regime. The Vietminh henceforth played the
major military role and so gained the upper hand
in determining the future of Vietnam.
The North Vietnamese were certainly encour-
aged by the growing protest movement against
the war in the US and by their success in under-
mining the authority of the South Vietnamese
regime. They calculated that an American with-
drawal would be hastened if they showed a
readiness to talk peace while continuing to inflict
heavy casualties on Americans in Vietnam: a point
would be reached when American public opinion
would force the administration to accept the com-
munist peace terms in all essentials. Nixon’s policy
of Vietnamisation played into their hands as they
negotiated interminably in Paris. Their prime aim
was to reach an agreement that would get the US
out but would leave them able to continue the
war within the country until final victory. So they
resolutely rejected any proposal put forward by
Henry Kissinger, America’s chief negotiator in
Paris, which required both North Vietnamese
forces and the Americans to withdraw from the
South. American bombing caused grievous losses
but, making use of widely dispersed factories and
with supplies of arms from China and Russia, the
communist leadership in Hanoi was prepared to
continue waging war for years to come.
In January 1973 a ceasefire was finally agreed.
The Americans would withdraw from Vietnam
within sixty days and the settlement would be left
to the Vietnamese. But the ceasefire was not a pre-
lude to peace. The North Vietnamese soon
resumed the conflict and, despite massive supplies
of American arms, the badly led South Vietnamese
army crumbled completely. The Watergate scan-
dal had removed Nixon in August 1974, and
his successor President Ford knew only too well
that the American people would not sanction
a renewed US involvement in the war. As the
North Vietnamese army thrust south, millions of
refugees fled in terror towards Saigon, but the
capital itself fell on 30 April 1957 as the last
Americans and accompanying Vietnamese were
lifted from an American safe house in a frenzied
evacuation, seventy helicopters carrying 1,000
people to safety on the US warships lying offshore.
But hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese officers
and civil servants who had been loyal to the
American-backed South Vietnamese regime were
left behind to face the rigours of ‘re-education’ by
their new masters. They were taken to camps,
1
THE VIETNAM WAR AND AFTER 605
The image that depicted humiliation. 29 April 1975, a day before Saigon fell to the communists. Evacuation
of Americans and a few lucky Vietnamese to US warships offshore from a ‘safe house’. © Bettmann/Corbis
