Authors: Nigel Cawthorne
DESPITE NIXON'S PROCLAMATION
of 'peace with honour' everybody knew that the Peace Accords were a sham. Kissinger had long realised that the best the US could hope for was a face-saving interval between US withdrawal and a Communist takeover of the South. Le Duc Tho was more frank, and proclaimed the Paris Peace Accords were a 'victory'. Both the Communists and the South Vietnamese began violating the ceasefire almost immediately, while at the same time going through the motions of implementing the Accords. A Joint Military Commission and an International Commission of Control and Supervision were set up to monitor the ceasefire, although they had little power to enforce it. The Saigon government opened new talks in Paris with the NLF which was now calling itself the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG). These were immediately deadlocked, and collapsed the following year.
The foreign ministers of twelve countries, including Britain, France and the Soviet Union, met in Paris to approve the ceasefire agreement. Canada and other Western countries granted the Hanoi government diplomatic recognition. The US withheld recognition until 1974, breaking off diplomatic relations again with the fall of Saigon in 1975. But Washington began talks about the possibility of giving aid to the North straight away. Meanwhile Operation Homecoming – the return of US POWs – got underway. It soon became clear that the exchange of prisoners of war by all sides was not being honoured. When the Saigon government was accused of holding Communists in its jail, Thieu said they were 'Communist criminals'. However, on 29 March 1973, the last US troops left Vietnam. 'The day we have all worked for and prayed for has finally come,' said Nixon.
The US Navy moved into North Vietnam to clear mines from the ports but, in Cambodia, US bombing continued as the Khmer Rouge threatened Phnom Penh once again. In June 1973, Congress voted to block funds for any further US military action in Southeast Asia. The following month, Congress voted to ban bombing in Cambodia and the Senate Armed Services Committee began hearings on the secret bombings. On 14 August, Nixon stopped bombing Cambodia in accordance with the congressional ban. By this time, Nixon was already being crippled by the Watergate Scandal. During the 1972 presidential election campaign, five men were arrested breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate building in Washington, DC. Among them were former White House aide E. Howard Hunt Jr and G. Gordon Liddy, general counsel for the Committee for the Re-election of the President. It gradually became clear that the White House was behind numerous 'dirty tricks' during the election and had hampered the investigation of the Watergate break-in. On 25 June 1973, former White House counsel John Dean directly implicated President Nixon himself in the cover-up.
The Paris Peace Accords of 1973 had only ended American ground troops' involvement in Southeast Asia. It permitted the NVA to stay in South Vietnam, but they were not to be reinforced. After US troops were gone, North and South Vietnam accused each other of numerous violations of the ceasefire and, inevitably, the NVA went back into action. Despite Hanoi's accusations that the Saigon government and the US were violating the truce, its own forces were making considerable gains in the South. By January 1974, Saigon announced that there had been 57,835 fatalities since the ceasefire. On 9 August Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment over the Watergate scandal and Gerald Ford became the 38th president of the United States. He began his term of office by giving a pardon to Nixon and an amnesty to those who had evaded the draft. In Hanoi the politburo began planning a new offensive for the following spring.
While the NVA and Khmer Rouge made advances in South Vietnam and Cambodia, there was little the US could do but sit and watch. When the US admitted making reconnaissance flights and giving the ARVN technical support, Hanoi complained that these were violations of the Paris Peace Accords. President Ford's request for $522 million in military aid for Cambodia and South Vietnam was blocked in Congress.
'Ultimately Cambodia cannot survive, so why spend hundreds of millions of dollars more?' asked one leading Democrat.
Kissinger, now Secretary of State, condemned denying money to South Vietnam, saying this would 'deliberately destroy an ally by withholding aid in its moment of extremis'. But President Ford ruled out any further intervention in South Vietnam which, in any case, would be out of the question without congressional approval.
Although, at times, the South Vietnamese army discharged itself admirably, the NVA was unstoppable. It had made its sacrifices in blood, now it was determined to have its victory. Although Giap was accused of making costly tactical errors and was often reckless with the lives of his own men, his strategy had worked. He had forced the US to withdraw and was now within a stone's throw of defeating the South Vietnamese on the battlefield – though it was his protégé Van Tien Dung who was to lead the final assault on Saigon.
