The final PAVN offensive — known as the Ho Chi Minh Campaign — opened on the 10th of March 1975 with the attack on Ban Me Thuot in the central highlands and ended at noon on the 30th of April 1975 with the entry of PAVN tank 843 of the 203rd Armoured Regiment through the gate of the Independence Palace in Saigon. The campaign lasted fifty days. It overran a territory of approximately 100,000 square kilometres, defeated an ARVN force of approximately 1 million men, captured approximately $5 billion of American military equipment intact, produced the largest forced civilian movement of the war (approximately a million refugees displaced internally across March-April), and ended the Republic of Vietnam as a sovereign state. The speed of the collapse — faster than the Hanoi planners themselves had anticipated, with the campaign originally scheduled to run across two years — surprised both the North Vietnamese command and the disengaged American foreign policy apparatus.
Ban Me Thuot
The campaign opened with a PAVN attack on the central highlands provincial capital Ban Me Thuot. PAVN had concentrated three divisions against the smaller ARVN II Corps highlands garrison; the city fell on the 11th of March after thirty-three hours of fighting. The substantive political consequence was Thiệu's decision of the 13th of March — the so-called Highlands Strategic Withdrawal — to withdraw all ARVN forces from the central highlands to the coast. The withdrawal was a substantive strategic miscalculation: the highlands roads were entirely inadequate for the vehicle and personnel movement, the operation was conducted without prior planning of withdrawal lanes or rear-guard arrangements, and the civilian population that joined the withdrawal column produced a refugee mass on the principal route (Highway 7B from Pleiku to Tuy Hoa) that PAVN forces could attack at will. The "Convoy of Tears" produced ARVN unit dissolution: approximately 70 per cent of the II Corps order of battle was lost as a combat-effective force across the eight-day withdrawal. The strategic-operational position of South Vietnam was destroyed in eight days.
Đà Nẵng
The PAVN northern offensive across I Corps was less contested than its planners had anticipated. Quảng Trị province was abandoned by ARVN within days; Hue was taken on the 25th of March; Đà Nẵng — the second-largest city in South Vietnam and a naval-air complex — was taken on the 29th of March. The Đà Nẵng collapse was political rather than military: the civilian refugee influx into the city, the proportion of ARVN personnel and their families seeking evacuation, and the command-control breakdown produced an urban panic that the PAVN forces approaching the city only formalised by their eventual entry. The American material captured at Đà Nẵng — including A-37 and F-5 aircraft at Đà Nẵng Air Base, naval craft at the naval facility, and ARVN equipment — would be used in PAVN operations across the following month.
Xuân Lộc
The ARVN defensive engagement of the campaign was the Battle of Xuân Lộc — the small provincial capital seventy miles east of Saigon, defended by the ARVN 18th Infantry Division under Brigadier General Le Minh Dao — between the 9th and 21st of April 1975. The 18th Division's defensive performance against PAVN forces of superior numbers (approximately 40,000 PAVN against 20,000 ARVN with local civilian-militia support) produced approximately 5,000 PAVN casualties and held the principal eastern road into Saigon for twelve days. The Xuân Lộc engagement was the principal counter-evidence to the broader 1975 thesis that ARVN had ceased to be capable of combat performance; the substantive position is that the 18th Division's performance was the exception rather than the rule, and that its eventual withdrawal was unavoidable given the broader strategic-operational situation.
The fall of Saigon
The PAVN final approach on Saigon opened on the 26th of April 1975 with the launch of the Ho Chi Minh Campaign's final phase — coordinated attacks by five PAVN corps converging on the capital from five axes. President Thiệu had resigned on the 21st of April; his immediate successor Trần Văn Hương served briefly before being replaced on the 28th of April by Dương Văn Minh — Big Minh, the figure who had led the 1963 coup against Diệm, brought back as the South Vietnamese-political establishment's last attempt at a negotiated transition. Minh's appointment was substantively too late: PAVN forces had no political reason to negotiate with a defeated regime.
The American evacuation — Operation Frequent Wind — opened on the 29th of April with the activation of the helicopter evacuation plan from the American Embassy and from the Defence Attache Office at Tan Son Nhut airbase. Across the next twenty-one hours, approximately 7,000 American and Vietnamese evacuees were lifted out of Saigon by helicopter to American naval vessels offshore. The visual record of the operation — particularly the photograph of the helicopter on the rooftop of the Pittman apartment building at 22 Gia Long Street (often misidentified as the embassy roof) — became the iconic visual representation of the South Vietnamese state's collapse. The last American Marine evacuated from the embassy compound at 7.53 a.m. On the 30th of April. PAVN tank 843 broke through the gate of the Independence Palace at 11.30 a.m. And the South Vietnamese flag above the palace was replaced by the PRG/NLF flag. Big Minh's surrender announcement was broadcast on the radio at 11.45 a.m. The Republic of Vietnam had ceased to exist.
The boat people
The post-war emigration from Vietnam ran across 1975-1989 and produced approximately 1.6 million refugees who left the country, including approximately 800,000 "boat people" who departed by sea (predominantly to Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia) and approximately 800,000 who departed through more orderly emigration programmes including the Orderly Departure Programme negotiated under United Nations auspices in 1979. The proportion were south Vietnamese opponents or perceived opponents of the new regime — former ARVN officers and civil servants detained in "re-education" camps across 1975-1985, ethnic Chinese Vietnamese expelled after the Sino-Vietnamese economic-policy conflicts of 1978-79, Catholic and Buddhist religious dissidents — but also included economic migration produced by the economic deterioration under the post-war collectivisation programmes of 1975-1985. The international resettlement effort, particularly by the United States (approximately 800,000 Vietnamese refugees admitted across 1975-1995), Canada, Australia, France and other Western countries, produced the Vietnamese diaspora communities that remain visible across Western urban areas today.
The unified Vietnam
The unification of the two Vietnamese states was formalised in 1976 with the merger of the DRV (north) and the PRG (south) into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The new state was dominated by the Hanoi political-military leadership; the substantive autonomy that the PRG had been promised in the Paris settlement was absent in the unified state. The economic reforms of the late 1980s (Doi Moi) produced the market-economy transition of the past forty years; the United States-Vietnam normalisation of 1995 produced the diplomatic-economic reintegration; the cohort of post-war-born Vietnamese has now superseded the cohort of the war generation in the country's political-economic leadership. Modern Vietnam is, in many respects, a country that has moved on from the war; the historical-memory infrastructure (the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, the Reunification Day commemoration on the 30th of April, the commemorative practice at the war's principal sites) coexists with the commercial-political reality that the country's post-1986 development has outweighed the war's economic-political legacy in the lives of most Vietnamese now alive. The Republic of Vietnam — the Lost Land of this volume — exists now primarily in the diaspora memory of approximately three million ethnic Vietnamese abroad, in the commemorative practice of the post-1975 emigration, and in the physical traces — the Independence Palace in Ho Chi Minh City, the war-era infrastructure of central and southern Vietnam, the military-historical sites of Khe Sanh, the DMZ, Cu Chi — that the travel guide section of this volume describes.
End of Chapter IX