupting organised Southern redeployments. His strategy in the north was to strike fast eastwards on several axes, severing arteries of which Route 1 was the most important.
In the first week of fighting the Southern I Corps commander Ngo Quang Truong felt that his forces had held their ground well – as An, his enemy counterpart, agreed. Some Regional Forces showed courage and determination, and the Marines launched effective counter-attacks. Now, however, the defence unravelled with terrifying speed, a chain of events precipitated by Thieu’s response to the Central Highlands collapse. The president’s order to withdraw the Airborne dealt Truong a moral and tactical body blow – the general would have been even more dismayed had he known that the president also intended to take away his Marine division. In 1972 those same Marines had bled copiously to retake Quang Tri; now, when they withdrew southwards the city was lost in a day, precipitating another mass exodus.
As in the Highlands, roads became jammed with civilians on foot and in vehicles of every kind. More and more people in the northern regions, both uniformed and civilian, saw that they faced abandonment, that their own government no longer considered this extremity of South Vietnam defensible. Despite some stubborn ARVN stands, at a dozen key points from north of Hue to south of Danang communist forces thrust insistently towards the coast: Truong and his corps were losing control as the region was carved about their heads. Thieu dithered – at one moment demanding that Hue must be held to the last, at the next proposing to relinquish it.
After two weeks’ fighting in which I Corps suffered two thousand casualties and claimed to have fired two hundred thousand rounds of artillery ammunition, on 21 March the NVA overran Rangers defending critical hills above Route 1. Therea
fter the communists began attacking north towards Hue. At 1300 on 25 March, a soldier named Nguyen Van Phuong raised the North Vietnamese flag in the old capital. An found drivers for fifty abandoned tanks and APCs, which joined his advance southwards. Mobs of bewildered and disarmed Southern soldiers milled in the streets; hundreds of officers became prisoners.
During evacuations from the northern coastline, the sorely-tried Marine division’s discipline collapsed. An American defence attaché had warned the previous year of the danger that an enemy offensive in the north would precipitate ‘a Dunkirk without ships’, which is what now took place: a disordered and woefully inadequate rabble of vessels sought to retrieve vast numbers of desperate soldiers and civilians. Patchy local resistance caused the NVA’s Gen. An fewer difficulties than moving rice to his scattered units, with mud clogging every track from his supply line further west.
Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians who fled from Hue in warships or small craft were disgorged a few hours’ sailing further south at Danang, to surge through the streets spreading the plague virus of panic. In the distance artillery fire was already audible, as resistance at Phu Gia, north of the city, imposed a brief check on An’s battalions. By the last days of March, an estimated million refugees swarmed in Danang’s streets. Thick black smoke eddied in the courtyard of the US consulate as staff and Marine guards burned files. Exultant North Vietnamese columns hastened towards the city, cheered on by civilians who sensed a historic transfer of mastery.
Cmdr. Nguyen Tri, who was responsible for the Vietnamese navy’s small craft at Danang, repeatedly sought orders, but his admiral responded with a numbed silence. On 28 March Tri visited army headquarters, which had retired into the naval base, and found it buzzing with officers laden with sandbags filled with personal possessions. Helicopters wafted these privileged fugitives to safety, leaving disorder in their wake. Tri embarked his own and the flotilla crews’ families, then cast off, speeding down the coast. At Qui Nhon, to their dismay they found the same scenes; a similar collapse of authority.
Gen. Truong wrote later of the last days of his command of I Corps that soldiers attempting to deploy ‘were swallowed up in the mass of humanity which choked Route I and intermediate land masses. Confusion, frustration and ultimately panic began to grip some combat units.’ An American eyewitness, AA pilot Wayne Lennin, said of Danang: ‘It didn’t fall; it came apart … The soldiers went berserk. They were running down the streets machine-gunning civilians … ripping the jewellery off bodies and raping girls.’ Dreadful scenes took place at the airport, where hysterical crowds mobbed the few departing aircraft, convinced that each would be the last; men who huddled in wheel-wells were crushed when ascending pilots retracted undercarriages. Efforts to fly out military stretcher cases foundered amongst mobs of troops and refugees: five thousand patients and medical staff were abandoned at Duy Tan General Hospital. On the shoreline, soldiers drove tanks and trucks into the surf, mobbed barges. ‘There were Rangers, Marines, tanks,’ said a Vietnamese eyewitness. ‘One ship came in first and the Marines shoot at everyone else they want to be on the ship, and the Rangers were so mad they shot at the Marines and then finally the ship sank.’
On 29 March Northern forces entered Danang after overrunning great tracts of territory at an estimated cost of fewer than three thousand casualties. An’s regiments reorganised with an important accession of transport, including 487 GMC trucks. They had also acquired PRC-25 radios, priceless to an army chronically short of communications, now for the first time issued down to company level. Every infantry squad boasted two M-79 ‘Thumper’ grenade-launchers. One in three of An’s artillery pieces was a captured weapon.
The next challenge was to move this formidable force six hundred miles southwards, reinforced by two further divisions that had hastened from North Vietnam to join the drive on Saigon. The ‘Coastal Column’, as it became, was placed under the overall command of Gen. Le Trong Tan, and comprised 2,276 vehicles. Gen. An felt somewhat overwhelmed as it set forth on 7 April: ‘This was the first time in my career I had controlled such a long, long column with so many specialised branch elements.’ Crowds stood cheering by the roadside, among them surrendered government soldiers begging for food. There were frequent halts while repairs were improvised to broken or blown bridges – between Danang and Xuan Loc they negotiated 569 crossings. An dispatched advance parties to ensure access to fuel stocks at Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, Camranh Bay. For almost two heady weeks, his corps’ movement averaged sixty miles in each twenty hours’ driving by day and night.
