7 - The Paris Peace Accords to Black April

The Easter Offensive left exhaustion and frustration in its wake from Saigon to Hanoi to Washington. One result was the resumption, in July 1972, of secret negotiations in Paris between American National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho, which had been going on intermittently since 1970. By now both sides were prepared to make some compromises in long-held positions, the most important for Hanoi being the removal of the Thieu regime and for Washington the removal of all North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam when all US troops withdrew. Of the two, Washington’s concession was far more significant in determining the ultimate result of the Vietnam War since failure to achieve a mutual withdrawal would leave at least 150,000 thousand PAVN troops in South Vietnam once all US troops had departed. This reluctant acceptance of compromise by both sides enabled Kissinger and Tho to reach an agreement in October 1972. However, the agreement was rejected by President Thieu, who with considerable justification argued that the concession regarding North Vietnamese troops constituted a mortal threat to his government and the ability of South Vietnam to maintain its independence. Thieu’s demands for modifications of this and other parts of the agreement he considered dangerous brought Kissinger back to Paris for renewed negotiations with Tho; these quickly deadlocked. Meanwhile, while pressuring Thieu to accept the agreement, Nixon offered him both increased American military aid and the assurance of US military support in the form of air power should Hanoi violate the Paris agreement.

In the end Nixon, who actually shared some of Thieu’s concerns about the agreement, decided to use another bombing campaign against North Vietnam to force Hanoi to accept at least some of the changes the US wanted in the October agreement. This campaign, Linebacker II, which began on December 18, 1972, and lasted for eleven days, was the most intensive of the war. Because it lasted through Christmas, it is also known as the Christmas Bombing. It provoked outrage in the press, among American antiwar groups and political figures, and in several European countries for allegedly being indiscriminant terror bombing directed at civilians. Among the accusations hurled at Linebacker II were that it was “a crime against humanity,” “Stone Age barbarism,” “war by tantrum,” a “wave of terror,” and worse.¹

In fact, as even most orthodox historians now acknowledge, it was none of these things. Turley points out “the bombing was as discriminating as bombing could then be.” He also notes that “the vast majority of Hanoi’s buildings were never touched was plain for visitors to see, too.” Moss states that Linebacker II “was not a campaign of terror that targeted cities and civilian populations.” The only targets deliberately attacked were military or those in areas not heavily populated. Herring notes that “American pilots went to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties,” a point also made by journalist Stanley Karnow.² The total civilian death toll in Hanoi and Haiphong was about 1,600, extremely light considering the scale of the bombing and when compared to past bombing campaigns. In contrast, the destruction of railroad yards, port facilities, factories, broadcasting stations, and similar actual targets was devastating. While the extent to which Linebacker II affected the North Vietnamese remains a matter of debate; on January 8, 1973, Kissinger and Tho returned to the bargaining table prepared to make some additional, if relatively minor, concessions.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, and a cease-fire in Vietnam began that same day. The main changes from the October 1972 agreement, most commentators agree, were minor; they certainly did not have any impact on what was to follow. The point that matters most, and the main flaw from the perspective of the United States and South Vietnam, concerned troop withdrawals: the United States would withdraw all its military forces from South Vietnam (and in return American prisoners of war would be released) while North Vietnamese troops (actually not mentioned in the Accords) would remain. That left more than 150,000 PAVN troops in South Vietnam, as well as another 100,000 in Laos and Cambodia. The territory those troops controlled, much of it seized and held during the Easter Offensive, stretched along South Vietnam’s western border with Laos and Cambodia from the DMZ to the northern edge of the Mekong Delta. This “Third Vietnam,” as Hanoi called it, provided the ideal launching point for attacking South Vietnam when the time was right. Another major flaw was that the Accords did not contain an effective mechanism for policing the cease-fire. Both North Vietnam and the United States were forbidden from sending more troops into South Vietnam, a provision that the US observed and North Vietnam violated from the start. In fact, as Willbanks points out, North Vietnam violated the Accords even before they could take effect. That sequence of events went as follows: Kissinger and Le Duc Tho initialed the Accords on January 23, but in the 48 hours before the cease-fire they mandated officially took effect (midnight January 27 Greenwich Mean Time, 8 a.m. January 28 Saigon time), PAVN forces attacked more than 400 villages and hamlets.³ Orthodox and revisionist commentators agree that the Accords were little more than an interlude before the fighting would begin again. The revisionist perspective is aptly summed up by General Davidson: “In reality, the settlement only suspended major combat operations for the period necessary for North Vietnam to prepare her forces for the final offensive.”⁴