Thieu progressively pulled his troops back. By the end of March 1974, amid denials, Saigon abandoned the northern provinces of South Vietnam and the Communist PRG took control. They asked civil servants who had worked for the Saigon government to continue in their posts under the occupying forces; Hanoi had not expected the collapse to come so quickly. The politburo had planned victory in 1976, but now ordered the final push on Saigon.
In Saigon, the US flew out 2,000 orphans for adoption in America, a move quickly condemned as propaganda. Thieu tried reshuffling his cabinet, and the ARVN made a last stand at Xuan Loc, just 25 miles north of Saigon, where it found itself outflanked by the NVA. Saigon was surrounded by sixteen Communist divisions, around 140,000 hardened troops facing the 60,000 demoralised men of the ARVN. A last shipment of American artillery arrived without shells and the South Vietnamese Air Force was grounded when it ran out of fuel. President Thieu resigned after making a speech condemning the US. He went to live in England, in the London suburb of Wimbledon. Former vice-president Ky castigated those who fled, but two days later he flew out to the 7th Fleet, and eventually to the USA, where he opened a liquor store in California. Thieu was replaced as president by Tran Van Huong who, a week later, on 28 April, was replaced by Duong Van Minh. Minh tried to negotiate a ceasefire.
By this time panic had set in. One of the most memorable images of the Vietnam War is people being evacuated by helicopter from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon as the city was about to fall. This was part of Operation Frequent Wind, a plan to rescue some 200,000 Vietnamese whose close association with the US would put them in danger when the Communists took over. However, the final collapse of the South came more quickly that anyone imagined, throwing the plans into disarray.
It was not until the third week of April 1975 that Washington ordered the evacuation of all nonessential personnel. It was estimated that there were still around 7,000 Americans in the country. In fact, there were more like 35,000. On 20 April, evacuations began from Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base. At first, only Americans were to be taken, but on the first day between three and four hundred refugees turned up. Soon there were thousands, many of them ARVN troops who would be in danger when the NVA arrived. There were ugly scenes as troops and civilians fought for seats on the departing aircraft. The panic increased as the city came under shellfire. When the airport itself came under sniper fire, the Marine helicopters began picking up people from the roof of the Embassy and other buildings, and carrying refugees out to the carriers waiting in the South China Sea. When the carrier decks were full, helicopters were simply pushed off the side to make room for more. Some pilots ditched in the sea in the hope of being picked up, while a flotilla of small boats made their way out to the US ships.
The crowds outside the US Embassy began to panic. Some climbed over the barbed wire on top of the compound walls. Lines made their way up to the roof where refugees risked being blasted off by the 90mph downdraft from the helicopter rotors. There was no handrail around the roof and one Marine fell off, fracturing his skull. At 4 a.m on 30 April the order was given that only Americans were to be evacuated from then on. The last 865 Marines who secured the Embassy were flown out at 7.53 a.m.
In the last 18 hours of the evacuation 1,373 Americans, 5,595 South Vietnamese, and 85 third-country nationals were flown out – 2,100 from the Embassy roof. In all, 22,294 Vietnamese who had worked for American agencies were evacuated, around a quarter of the 90,000 total, although only 557 of the 1,900 Vietnamese who had worked for the CIA got out. Worse, in the hasty evacuation of the Embassy, sensitive documents listing the Embassy's Vietnamese employees had been left behind intact, a gift for the incoming Communists bent on tracking down those who had collaborated with the US.
When President Minh's offer of a ceasefire was rejected by the Communists, he announced that he was ready to hand over power 'to avoid the useless shedding of our people's blood'. Less than two hours later, at midday on 30 April 1975, Communist forces entered Saigon. At 12.15, NVA tanks advanced on the Presidential Palace. On one of them was a journalist, Colonel Bui Tin, deputy editor of Quan Doi Nhan Dan, the North Vietnamese Army newspaper. NVA soldiers had already hung their flag from the balcony when Bui Tin's tank arrived on the lawn. Although Bui Tin was there to cover the final collapse of Saigon for his paper, when he entered the conference room where President Minh and his aides were waiting, he found himself ranking officer. As such, it was his duty to accept the surrender.