The plight of South Vietnam gripped the attention of tens of millions of Americans. None of the images of massed human suffering, however, shifted the national mood, overwhelmingly resistant to re-engagement. A domestic economic recession provided one justification for congressional opposition. Another was cited by Californian Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman: ‘We cannot promote the peace by providing the means of war … Providing more military aid to Saigon only increases resistance to substantive negotiations.’ The American leaders who behaved worst were those who promised the South Vietnamese help, while knowing this would not be forthcoming: Sen. Hubert Humphrey made supportive noises, then voted against an aid package. Thieu told Ford frankly that without American intervention – explicitly B-52s – his country was probably doomed. On 22 March the US president responded, pledging support while remaining studiedly vague about what form this might take. Thieu reminded him of explicit promises made by Nixon and Kissinger after the Paris Accords. Ford nonetheless determined that he would not risk a constitutional crisis by ordering air strikes. On 25 March he said: ‘I regret I do not have the authority to do some of the things President Nixon could do.’
Throughout those days, Ford’s secretary of state remained characteristically clear-sighted, citing the futility of diplomacy in checking the communist onslaught. ‘I am convinced,’ said Henry Kissinger, ‘that North Vietnam will do absolutely nothing except under military pressure.’ There was a proposal to commit the US Navy to assist the evacuations from Hue and Danang, but the White House drew back when commanders said troops would need to land. Instead, Military Sealift Command was mandated to charter merchantmen, which rescued thousands of fugitives in dramatic and sometimes violent circumstances. On 28 March Kissinger reported to Ford: ‘I don’t think South Vietnam can make it … It is a moral collapse of the United States.’ Next day he told a meeting of his own staffers, ‘The disgrace is ours.’ When one of them proposed asking Moscow to intervene, Kissinger responded: ‘We can’t ask the Soviets in the spirit of détente to save us from ourselves.’
In Hanoi, Giap prepared for the last stage of what he was determined should be recognised as a personal triumph: he moved his bed into Dragon Court, and remained there around the clock until the fall of Saigon, save for one quick trip South to meet field commanders. Every hour thereafter ‘Van’, as he was codenamed, urged on his generals the need for speed, speed, speed – to seize Saigon before the rains descended in earnest, or the Americans changed their minds and started to bomb. At seven o’clock each evening, Le Duan was briefed: post-war communist narratives emphasise his role as ‘de facto supreme commander’, effacing the legend of Giap, though there is little doubt that the campaign reflected the old general’s brief restoration to strategic primacy.
Between 10 and 31 March, four NVA divisions, supported by Vietcong guerrillas, carried out attacks north and east of Saigon which were contained, but left invaders poised within forty miles of the capital. In the last days of the month Le Duan urged Dung, in the Central Highlands, to launch a dash for final victory. The general was brave and stubborn enough to demur, insisting upon first completing the destruction of the ARVN’s II Corps. On 31 March his forces broke through an Airborne brigade holding the key M’Drak Pass. The port city of Qui Nhon was overrun, and next day NVA armour swept into Tuy Hoa, further south. The American consulate at Nha Trang was evacuated amid turbulent and terrible scenes. As whole Southern units disi
ntegrated, Camranh Bay fell. On 2 April Gen. Phu, his corps shattered, fled to Saigon.
All the important passes on Route 1 were now in Northern hands. Frank Snepp says of some twenty-first-century revisionists who seek to suggest that South Vietnam staged a coherent national defence: ‘they weren’t there to witness the shambles. Attempts to impose clarity on the ARVN story are nonsense.’ This is certainly true of Thieu’s strategy, such as it was, which failed miserably. Yet a few South Vietnamese troops fought with a courage worthy of a better national leader.
Le Duan asserted in a long 1 April message to his commanders that in Northern operations thus far ‘there have been few military casualties’ – they had secured much of South Vietnam in exchange for far smaller losses than those of 1972. For the first time in the war, Hanoi dispatched cameramen and reporters to accompany the NVA on its victory road. Among these was Phung Ba Tho, newly returned to his homeland after twenty years in Europe, where he had become a successful film-maker. The army issued Tho with a uniform and camera, then sent him south to witness the triumph of the revolution. ‘It was so thrilling,’ he said emotionally. At first he and his comrades of the communist media were full of fears amidst the turmoil in newly-conquered Southern cities, ‘but then we saw that it was all going to be alright’. The throngs of people whom they passed, both military and civilian, had no thought of doing them harm – indeed, one of the bizarre spectacles that became familiar was that of Southern soldiers stripped to their shorts, having discarded their uniforms.
Two Critical Messages
Top: Extract from a CIA intelligence Information Cable, dated 8 April 1975, warning on the authority of the ‘Tay Ninh source’ that Hanoi has no interest in a political deal.
Bottom: North Vietnamese cable, 7 April 1975, from ‘Van’ (Giap), urging ‘Speed, ever greater speed; daring, ever greater daring; exploit every hour, every minute; charge forward into battle; liberate the South; resolve to strive for total victory.’