President Thieu, who considered the Accords a “surrender agreement,” was pressured by Nixon into signing the agreement by a combination of intensified threats and promises of upgraded aid and support. The threats included signing the Accords even if Thieu refused and cutting off all aid. The promises guaranteed continued diplomatic support, continued military and economic aid, and, crucially, the assurance the United States would respond “with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam,” a guarantee that meant the use of air power as had been done during the Easter Offensive of 1972.⁵

Both Nixon and Kissinger maintained the Paris Accords would have provided “peace with honor”; that is, they would have protected the independence of South Vietnam had Congress not undermined them by radically reducing aid to the Saigon government. Revisionists are divided on this important point. Some agree with orthodox commentators that the Paris Accords were too flawed to protect South Vietnam. Dave Richard Palmer, for example, calls them “nothing more than a device to remove the US military presence from Vietnam.” These revisionists also argue that in light of the evolving Watergate scandal and the widespread desire among the American people to exit from Vietnam, Nixon’s promises to Thieu were empty. Beyond that, they tend to blame South Vietnam’s ultimate defeat two years later on its own internal problems, from corruption to poor leadership to ARVN’s unfixable shortcomings. This essentially is General Davidson’s position, although he includes the caveat that some criticism of Nixon and Kissinger is “too harsh” given the situation they faced at home and suggests that they “had to take the agreement they got.”⁶ Other revisionists, such as Sorley and Colby, have a different focus. Whatever problems they find with the Accords and the Nixon/Kissinger performance or with the South Vietnamese government, they argue that the primary reason for South Vietnam’s collapse in 1973 was America’s failure – and by this they mean that of Congress – to honor the promises made in 1973. It was, they insist, what Washington did after the Accords – its “abandonment” of South Vietnam – that led to what the South Vietnamese call “Black April,” Hanoi’s military victory that united Vietnam under a Communist dictatorship.

The Abandonment of Vietnam

The idea that the United States, at least to some degree, abandoned South Vietnam is present in orthodox commentaries. Scholars such as Herring, Moss, and Turley do not deny that US aid cuts undermined ARVN’s fighting ability. They also cover how the American withdrawal from South Vietnam hurt the country’s economy by depriving it of funds that provided thousands of civilian jobs. The impact of worldwide inflation, caused by the 1973 Arab oil boycott of Western nations and the resultant spike of oil prices, also receives mention. However, as Moss puts it in a representative comment, while the congressional aid cuts “no doubt sapped the strength and morale of the RVNAF [Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) Armed Forces] forces … they were not the most important causes of the GNV’s growing military weaknesses.” Those causes, the ones that mattered, were to be found in the shortcomings of the Saigon regime.⁷ It is this point that revisionists, at least some of them, firmly reject. In rebuttal, they argue that with continued US support at the level promised, the non-Communist regime in South Vietnam could have survived. Instead, between 1973 and 1975, piece by piece, Washington withdrew its support to the point where it can be said the United States abandoned South Vietnam. And this, not South Vietnam’s failings, was the fundamental cause of Saigon’s military collapse and defeat in 1975.

