The period from the Paris Peace Agreement of January 1973, which marked the end of the United States’ direct military involvement in the Vietnam War, to the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in April 1975 remains relatively under-researched in the Vietnam War historiography compared to the years prior to the final withdrawal of U.S. combat troops.
The 50th anniversary of the end of the end of the Vietnam War this month offers an opportune occasion to revisit the strategic decisions on the communist side during the months leading up to the end of the war. Importantly, the events that unfolded 50 years ago remind us of the uncertainties of war and great power patronage.
Henry Kissinger, at the time U.S. secretary of state, in his account of the peace negotiations, recollected that both U.S. President Richard Nixon and he had no illusions that the Vietnamese communists had abandoned their lifetime struggle. Kissinger said he had warned Nixon in late 1972 that “Hanoi would press against the edges of any agreement and that the peace could only be preserved by constant vigilance.”
But nobody, not even the Vietnamese communists themselves, expected that they would be able to reunify the country so soon after the U.S. military exit.
Indeed, General Tran Van Tra had said that “we had won a victory, but not yet a complete victory.” The goal of the communists was still to bring about the reunification of North and South Vietnam, and by military means if necessary.
By December 1974, the general sense was that the United States would be most unlikely to re-intervene in the Vietnam War. Nixon had resigned four months earlier on August 9, 1974 and the U.S. House of Representatives had also in that month slashed U.S. military aid for South Vietnam to $700 million for the 1975 fiscal year (which began on July 1, 1974) from the $1 billion requested.
With the success of the Highway 14-Phuoc Long campaign (December 14, 1974-January 6, 1975), for the first time since the Vietnam War started, the communists had complete control of a province near Saigon. The U.S. did not come to the assistance of the South’s forces despite President Gerald Ford’s assurance on taking office to continue U.S. support of the Thieu administration. General Van Tien Dung recalled that it “gave a clearer indication of United States’” designs and their “ability to intervene in South Vietnam.”
In his April 21, 1975 resignation address, South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu referred to the U.S. failure to react when Phuoc Long fell and illustrated how U.S. military aid to South Vietnam had decreased since 1973, leading to a failure to implement both the “Vietnamization” and the modernization of the South Vietnamese armed forces programs.
When the communists’ 1974-1975 dry season offensive began with the Tay Nguyen (Central Highlands) campaign on March 4, 1975, no one, not even the most optimistic within the Vietnamese communist ranks, expected the Saigon administration to capitulate within two months.
The Hue-Danang campaign culminated with the communists’ takeover of Danang on March 29. In its message that day, the Politburo concurred with Pham Hung (then political commissar) that they should “seize every opportunity and act with determination and boldness” and indicated that the communist side could consider the campaign for the liberation of Saigon to have begun. The Hanoi leadership however only gave the greenlight to attack Saigon on April 22, 1975.
The developments in the southern battleground were indeed progressing extremely swiftly. In their evaluation of the military developments of the previous three weeks at the March 31 Politburo meeting, which Hoang Van Thai subsequently recalled as an “historic” meeting, the Politburo concluded that strategically, militarily, and politically, the communists were holding the upper hand, and the possibility of the enemy collapsing was high. The U.S. also did not appear to be making any serious attempt to save the Saigon government.
During the fighting in South Vietnam, the Cambodian capital fell to the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge, who had always wanted to get out of the Vietnamese shadow, proved able to “liberate” their country ahead of the Vietnamese. We still do not know what the Hanoi leadership thought of the fall of Phnom Penh but on April 17, 1975 they were probably too engrossed in their own war in the South to think about the long-term implications of the liberation of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge themselves for Cambodia-Vietnam relations.
If the Vietnamese communists themselves were taken by surprise by the pace of the military developments in the South since March 1975, Beijing and Moscow, which were neither very well informed of the situation in Vietnam nor had very much control of developments there, were as astounded.
Sino-Vietnam relations had been rocky since 1972. There had been some border skirmishes between the countries in 1973, and in January 1974 the Chinese occupied the Paracel Islands, which had been under South Vietnam’s control. However, at this point of time, a distracted Hanoi could only raise a lame protest in private. In March 1974, Hanoi closed the only Chinese language newspaper, and the activities of the Sino-Vietnamese Friendship Association were also suspended. Fu Hao, who assumed the position of China’s ambassador to North Vietnam in 1974, felt the “increasing hostility of the Vietnamese government toward China…”
The Chinese also favored two separate Vietnams, as a united Vietnam would pose a threat to China’s southwestern border. Beijing surmised, albeit incorrectly on hindsight, that the stalemate in South Vietnam would continue for some time.
The Vietnamese communists also had differences with the Russians. However, as Russian historical Ilya Gaiduk noted, for Hanoi, the importance of Soviet support “grew with the multiplications of disagreements between Hanoi and Beijing…” Moscow, in turn regarded Chinese efforts to increase their influence in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, as well as the seizure of the Paracel Islands as “China’s attempts to encircle Vietnam”.
The final offensive (the Ho Chi Minh campaign) was launched on April 26. It was the largest military campaign in the 20 years resistance against the United States. With the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the Vietnamese communists finally brought the Vietnam War to an end.