'We have been waiting for you since early this morning so we can turn over power to you,' said Minh.
'There is no question of you turning over power,' said Bui Tin. 'You cannot give up what you do not have. You can surrender unconditionally'.
Suddenly a burst of gunfire erupted outside. Several of Minh's ministers ducked.
'Our men are merely celebrating,' said Bui Tin. 'You have nothing to fear. Between Vietnamese, there are no victors and no vanquished. Only the Americans have been beaten. If you are patriots, consider this is a moment of joy. The war for our country is over'.
After decades, centuries – indeed, millennia – of fighting, Vietnam was once again a united and independent country. The Vietnam war was over.
At the same time Laos fell to the Communists. A month after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, the warring factions in Laos had signed their own Vientiane Agreement, establishing a new coalition government, comprising factions from left and right, under the royalist Souvana Phouma. While fighting began again in South Vietnam and Cambodia, peace held in Laos. However, with the Americans gone, the rightists had no backing. When South Vietnam fell, the Pathet Lao took over in a bloodless coup. Prince Souphanouvong became head of state of the Lao People's Democratic Republic and announced the end of Laos's six-hundred-year-old monarchy.
Worse was in store for Cambodia. Lon Nol's ill-trained and corrupt army was no match for the dedicated fanatics of the Khmer Rouge, but the Communists had been held at bay by US air power, which turned its full force on Cambodia in January 1973 after the Paris Peace Accords ended the bombing of North Vietnam and Laos. However, when the US bombing was halted at the beginning of 1974, the Khmer Rouge were in shelling range of Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh and a prolonged siege of the city began. Despite US backing and an army which outnumbered the enemy, Lon Nol fled on 1 April 1975, seeking refuge in the US. On 12 April 1975, American personnel were evacuated from Phnom Penh in Operation Eagle Pull. At 9 a.m, 36 Marine helicopters set down close to the Embassy and a 360-man Marine force secured the area. By 10 a.m 82 Americans, 35 third-country nationals, and 159 Cambodians, largely employees of the Embassy and their dependents, were flown out. The US Ambassador John Gunther Dean had offered the Cambodian government and top officials seats on the helicopters. Only one, Acting President Saukham Khoy, accepted the invitation. The rest stayed to meet their deaths.
On 17 April the Khmer Rouge marched down the once smart boulevards of Phnom Penh. It was well known that this army of fanatical Communist guerrillas were extraordinarily well disciplined. They were impervious to argument, bribery, or sentiment. These young troops had not come to loot or rape. They would have no drunken victory celebration. But the expressionless teenagers of this austere fighting force struck a note of terror in the hearts of the inhabitants. The fate that awaited the inhabitants of Phnom Penh would be much worse than raping and pillaging. 17 April, 1975 was to be Day One, Year Zero.
The Khmer Rouge leader was Pol Pot, the nom de guerre of Saloth Sar, the son of a minor Cambodian official. During the 1940s, he joined the anti-French resistance in colonial Indochina led by Ho Chi Minh. Pol Pot then joined the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) in 1946, and in 1949, he went to France to study radio engineering but devoted his time there to revolutionary politics, returning to Cambodia in 1953.
During the First Indochina War, the CPK, backed militarily by Vietnamese Communists, infiltrated the nationalist Issarak movement. Rivals were violently suppressed. However, the Communist ascendancy in Cambodia was halted by the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1954, and the movement was then repressed by the Kingdom of Cambodia's hereditary ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who contemptuously dismissed the CPK as the 'Khmer Rouge' – Red Khmers. The Khmer were the aboriginal people of Cambodia. The name stuck.
Meanwhile, dedicated cadres purged the party of those who had lost the faith. In 1962, CPK leader Tou Samoth disappeared on his way back from a secret trip to Hanoi and Pol Pot seized control of the party, but his insistence on pursuing his own revolutionary policies put Pol Pot increasingly at odds with his Vietnamese sponsors. In March 1970, while Sihanouk was away on holiday in France, Lon Nol seized power, backed by the US who urged him to drive the NVA out of the Cambodian strongholds they used to prosecute the war in South Vietnam. However, the NVA counter-attacked and by the late summer of 1970, they controlled half the country.