The revisionist case about the abandonment of South Vietnam dates from when it was happening. As one might expect, it was made by a variety of US government officials, including Nixon and Kissinger. Some of the most compelling early statements of that case came from a soldier on the scene in South Vietnam, Major General John E. Murray, the author of a series of urgent and prescient dispatches from Saigon between 1973 and 1975. In January 1973 Murray became head of the newly created Defense Attaché Office (DAO), which was charged with managing US military aid to South Vietnam after the Paris Accords. He was warning of critical shortages and a dangerous situation in South Vietnam by December of that year. Interestingly, Murray is virtually ignored in many standard orthodox accounts of the war.⁸ Once the war was over, Dave Richard Palmer provided a succinct early statement of the abandonment case when he observed that “the Soviet Union and China refurbished and strengthened Hanoi’s army while the United States gradually constricted its own flow of supplies to Saigon.”⁹

By far the most thorough early presentation of evidence for the abandonment case is a study published by the US Army Center of Military History, Vietnam from Cease-Fire to Capitulation, by Col. William E. Le Gro. Le Gro served in South Vietnam as a senior officer with the MACV and then in the DAO from December 1972 until April 1975. He does not overlook the leadership shortcomings of the Thieu regime with regard to civilian and military leadership; in fact, he cites strong leadership “at the highest levels” in Saigon as one of the two key missing factors that might have avoided South Vietnam’s defeat. Le Gro’s other key vital missing factor was “unflagging American moral and material support,”¹⁰ and this point has become a foundational part of the revisionist case as it has evolved over the years. Sorley stresses it in making the abandonment case in several works, including A Better War. Citing South Vietnamese General Cao Van Vien, chief of the ARVN Joint General Staff, Sorley mentions three “vital areas” where US help was essential: air support, including troop transport; sea support; and the replacement of weapons and supplies. He adds that these areas “had always been factored into calculations of the appropriate South Vietnamese forces.” The importance of American aid to Saigon’s survival is also central to the most comprehensive overview of the post–Paris Accords period, George J. Veith’s Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973–1975. Veith is a former US Army captain and the author of two other books on the Vietnam War. In writing Black April, he consulted extensively with Le Gro and also with Merle Pribbenow, the acclaimed translator of Vietnamese whose efforts gave Veith access to numerous sources previously unavailable to other scholars. In his treatment of the US abandonment issue, Veith seconds Sorley by noting that after the Paris Accords no major US military or civilian official believed South Vietnam could withstand another major attack without the backing of US firepower. He states that by 1973 the ARVN, its problems notwithstanding, had become a military force capable of defeating the North Vietnamese. He concludes that had the ARVN been adequately supplied and given steady American support after the ceasefire, “the outcome of the war might have been vastly different.”¹¹

The “Most Murderous Truce”

The sequence of policies and events that doomed South Vietnam began as soon as the Paris Accords were signed. South Vietnam soon became the scene of fierce fighting, not the lasting peace called for by the Accords or even a real truce.¹² Meanwhile, Congress cut aid to South Vietnam. Antiwar political figures in Congress were able to impose these cuts when President Nixon was weakened by the Watergate scandal, which emerged as a major factor in American politics in early 1973. Congress made these cuts despite the continued requests for higher levels of support by Nixon and, after he had to resign in August 1974 because of Watergate, his successor Gerald Ford. As a result of congressional cuts, US military aid to South Vietnam decreased drastically between 1973 and 1975: from $2.3 billion in fiscal year 1973 to just over $1.1 billion in 1974 to only $700 million authorized for 1975, a year in which the Ford administration requested $1.5 billion. Meanwhile, price increases and other factors such as shipping costs ate away at what that money could buy, to the point where the $700 million authorized for 1975 could purchase only one-fifth of the material provided to the South Vietnamese armed forces in previous years.¹³

In addition, as of August 1973, having already ended all funding for military operations in Laos and Cambodia, Congress ended all funding for any American military activities in Indochina, which meant that US air and naval power could not be used to support South Vietnam in the event of North Vietnamese violations of the cease-fire mandated by the Paris Accords. That cease-fire, as already noted, was a fiction, as North Vietnam violated it from the start. During 1973 North Vietnamese efforts to seize more territory – its so-called Landgrab 73 or land and population grab campaign – plus other attacks turned that year into one of the bloodiest of the war, leading French journalist Olivier Todd to call the 1973 cease-fire “the most murderous truce this century.” However, despite 15,000 Communist acts of terror, the ARVN fought well, and at year’s end Saigon controlled slightly more territory and people than when the Paris Accords were signed. In Davidson’s words, a year after the Paris Accords South Vietnam “still held the upper hand.”¹⁴

