By John J. Metzler, April 30, 2025The tides of history, the tears of remembrance.
Fifty years ago, on April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese military units surged into Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, forcibly reuniting the country, thus ending twenty years of conflict.
Scenes of the North Vietnamese T-54 tanks crashing through the gates of the Doc Lap Independence Palace were among the poignant closing episodes of the Vietnam war.
Soon the massive outpouring of refugees from helicopters on Saigon rooftops and the Boat People became a searing reminder of the fast-ending conflict.
The original U.S. plan of limited counterinsurgency to thwart communist attacks morphed into a full-scale war.
For the United States, a cardinal error was deposing the controversial Catholic nationalist South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. The coup d’etat orchestrated by President John F. Kennedy and the CIA deposed Diem’s government on Nov. 1, 1963, putting the country on a perilous trajectory of a dozen incompetent military governments over the next decade.
The U.S. massively reinforced troops from 1965 until 1971 when there were 535,000 Americans in Vietnam!
President Richard Nixon began a process of “Vietnamization” whereby the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) would transition to do the fighting to defend their country. The U.S. military commitments would be reduced; The last American combat troops left the country in March 1973.
During the conflict the Americans were not alone in supporting the South Vietnamese; There were military units from Australia, Thailand, and amongst the best, more than 50,000 South Korean combat forces.
A decade of war cost nearly 58,000 thousand American lives with more than 2,500 MIA’s.
Millions of refugees fled. More than 2 million Vietnamese died on both sides.
Significantly, deep political divisions in the USA during the war continued for decades.
Now a half century later, it’s not the time to “re-fight or re-litigate” the war but rather revisit to assess the lingering “What If’s?”
Recall Henry Kissinger’s flawed 1973 Paris Peace negotiations produced an agreement whereby communist North Vietnam and reasonably democratic South Vietnam would coexist as separate entities as they did since 1954 following the French colonial period.
But the North Vietnamese army (NVA) and their local Viet Cong proxies gained military advantage through the “ceasefire in place agreement” allowing the North an unquestionable foothold given their forces already controlled substantial territory.
This fact offers an eerie echo with plans for a Ukraine cease-fire, a ceasefire in place for Russian troops!
An international settlement ensured that the status quo of North and South Vietnam, divided by the DMZ at the 17th parallel, would form the border much as the 38th parallel has separated North and South Korea since 1953.
Both sides had pledged not to attack the other, at least on paper.
The collapse in 1975 came like dominos; NVA probing attacks in February from Boun Me Tout and Pleiku in the Central highlands proved surprisingly successful.
The Soviet-supplied Hanoi communists gambled and launched a major offensive with 30 divisions of regulars during which South Vietnamese towns and ARVN units crumbled, often ineffectually without a fight.
By April the NVA were near the gates of the capital Saigon. The rest is history as NVA tanks and units captured the city on April 30. The curtain fell on the Indochinese wars.
Contrary to popular myth, the U.S. military was not retreating from embattled Saigon in the last days; Rather the formidable logistics and economic support apparatus in South Vietnam was being hastily evacuated. American combat forces were withdrawn two years earlier.
But as I have mused many times, Vietnam is not a war but a country of 100 million people.
Let’s say the status quo held as in Korea.
Even in 1974 South Vietnam’s economy outshone the communist North.
North Vietnam’s now forcibly reunified Socialist Republic of Vietnam suffered under a corrupt and incompetent socialist economy until 1986 when Do Moi market reforms began to replace the moribund Marxist system.
China, the U.S. and European Union are major trading partners. Massive foreign investment flourished in recent years.
Former South Vietnam would likely have emerged as a Southeast Asian “Tiger Economy” by the late 1970’s, a moderately prosperous export economy with upward trajectory.
Today Vietnam boasts 6 percent GDP growth and per capita income is near $5,000. Vietnam is a top ten trading partner of the United States with $149 billion in two-way trade; Yet Washington faces a $123 billion trade deficit!
Nonetheless fifty years after a united Vietnam, the country is reasonably prosperous but retains a communist authoritarian system. Who would have thought?
John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of Divided Dynamism the Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China (2014). [See pre-2011 Archives]
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