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Salute The Nation That Brought The US Empire To Its Knees

By Kenny Coyle

01 May, 2015
Morning Star

On the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, April 30, 2015, the momentous events that made it possible are recalled

Forty years ago, on the morning of April 30 1975, a column of tanks broke down the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, the headquarters of the Republic of (South) Vietnam.

In the space of an hour or so, the new flag of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam was hoisted over the palace, signalling the end of 101 years of Vietnam’s colonisation, war and division.
The final assault by the Vietnam People’s Army (VPA) and its allies in the National Liberation Front (NLF) took just 55 days — exactly the same length of time, noted Vietnamese military legend General Vo Nguyen Giap, as the historic siege of Dien Bien Phu, which had ended French colonial rule in 1954.

The speed of the Ho Chi Minh Campaign, as it was named, took both sides by surprise.

Military strategists in the North had estimated that military victory would be achieved only in 1976.

In the South, the delusional military dictatorship in Saigon had dismissed any idea that the regime would ever fall despite the withdrawal of US military forces.

Generous military aid from Washington, amounting to $1.6 billion a year, was considered sufficient to see off the communists.

In 1973, US president Richard Nixon had agreed withdrawal terms with North Vietnam in Paris and promised: “Peace with honour,” although it’s fair to say that “Tricky Dicky” was a stranger to both of those concepts.

The Paris deal was described as “half-peace, half-war” by one commentator.

The agreement did not require that the liberation forces withdraw from territory in South Vietnam.

This allowed the southern-based anti-imperialist NLF to regroup its forces and expand its networks in the countryside and major towns.

The US was soon embroiled in a crisis of its own making. Nixon was impeached over the Watergate scandal and resigned in August 1974.

A massive wave of revulsion and cynicism about the US Establishment engulfed those hitherto supportive or indifferent to the war.

The loyal core of US anti-war activists was now joined by mainstream US opinion.
The same year, US government aid to the puppet regime in Saigon was halved and the possibility of a new US invasion receded.

Vietnamese communist leader Pham Van Dong remarked sardonically that: “The Americans will not send back GIs even if we offer them candy.”

In January 1975, a force of just 8,000 VPA soldiers and NLF fighters took the city of Phuoc Binh, capital of the province of Phuoc Long, after a fortnight of fighting.

Other provincial capitals began to fall in quick succession, one after another. In total, all 43 southern provinces were “lost” in less than two months.

But as the legendary Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett remarked: “There is no explanation for the fact that the loss of a provincial capital is synonymous with the loss of an entire province other than that the province had been ‘lost’ for years.”

The speed with which liberation forces advanced had another explanation that eluded both the South Vietnamese regime and its US advisers.

They had calculated that the VPA would be forced to station a regiment in each new province. What happened instead was that local people’s committees took over provincial administration.

Local NLF units emerged from the underground and joined up with many South Vietnamese troops who chose to go over to the side of the liberation forces.

Vast amounts of US-supplied weaponry fell into the VPA’s hands, easing logistical concerns over the lengthening supply chains from the northern bases.

The VPA created an entire squadron from captured South Vietnamese A-37 Dragonfly fighter-bombers.

In April 1975, a unit of specially retrained Vietnam People’s Air Force pilots flew them in formation over Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport, where the remnants of the Saigon regime’s air force were based and through which the elite planned to escape in the event of defeat.

When challenged by the air traffic control tower to identify which unit they belonged to, a pilot replied sarcastically: “A Made in the USA squadron!” before bombing the runway and enemy planes below.

Specialist VPA commando units, called dac cong, were used to penetrate enemy positions, gather intelligence, sabotage the Saigon regime’s defences and make contact with underground NLF units. They were devastatingly effective, sowing confusion and panic in the disintegrating ranks of their enemies.

Underground NLF activists were instructed to launch urban insurrections in the heart of the towns and cities.

The term “people’s war” was no military cliche but a fundamental political strategy developed by Vietnamese communists over generations.

VPA and NLF forces swelled, reaching 15 full divisions by the end of April 1975.

The new challenge for the Vietnamese military leadership was how to co-ordinate this unanticipated larger force and to strike before the summer monsoon season began toward the end of May.

The victory of April 30 was the culmination of decades of struggle and years of planning.

It was, as Vietnamese communist leader Le Duan noted, the combination of a remarkable series of political alliances.

First the core worker-peasant alliance was extended to the urban intelligentsia. A second factor was the support offered by the socialist countries, and this at a time when the Sino-Soviet split created enormous but not yet disastrous challenges.

Third, was the solidarity of the democratic and progressive forces within the imperialist camp itself, first and foremost the heroic anti-war movement within the US, but also extending to peace and anti-imperialist forces across western Europe and Australia, whose campaigns had limited and blocked more intensified conflict.

To any visitor to today’s Vietnam, it’s difficult to imagine just how much death and destruction was inflicted upon the country.

Controversy rages around the exact number of deaths. Vietnamese sources estimate a total loss of around three million people between the end of the French colonial war in 1954 and 1975.

US academic and British Medical Journal surveys put the number of deaths between 1965-75 alone at approximately 1.5 million.

The US air force dropped 7.8 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, more than the combined total dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II. Around the same tonnage again was fired from land and sea units.
An estimated 800,000 tons failed to detonate, contaminating around 20 per cent of its land.

More than 100,000 people have been killed or injured since 1975 by these delayed parcels of death.

Added to this was the widespread use of chemical warfare, napalm and Agent Orange, both of which had been trialled by Britain during its colonial war in Malaya.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs lists 15 diseases associated with the defoliant Agent Orange, ranging from lung cancer to leukaemia, which can be cited by former US service personnel to claim benefits.

All the while, US war crimes against the Vietnamese population, from generation to generation, remain unpunished.

Nine US corporations were given contracts to produce Agent Orange. Two are household names — Dow Chemical, the official chemical sponsor of the London Olympics, and Monsanto, best known today for its genetically modified foods.

The war cast a dark shadow over every Vietnamese family — the losses created one million widows and 880,000 orphans.

In the North, 4,000 out of 6,000 villages were destroyed and 29 provincial capitals were bombed, 12 of which were razed to the ground.

Six major cities, including the capital Hanoi and the major port of Haiphong, were seriously damaged.

The US cynically targeted North Vietnam’s economy, hoping to starve its people into submission.

A total of 400 factories and industrial enterprises were eliminated. The numbers of bridges, dams and dykes destroyed are incalculable.

Neither should we forget that the “American war” also enlisted the forces of its allies. South Korean forces, brutalised by their own civil war and fanatically anti-communist, were responsible for at least half a dozen massacres of Vietnamese civilians.

Australians, New Zealanders, Filipinos, Thais and soldiers from Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan took part in the conflict.

Even after its humiliating defeat, the US maintained a vindictive economic embargo against Vietnam until 1994.

Vietnam’s victory in 1975 was a triumph for all those who cherished solidarity and resistance against a seemingly invincible imperial power.

The struggle of the Vietnamese people for reunification and independence was, in the words of Che Guevara, the battle of “a nation representing the aspirations, the hopes of a whole world of forgotten peoples.”

Today’s [April 30] anniversary marks not simply an astonishing military success but the affirmation of the unbreakable spirit of these “forgotten peoples.”
Four decades later, let’s ensure that the heroism and sacrifices of the Vietnamese people are not only remembered with reverence but celebrated with pride.

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