The declining American support for South Vietnam had a serious implication beyond its direct impact on the ARVN: it was a key factor in the decision of North Vietnam’s ruling Politburo to resume full-scale warfare in the South, a decision it made in May 1973. Davidson observes that congressional cuts “freed the Politburo’s hand to strike the RVN whenever it so desired.” Declining US support was not the only reason for Hanoi’s timing, however. As Veith points out, the Politburo, pressured as always by Le Duan, believed it had a small window of opportunity to win the war. South Vietnam was plagued by economic and political weakness, as was the United States. However, neither condition was likely to last for long. The Politburo also was concerned about its relations with China, including Beijing’s claims on islands near the Vietnamese coastline. As the Politburo itself observed in its study of the war two decades later, if it had waited “the situation might have become very complicated and dangerous.” Therefore, in early 1973 North Vietnam began its “strategic preparations” to finish its conquest of South Vietnam.¹⁵

The intense combat of 1973 was possible because during that year the North Vietnamese, in violation of the Paris Accords, poured new troops and heavy weapons into South Vietnam. While the actual numbers vary from source to source, Sorley’s figures, some of which are drawn from Communist sources, can be considered reliable. Sorley quotes the official North Vietnamese history of the PAVN to the effect that between January and September 1973, the quantity of supplies sent into South Vietnam reached 140,000 tons, four times that of 1972. This included 80,000 tons of military supplies, which in turn included 27,000 tons of weapons. During 1973, in terms of personnel, 100,000 soldiers and civilian cadres “marched from North Vietnam to the battlefields of South Vietnam,” as the PAVN history puts it. This included two infantry divisions, an antiaircraft division, two artillery regiments, an armored regiment, an engineering regiment, and other assorted units. Despite high combat losses during 1973, the massive reinforcements that streamed down the Ho Chi Minh Trail meant that by year’s end North Vietnamese forces in the South had increased by 40,000. They also were equipped with six times as many tanks and three times as many artillery pieces as before.¹⁶ Turley, who includes figures for Vietcong main-force units and guerrillas, places the total for Communist forces in the South at 230,000.¹⁷

All these troops and supplies could reach Vietnam and also arrive far more quickly than before because of improvements to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. At the time of the Paris Accords, it already was an elaborate network of thousands of miles of jungle trails and roads much improved from what it had been a decade earlier. With the end of American air interdiction, Hanoi was able to expand and transform it into something akin to a modern military highway network.

It was a massive effort. A two-lane, all-weather hard-surfaced road was built in Laos stretching from just south of the 17th parallel to within less than 100 miles of Saigon, that is, almost the entire length of South Vietnam. It was one of a growing number of such modernized roads that were now part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail network. A fuel pipeline, essential to supply all the tanks, trucks, and other vehicles being shipped to South Vietnam, ran along the same route. Veith considers the eight-inch pipeline the key logistical upgrade for PAVN forces in the South because they no longer faced fuel shortages despite being equipped with more armor and other modern vehicles than ever before. There were many other major improvements as well, as Hanoi dispatched more than 30,000 people and more than 1,000 vehicles and specialized machines for north-south road construction in Laos and in territory it controlled inside South Vietnam. Building the “road to victory,” according to the official PAVN history, became “the entire nation’s number one priority.” As a result, by 1974 the north/south route of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos was supplemented by a similar route – the Truong Son Corridor, or Corridor 613 – stretching 600 miles southward from the DMZ, entirely within the mountainous western section of South Vietnam. By September 1974, that route was an all-weather thoroughfare twenty-six feet wide complete with eastward spurs to the battlefronts. North Vietnamese soldiers – 100,000 in 1973 and 80,000 in 1974 according to North Vietnamese General Hoang Van Thai, a key staff officer for General Giap – rather than walking now often rode to South Vietnam in truck convoys, some of which numbered 300 vehicles. Armor, heavy artillery, antiaircraft weapons, and other materials all rolled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They could be serviced at new supply depots and repair facilities along the route, which had been built because Hanoi no longer had to worry they would be attacked by US aircraft. The expanded “strategic transportation routes,” as General Thai called the trail, even allowed Hanoi for the first time to evacuate badly wounded troops back to North Vietnam for proper treatment.¹⁸

