The Fall of Saigon, 50 years on

US combat forces had left two years before, but the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam drew a line under 20 years of Western intervention in Indochina

Fifty years ago, on 30 April 1975, as dawn broke, soldiers of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) entered the outskirts of Saigon. The Communist forces had begun their spring offensive four months before, and now they were walking the streets of the capital of South Vietnam.

This was the final act of a conflict which had lasted for nearly 20 years, and it was a brutally short coda. Around 9.00 am, the PAVN pushed forward and met resistance at the Newport Bridge across the River Saigon. Within 90 minutes, however, it was all over: at 10.24 am, General Dương Văn Minh, sworn in as President of the Republic of Vietnam 40 hours earlier, ordered an unconditional surrender. The Vietnam War was over.

The official American presence had ended only hours before. From 2.00 pm the previous day, Operation Frequent Wind had evacuated 1,373 US and 5,595 “at-risk” Vietnamese and third-country personnel by helicopter from Saigon to the US Navy’s Task Force 76, 17 miles off the coast in the South China Sea. The American ambassador, Graham Martin, left at 4.58 am and the last helicopter, carrying Major James Kean and the last 10 of his Marine Corps embassy guards, took off at 7.43 am.

For the United States, the Vietnam War had ended like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. Combat operations had ceased in January 1973, and by March the last 24,000 military personnel had been withdrawn; but President Nixon made it clear he might intervene in the event of a major offensive by North Vietnam. In 1974, Congress voted to reduce military aid to South Vietnam and end it altogether by 1976. If the collapse of Saigon was unexpectedly swift, it had been a long time coming.

The course and outcome of the war had been profoundly traumatic for the United States, and would continue to be so. Formally, it was not a war at all; Congress authorised the deployment of troops but it never issued a declaration of war against North Vietnam or the Viet Cong, a power exclusive to it under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. But 58,200 US service personnel were killed and 153,303 wounded; between one and three million Vietnamese died. It cost the United States well over $100 billion and made the draft so poisonously unpopular that it was all-but-scrapped by Nixon in 1973.

For an international audience there were wider, sometimes shocking lessons. For the first time in 150 years, the United States could not plausibly argue that it emerged from the conflict with an advantage. In terms of the Truman Doctrine, it was a disaster, ending with all of Vietnam in Communist hands; with Communist régimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia by the end of 1975, it seemed like Eisenhower’s dominoes were toppling, and the West could do nothing to stop them.

Vietnam shattered the image of two key features of American military power. The first was overwhelming force. Clearly America exercised that: there were 540,000 American soldiers in Vietnam at the height of the war; the US Air Force dropped seven million tons of bombs, three times more than in the Second World War; and on a number of occasions senior military and political leaders at least put the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons on the table. None of it delivered victory.

The second was the brief but sincere faith in business-like management and systems analysis as game-changing advances in warfare. Robert McNamara was lured from Ford to become Kennedy’s secretary of defense in 1961; he was a Harvard MBA and one of the “whiz kids” who had used management theory, statistical modelling and an insatiable appetite for data to optimise the performance first of America’s wartime strategic bombing campaign and then of the Ford Motor Company.

This seemed like the future of military planning and operations, with graphs, charts and clear metrics. And it failed, because McNamara became fixated with the wrong metrics. The numbers the Pentagon could see should have brought victory, but in the paddy fields and river deltas of Vietnam, that victory simply would not come.

Fifty years on, we all live in the shadow of Vietnam. America’s allies have a clear idea of what will and will not be acceptable to Washington. Anything which threatens to become “another Vietnam” is unthinkable; the American public will not tolerate “kids coming home in body bags”; and the word “quagmire” is now virtually synonymous with the conflict.

We fear, as American political and military leaders fear, a loss of control. By the end of 1966 at the latest, it was clear to those with the courage to be honest that the war was unwinnable in any meaningful sense. McGeorge Bundy knew it, Henry Kissinger knew it, Daniel Ellsberg knew it, and the junior army officers and CIA operatives on the ground knew it. But at that stage 50,000 more US soldiers were yet to die to prove it.

The West sees the world through the eyes of the hegemonic power. We are haunted vicariously. Vietnam should have been the great lesson—never again. But it is difficult to learn when it is hard to understand why it was ever allowed to happen at all.