The Nixon Years
Richard Nixon, in contrast to our other presidents during our engagement in Vietnam, understood that war is a contest of wills. He simultaneously announced a policy of American withdrawal and scaled-down draft calls to de-fang the anti-war movement. At the same time, ordering sharp escalations to throw the communists off balance. He opened relations with communist China to cover his diplomatic flanks and made peace overtures to Hanoi. The communists licked their wounds, bided their time, and in March of 1972, struck again with a massive conventional attack. By then, the bulk of American ground combat forces had gone home, and the ARVN had finished the work of 1968 by effectively eliminating what was left of the Viet Cong.
The result was a conventional battle in which PAVN columns, plentifully supplied with Soviet T-55 tanks and advancing under a rolling umbrella of AAA and SAMs, clashed with a re-energized ARVN bolstered by American advisors and supported by U.S. air power. Benefiting from surprise, the PAVN gained considerable ground in the initial onslaught, but ran up against tenacious ARVN defenders and massive U.S. air support, including B-52 strikes.
To isolate the battlefield in the south, President Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker, a massive air campaign against communist supply lines. In contrast to Rolling Thunder, Nixon gave the military commanders full discretion to apply airpower as they wished, indeed chided them for timidity. B-52s were sent against targets in North Vietnam for the first time and laser-guided bombs were used in quantity. Armadas of F-105s had been required to drop the Doumer Bridge in 1967, but in 1972 a flight of four F-4s with laser-guided bombs did the trick. By June, the communists were halted and Hanoi was ready to resume negotiations.
The Christmas bombings
But the communist negotiators dug in their heels, and Nixon knew that the American public would give him little time. In December 1972, he ordered a renewed bombing of North Vietnam. In Operation Linebacker II, the so-called Christmas bombing, streams of B-52s savaged targets in the Hanoi area with a rain of bombs – and suffered heavy losses from SA-2s. The North Vietnamese would later claim it as a victory, but Nixon got what he wanted: a negotiated peace.
The Jan. 12, 1973, Paris Peace Accords offered South Vietnam only a cease-fire in place that allowed the PAVN to keep its territorial gains from 1972. That having been said, the Accords gave Nixon the “Peace with honor” he so urgently needed and the return of American prisoners of war (POWs) held in North Vietnam. Ironically, that did Nixon little good. Caught by the news media in his repeated deceptions, not least of all “stonewalling” over the Watergate break-in, he was threatened with impeachment and forced to resign in August 1974 in favor of Vice President Gerald Ford.
Ford, a good man in an untenable position, found himself caught in a vice between a Congress determined to abandon the war and his sense of obligation to our erstwhile South Vietnamese and Cambodian allies. In December 1974, the PAVN returned tentatively to the offensive, seizing the South Vietnamese provincial capital of Phuoc Long north of Saigon.
The Fall of Saigon
Nixon had committed the U.S. to resist North Vietnamese violations of the Paris Accords with military force, but Nixon was now gone. The PAVN could press on, and did. In February 1975, unhampered by American bombing, they launched a final offensive, overrunning the Central Highlands, then taking Hue and Da Nang.
The one remaining ARVN equalizer, air support by VNAF AT-37s and AC-119Ks, was largely neutralized by shoulder-fired, heat-seeking SA-7 missiles. In early April, communist forces reached the eastern approaches to Saigon at Xuan Loc, where the ARVN fought its final battle, April 9-20. A reinforced ARVN regiment fought two PAVN divisions to a standstill, only to be outflanked and forced to withdraw.
Saigon lay open for the taking, and into the void an American naval task force came to evacuate American citizens, friendly foreign nationals, and Vietnamese deemed particularly at risk. In the previous weeks, bureaucratic inertia had restricted aerial evacuation through Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport to far less than the seats available, and the responsible American official, Ambassador Graham Martin, seemed oblivious to the imminent danger.
Finally, on April 28, a communist air raid on Tan Son Nhut by captured VNAF AT-37s made clear the precariousness of the situation, a message underlined by a rocket barrage shortly after midnight. Still, Martin clung to hopes for a negotiated settlement, disrupting helicopter evacuation plans by delaying implementation until 11:30, before yielding to a direct order from President Ford.
The ensuing evacuation was a triumph in improvisation for the Marine and Air Force H-53 and H-46 helicopter crews and the Navy ships’ companies and deck crews who supported them. It was also a triumph for Tan Son Nhut-based UH-1 crews of Air America, the CIA’s contract airline, who shuttled across the doomed city bringing evacuees to safety. Among them, they pulled out some 9,000 Americans, Vietnamese, and third-country nationals under conditions that can only be described as chaotic.
An impressive feat of airmanship and seamanship, it was a tragic ending for an American commitment that had begun in idealistic fervor 30 years earlier.
U.S. Air Force (top) and U.S. Army (bottom) photos courtesy Jim Mesko.