Weapons and US versus Soviet and Chinese Aid

Another important point to understand about what revisionists call the abandonment of South Vietnam is the nature and quality of the weapons North Vietnam was able to send to South Vietnam as compared to those in ARVN hands. During 1973 the number of tanks available to North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam (or just across the border in Laos and Cambodia), including modern T-54 models, increased from 100 to 500; that number soon swelled to 650, at least twice the number available to ARVN. Orthodox commentators often stress that when it came to heavy artillery, ARVN had an advantage, but as Major George R. Dunham and Colonel David A. Quinlan point out in their survey of the US Marines in Vietnam, between 1973 and 1975 “raw statistics relating to artillery reveal how misleading the numbers game” actually is. It is true that as of 1975 the ARVN had about 1,200 artillery pieces (down from 1,600 in 1973) versus about 400 in PAVN hands. The trouble for the ARVN, as both Dunham/Quinlan and Le Gro note, was that the PAVN’s main artillery pieces were Soviet 122-mm howitzers and 122 mm and 130 mm guns. These could be fired faster and had a longer range than the ARVN’s primary artillery weapons, American 105 mm and 155 mm howitzers. The Soviet weapons also were highly mobile, another factor that enabled PAVN forces to counter the ARVN’s numerical superiority. The ARVN did have a few long-range US 175mm guns, but at long range the Soviet 122 mm howitzers and 130 mm guns were more accurate than even these weapons. This essentially allowed PAVN gunners to fire on ARVN positions without fear of effective retaliation. In addition, by the end of 1973 the PAVN’s twenty antiaircraft regiments in the South were equipped with advanced handheld Soviet SA-7 heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles; some units also had deadly SA-2 antiaircraft missiles mounted on mobile launchers. One antiaircraft regiment even was equipped with the Soviet ZSU-23, an ultramodern armored vehicle featuring radar-guided antiaircraft cannon, which had never before been deployed in Vietnam. These were extremely effective weapons against South Vietnamese aircraft attempting to support Saigon’s ground troops.¹⁹

The ARVN’s disadvantage in heavy and advanced weapons is part of the larger question of the impact US aid reduction to Saigon had on the outcome of the war. The reduction of US aid to South Vietnam is only half of a key equation regarding the years 1973 to 1975. The other half is the Soviet and Chinese aid to North Vietnam, and that aid is one of the main bones of contention between orthodox and revisionist commentators, especially in light of the disastrous impact the US aid reduction had on South Vietnam’s armed forces. Some orthodox historians have argued that after the Paris Accords Soviet and Chinese aid to North Vietnam also decreased and that the aid that was forthcoming was increasingly economic rather than military. The raw aid figures they cite presumably show that Washington was no less forthcoming than were Moscow and Beijing. To cite two examples of this line of thinking, Prados contends that “Saigon may have been famished but so was Hanoi,” while Turley, even while admitting that the figures on US versus Communist arms shipments “are not fully comparable,” argues that the aid figures “remove any doubt about Washington’s generosity in comparison with that of Moscow and Beijing.”²⁰ This fits neatly with assertions that, contra certain revisionists, the main reasons for Saigon’s collapse in 1975 cannot be blamed on US aid cuts but rather on the Saigon regime’s and ARVN’s multiple failings.

