A Raid Too Far: Operation Lam Son 719 and Vietnamization in Laos

Epilogue: Endgame

202 Epilogue: Endgame The war was over for the United States, but, as it turned out, decidedly not so for the Vietnamese. Unfortunately for the South Vietnamese, the Paris Peace Accords did not address over one hundred thousand North Vietnamese troops inside the borders of South Vietnam. The cease-fire was short-lived, and the fighting resumed as both sides tried to grab as much territory as possible. For the rest of 1973 and most of 1974, the North and South Vietnamese fought each other throughout South Vietnam. Nixon had coerced Thieu into acquiescing to the Paris Accords, promising that the United States would come to the aid of the South Vietnamese if North Vietnam tried another major offensive . With this in mind, and using weapons and equipment stockpiled during 1972, the South Vietnamese initially held their own against the North Vietnamese. However, as these stocks began to wane, Thieu had no one to turn to for support. Nixon, reeling from the impact of the Watergate investigation, was fighting for his political life and was unable to generate any interest in the plight of the South Vietnamese. On 9 August 1974, Nixon resigned from the presidency. Thieu and his countrymen had always relied on Nixon’s promises to intervene if the North Vietnamese violated the cease-fire. Now Nixon was gone. Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, promised that “the existing commitments this nation has made in the past are still valid and will be fully honored in my administration.”1 This was a commitment that Ford could not keep, given the prevailing sentiment in Congress. With Nixon gone, the North Vietnamese decided to test the South Vietnamese with a corpslevel attack against Phuoc Long Province. This was effectively to be a test case to see how the South Vietnamese would handle a multidivision attack, but, more important, to see how the United States would react if the South Vietnamese got into trouble on the battlefield. The battle was launched in mid-December. The Endgame 203 outnumbered ARVN fought poorly, and the North Vietnamese routed the defenders, killing or capturing three thousand soldiers, taking control of vast quantities of war materiel, and “liberating” the entire province. The United States did nothing. Both Saigon and Hanoi were shocked. Thieu finally realized that his forces had been relegated to fighting a “poor man’s war,” while the North Vietnamese, still being resupplied by China and the Soviet Union, got stronger every day. The North Vietnamese decided that the time was ripe for a knockout blow. Believing the United States would not or could not intervene, they planned a two-year strategy that called for large-scale offensives in 1975 to create conditions for a “general offensive, general uprising” in 1976.2 The North Vietnamese launched what they called Campaign 275 on 10 March 1975 with an attack on Ban Me Thuot in the Central Highlands. They overran the city in two days and then turned their attention on Pleiku and Kontum. The South Vietnamese , realizing they were on their own without any hope of US support, fell back in panic. When Thieu decided to shorten his lines by withdrawing his forces out of the Highlands, supposedly to concentrate his forces for a major effort to retake Ban Me Thuot, the retreat rapidly turned into a rout. While the communist forces in the highlands attacked toward the sea, additional communist troops in the northern provinces drove southward from Quang Tri down Highway 1. One by one, the cities and bases fell as the communists drove rapidly down the coast. On 30 April 1975, it all came to an abrupt end when North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, and the war was over.3 The war was over; the South Vietnamese forces, beset by their long-standing shortcomings and demoralized by America’s failure to honor the promises that had been made by Presidents Nixon and Ford, had collapsed in less than fifty-five days. In the end, the RVNAF failed in its ultimate test, and so, too, did Nixon’s Vietnamization program. Appendixes ...