The Fall of Saigon: NVA troops capture the Capital

Jivan Johal
Apr 30, 2017
3 min read

For almost 20 years, Vietnam had been a hot topic for the Cold War. Vietnam had originally been a French Colony (Indochina), and after WWI, in 1950, after China had become communist, and the USA began to worry about the spread of communism in the South East of Asia. They developed the "domino theory', where neighboring countries fell to communism one by one (as Europe had), and Vietnam would be one of those neighbors.

From 1950-1954, France fought the Indochina war, which was a struggle to keep Vietnam as a colony. They were ultimately defeated, and Indochina was partitioned into Cambodia, Laos, South and North Vietnam. The North fell under communist rule, and the south fell under democratic rule. The French had been defeated and so the stage was set for Vietnam to decide whether it would be a friend or enemy of the USA

The US began operations in 1955, by funding the French and sending money to aid the South. Both the North and South began to install governments which were swaying in favor of the superpower supporting it (communist North, democratic South). Finally, tensions grew and war broke out between the communists and the USA, after the US was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin (this attack was later discovered to be a lie to invade Vietnam). From the very start, the US was on the losing side.

The US was a highly trained and organized army, but they were not able to fight against the guerrilla tactics of the NVA and communist supporters. They used booby traps, landmines, pitfall tracks and rat tunnels, which were a complicated system of underground tunnels used by guerrilla fighters to quickly and quietly ambush US troops and move ammunition. One of the major battles in the campaign was the battle of Khe Sanh. Khe Sanh was an operating base where the US launched missions out of into Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, in order to prevent the spread

of communism. The battle ended when the Vietnamese were able to destroy the base and force the US on its' heels. The Ho Chi Minh trails were also used to transport weapons. The trails were a series of designated routes that ran through Vietnam's neighboring countries, and were effective because the US could not launch war with an "innocent country", but at the same time, the Vietnamese were able to get the weapons they needed. The war continued to go south for the US until this day in 1975, when the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City), fell to communist forces, ending the Vietnam war. Despite the US attempts to carpet bomb, defoliate, and use mass amounts of explosive to destroy communism, the people would die, but the ideology lived. Because Minh portrayed the war as a liberation, many fought for the North, and the US was in a losing war. The North Vietnamese pushed the failing US back to Saigon, and after a US evacuation of the city, took the city and the entire country, ending the war.

Millions of men, both Vietnamese and American, died, and many more were taken prisoner and tortured. It is widely conspired that JFK died because of his anti-war ideas, and was either killed off so that the arms manufacturers could continue to profit from war, or it was a communist doing. In the end, the US suffered a humiliating defeat and retreat. Vietnam was a lost cause from the start, and the fall of the Vietnamese capital to communists was the final coffin in the nail.