One does not have to be a revisionist to find serious problems with this argument. It is true that during 1974 PAVN troops in South Vietnam faced shortages in ammunition for their burgeoning number of tanks and artillery pieces.²¹ But those shortages were being redressed; more to the point, at no time did they cause problems nearly as severe as those faced by the ARVN. Furthermore, during late 1974 and early 1975, the Soviets dramatically increased their aid to Hanoi, something that could not have been included in American intelligence estimates available at the time. That huge spike came after General Viktor Kulikov, the head of the Soviet general staff, visited Hanoi in late 1974; immediately after his departure, Soviet shipments by sea of war material to North Vietnam increased fourfold. As Frank Snepp, the chief CIA strategy analyst in Saigon at the time observed, Moscow was giving Hanoi “full aid and comfort” in its effort to finish off South Vietnam. Willbanks notes that the actual amount of Soviet aid to North Vietnam remains “subject to debate.” At the same time, he points out that “the sheer volume of new equipment and weapons during the final offensive in 1975 was most impressive, demonstrating few if any shortages.”²² For example, as Veith reports, PAVN units in the southernmost part of the country (which the North Vietnamese called the B-2 Front) had 58,000 tons of supplies in mid-April as they prepared for the assault on Saigon. This was supplemented by 240 trucks en route carrying 13,000 rounds of 130 mm shells; also en route were 40 trucks carrying spare parts for tanks and 150 trucks with mortar ammunition. Focusing on the 130 mm rounds, which were fired from artillery guns the ARVN could not match in terms of power or range, Veith rhetorically ask how North Vietnam suddenly came up with this particular ammunition. His answer: “Only the Soviets could have supplied such ammunition.”²³

Veith finds the assertion that after the Paris Accords Hanoi received considerably less aid than Saigon “disingenuous,” in part because US intelligence lacked specific information about the size and actual costs of Soviet and Chinese aid, which in turn made all estimates “guesswork.”²⁴ US intelligence agencies acknowledged this at the time in their classified reports. For example, an interagency intelligence memorandum on North Vietnamese military imports during 1974 issued jointly by the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and State Department in January 1975 states that its estimate “will undoubtedly increase as additional evidence becomes available.” It further qualifies its estimates by noting that they include only the cost of the actual equipment received, not the costs of spare parts, training, and transportation, “for which there is virtually no information.” The next sentence in the report points out that these items, as well as others such as rations, medical supplies, and the costs of contractor support for various services, are included in US military aid totals. Another classified report issued at about the same time, this one a CIA/DIA memorandum, says that estimates of military aid to North Vietnam “are subject to a wide margin of error.”²⁵ The problem of comparing US and Soviet/Chinese military aid, Veith stresses, is compounded by the important fact that the two military systems and sets of weapons were so different, a point also made by CIA/DIA/State Department intelligence analysts. Soviet and Chinese weapons were cheaper than US weapons and easier to maintain, which meant that Communist aid went much further than did US aid. In addition, ARVN had been trained to fight according to US doctrine, which stressed machines and firepower, a more expensive approach to warfare than the Soviet/Chinese approach, which put more emphasis on personnel.²⁶

Another vital consideration, and perhaps the most important one of all, is what each side actually needed. While it is true that from 1973 through the end of 1974 – that is, until Kulikov’s visit to Hanoi and the subsequent spike in Soviet shipments to North Vietnam – Soviet military aid to North Vietnam decreased, the essential fact is that after the Paris Accords Hanoi’s military needs decreased considerably. The reason is straightforward: North Vietnam no longer had to deal with US military power. This is one of the first points made in the joint CIA/DIA/State Department report of January 1975, which states that “with no air war in North Vietnam,” there was less need for “sophisticated and expensive” Soviet air defense equipment. The report adds that this equipment constituted at least a third of North Vietnam’s military imports prior to the Paris Accords, and “even more” if antiaircraft munitions are included. Because Hanoi no longer had to defend against US bombing, as of January 1975 there were at most twenty-five operational SAM missile sites in North Vietnam, as compared to forty-eight two years earlier. This new situation, the CIA and DIA noted, in which Hanoi no longer had to face US airpower north of the 17th parallel, allowed Hanoi to send at least 100 Soviet-supplied SA-7 shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons to South Vietnam, where they saw “heavy use” in 1974.²⁷ In other words, North Vietnamese needs actually decreased at the very time when South Vietnamese needs were increasing.

