The Fall of Saigon Revisited

April 30, 2025, would be 50 years since the Fall of Saigon. Ho Chi Minh (real name, Nguyen Sinh Cung), who also used the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quoc, while in Paris, died before the reunification. This was pretty much the reverse of what happened between East Germany and West Germany, years later, on November 9, 1989. This event is when North Vietnam finally triumphed over South Vietnam. The democratic South Vietnam fell into the hands of the Communist North Vietnam, which was a totalitarian state. The event was the triumph of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) and its armed wing, the Vietnam People's Army (VPA). Communism won, and the CPV still occupies Vietnam to this very day.

The Fall of Saigon proved that Communism can win. True enough, dictatorships do get toppled but not all dictatorships get toppled. The 1986 EDSA Revolution and the 1989 Berlin Wall proved that dictatorships can fall. However, Vietnam is still under a dictatorship. In fact, the reunification created a refugee crisis, as these people were unwilling to submit to the totalitarian government of Vietnam. Even today, Vietnam still retains a certain degree of totalitarianism.

The National Museum of American Diplomacy states this about the final days of the two-decade war:

Saigon in April 1975

Although the United States had withdrawn its military forces from Vietnam after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, approximately 5,000 Americans remained–including diplomats still working in the U.S. embassy in Saigon. While President Nixon threatened a forceful response to a violation of the treaty, many factors, including lack of domestic support and the distraction of the Watergate scandal, provided an opportunity for the NVA to launch an offensive.

Throughout March and April 1975, the North Vietnamese Army captured more and more Southern cities. South Vietnamese citizens began to flee in mass numbers. The fall of the second-largest city, Da Nang, sparked even more refugees to depart.

In Saigon, South Vietnamese lined up at the embassy to gain entry to the United States. Patti Morton, a trailblazing Diplomatic Security Special Agent serving as a Regional Security Officer in Saigon—the first woman in such a role—documented the scene on the embassy grounds in the footage below, taken on an unknown day in April.

The Final Days: The Fall of Saigon

On April 29, 1975, North Vietnamese troops shelled Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base. U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin then ordered the evacuation of Saigon. As a signal to Americans in Saigon that the evacuation had begun, Armed Forces Radio started to play “White Christmas” on repeat.

By this point, sea lanes were blocked and planes could not land in Saigon, leaving only one option for an evacuation: a helicopter airlift.

After the defense attaché compound was attacked, the U.S. embassy became the sole departure point for helicopters. The original plans called to only evacuate Americans, but Ambassador Martin insisted on evacuating South Vietnamese government officials and the embassy’s local staff.

Meanwhile, 10,000 South Vietnamese waited at the embassy gates, hoping to make it onto a helicopter.

From April 29th to April 30th, helicopters landed at 10-minute intervals in the embassy, including landing on the embassy roof. With some pilots flying for 19 hours straight, over 7,000 people were evacuated, including 5,500 Vietnamese, in less than 24 hours.

The Vietnamese Heritage Museum reveals this concerning the refugee crisis, as a result of the Fall of Saigon:

1975 Exodus

In 1960, there was renewed conflict in South Vietnam. Anti-communist forces, supported by the United States, which eventually sent in over 500,000 troops, sought to halt the spread of Soviet and Chinese-backed communism in Southeast Asia. The war in Vietnam led to greater waves of displacement in all three Indochinese countries. Most of the displacement was internal, but in some cases it spilled across borders, as in the case of the ‘Delta Khmer’ who fled into Cambodia to escape the fighting in Vietnam. By the late 1960s, when the war was at its height, an estimated half of South Vietnam’s 20 million people had been internally displaced. The Paris Peace Agreement of January 27th 1973 brought a temporary end to the Vietnam conflict and opened the door for a greater role of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which launched a program to assist displaced people in Vietnam and Laos.

In the final days before the fall of Saigon in April 1975, some 140,000 Vietnamese who were closely associated with the former South Vietnamese government were evacuated from the country and resettled in the United States. The US-organized evacuation was followed by a smaller exodus of Vietnamese who found their own way by boat to flee to neighboring Southeast Asian countries. By the end of 1975, some 5,000 Vietnamese arrived in Thailand, 4,000 in Hong Kong, 1,800 in Singapore and 1,250 in the Philippines. The UNHCR’s initial reaction was to treat these movements as the aftermath of war rather than the beginning of a new refugee crisis.

The discontentment with the new communist regime increased, so did the number of people fleeing the country. In July 1976, the government in Hanoi stripped the Provisional Revolutionary Government, which had been established in the south after the fall of Saigon, off any remaining autonomy it possessed and unified the country as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It also embarked on a program of resettling urban dwellers in the countryside in so-called ‘new economic zones’. More than a million people were placed in ‘re-education camps’. Many died while tens of thousands were left in anguish in detention until the late 1980s. As time went by it also became clear that the prominence of the ethnic Vietnamese Chinese population in the private economic sector was contrary to the socialist vision of the new authorities. By early 1978, formal measures were being taken to expropriate businesses of private entrepreneurs, most of whom were ethnic Chinese Vietnamese.

Boat People

In 1977, about 15,000 Vietnamese sought asylum in Southeast Asian countries. By the end of 1978, the numbers fleeing by boat had quadrupled and 70 percent of these asylum seekers were Vietnamese of Chinese origin. Many more ethnic Chinese Vietnamese fled to China. They were mainly from northern Vietnam, where they had lived for decades, and they were mostly poor fishermen, artisans and peasants. China subsequently established a project to settle the refugees on state farms in southern China.

By the end of 1978 the problem had begun to reach alarming proportions, there were nearly 62,000 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ in refugee camps throughout Southeast Asia. Tens of thousands had crossed the border into Thailand. As the numbers grew, so did local hostility. Adding to the tension was the fact that several of the boats arriving on the shores of countries in Southeast Asia were not small wooden fishing craft but steel-hulled freighters chartered by regional smuggling syndicates and carrying over 2,000 people at a time. In November 1978, for example, a 1,500-tonne freighter, the Hai Hong, anchored at Port Klang, Malaysia, and requested permission to unload its human cargo of 2,500 Vietnamese. When the Malaysian authorities demanded that the boat be turned back to sea, the local UNHCR representative argued that the Vietnamese on board were considered to be ‘of concern to the Office of the UNHCR’. This position was reinforced by a cable from UNHCR headquarters suggesting that ‘in the future, unless there are clear indications to the contrary, boat cases from Viet Nam be considered prima facie of concern to UNHCR’. For more than a decade, Vietnamese who reached a UNHCR-administered camp were accorded prima facie refugee status and were given the opportunity of resettlement overseas. At the beginning of the Indochinese exodus in 1975, not a single country in the region had acceded to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol. None of the countries receiving Vietnamese boat people gave them permission to stay permanently and some would not even permit temporary refuge. Singapore refused to disembark any refugees who did not have guarantees of resettlement within 90 days. Malaysia and Thailand frequently resorted to pushing boats away from their coastlines. When Vietnamese boat arrivals escalated dramatically in 1979, with more than 54,000 arrivals in June alone, boat ‘pushbacks’ became routine and thousands of Vietnamese may have perished at sea as a result. By mid-1979, of the more than 550,000 Indochinese who had sought asylum in Southeast Asia since 1975, some 200,000 had been resettled and some 350,000 remained in first-asylum countries in the region. Over the previous six months, for every individual who moved on to resettlement, three more had arrived in the camps. At the end of June 1979, the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) —Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand—issued a warning that they had reached the limit of their endurance and announced that they would not accept any new arrivals. ‘Pushbacks’ were in full speed and asylum was in jeopardy.

1979 International Conference on Refugees and Displaced Persons in Southeast Asia in Geneva

With the principle of asylum under direct threat, on 20 and 21 July 1979, 65 governments responded to an invitation from the UN Secretary-General to attend an international conference on Indochinese refugees in Geneva. The international commitments they made were several and significant. Worldwide resettlement pledges increased from 125,000 to 260,000.

As a result of the 1979 conference, the immediate crisis was averted. In what amounted to a three-way agreement between the countries of origin, the countries of first asylum and the countries of resettlement, the ASEAN countries promised to uphold commitments to provide temporary asylum as long as Viet Nam endeavoured to prevent illegal exits and to promote orderly departures, and as long as third countries accelerated the rate of resettlement. Indonesia and the Philippines agreed to establish regional processing centres to help resettle refugees more quickly and, with notable exceptions, pushbacks were halted. International resettlement, which had been taking place at the rate of around 9,000 per month in the first half of 1979, increased to around 25,000 per month in the latter half of the year. Between July 1979 and July 1982, more than 20 countries—led by the United States, Australia, France, and Canada—together resettled 623,800 Indochinese refugees. From 1980 to 1986, as resettlement out-paced declining arrivals, refugee officials began to speak with growing optimism about solving the regional crisis.

For Vietnamese living abroad, Uncle Ho was still a monster. The successors weren't any better. It was a 20 year war, which caused massive deaths, even to the citizens of North Vietnam. The Vietnam War started in 1955 and ended in 1975. One can only imagine how life was disrupted on both sides, and how the South was hoping they would win. However, the South Vietnamese lost and the North Vietnamese took over, forcing the democratic south to accept Communist rule. 

If anything, Vietnam has better economics today, despite still being under a Communist regime. After all, in the 1980s, one man named the late Nguyen Duy Cong (who died in 2018 at 101) founded Doi Moi. Doi Moi became the instrument that allowed free marekts, despite Vietnam's supposed status as a Communist country.