Ammunition requirements are part of this equation. Le Gro points out that the PAVN, which was on the offensive, had the great advantage of being able to accomplish its objectives with far less ammunition requirements than the ARVN, which was on the defensive. He explains:

Through careful reconnaissance, registration, and the siting of batteries in concealed locations, the attacker concentrated heavy fires on small targets, while the defender had to search great areas, cover many avenues of approach and suspected enemy positions, and use much larger amounts of ammunition in the defense. The requirements for defense of populated areas, thousands of bridges, and hundreds of miles of highway, left the RVNAF with few forces available to use in deep or prolonged offensives.²⁸

Veith adds another crucial point regarding Soviet aid: the matter of training. One of the key reasons the Easter Offensive failed is that General Giap did not understand how to coordinate what is known as combined arms operations: that is, the simultaneous use of different military arms – such as infantry, armor, and artillery – in an operation. This is essential in modern warfare given the great variety of available weapons, and after 1972, as Veith notes, the PAVN “needed to become a modern army, and only the Soviets could train it in this type of warfare.” Therefore, in the fall of 1973, by which time the Paris Accords precluded the United States from providing any additional advising to the South Vietnamese, several leading North Vietnamese commanders went to the Soviet Union to train in this kind of warfare. Not coincidentally, this was only a few months after the North Vietnamese Politburo had voted to resume full-scale warfare to conquer the South. There is no way to measure the value of this aid in dollars; it does not appear on any ledger. What one can say given the conventional invasion Hanoi launched against South Vietnam in late 1974 – an invasion spearheaded by armor, the “key to victory” according to Veith – is that this particular form of Soviet aid was invaluable.²⁹

Veith provides a broader perspective on the question of Saigon’s and Hanoi’s respective aid requirement that reduces the orthodox focus on numbers to absolute meaninglessness. He explains that the geography made it extremely difficult to defend South Vietnam from invasion. It is a long, narrow country with an exposed western flank 800 miles long. Rugged mountainous terrain and thick jungle vegetation add to the problem of defense, as does the lack of space between the mountains and the coast where the bulk of the population lives, which leaves no room to absorb an attack. Faced with this geographic challenge, the South Vietnamese armed forces, to defend their territory and, above all, their people, “had to guard everywhere, all the time.” The Communists, enjoying the interior lines provided by the Ho Chi Minh Trail, could maintain smaller forces because they could mass them at will and attack at the point of their choosing. Furthermore, the South Vietnamese not only needed more troops, they also required more equipment to move troops and weapons to respond to North Vietnamese attacks. This equipment was expensive and, in the case of helicopters and fix-wing aircraft, technologically complex and costly to maintain. In short, given their respective tasks, the costs of the two military establishments were not comparable: South Vietnam needed much more aid to defend than North Vietnam needed to attack. Little wonder Veith calls the dollar-for-dollar comparisons of American and Soviet/Chinese military aid to their respective Vietnamese clients “disingenuous.”³⁰

Two other factors must be taken into account to understand South Vietnam’s needs and the corrosive impact of American aid cuts on the South Vietnamese armed forces and government. First, as Veith notes, even before the US aid cuts, the withdrawal from Vietnam of all American troops and airpower left the South Vietnamese defending their country “with less than half the previous forces and a fraction of the firepower.” Second, while Washington had expected that the cease-fire would reduce the expenses and needs of South Vietnam’s armed forces, “the ceasefire never materialized.”³¹ South Vietnam therefore had been deprived of vital resources and support, but the situation that was supposed to enable it to survive under those circumstances did not exist.

What this meant, as Davidson puts it, is that as of 1974 South Vietnam had to fight a “rich man’s war on a pauper’s budget.” The result was “devastating.” Training in every branch of the armed forces “ceased altogether.” The ability to move troops and supplies by helicopters and cargo aircraft fell by 50 percent to 70 percent. The shortage of spare parts sidelined vehicles, and the cannibalization of some vehicles to supply others reduced inventories even further. The shortages of munitions became a serious problem, forcing the ARVN to reduce its artillery and mortar fire. Hand grenades were rationed, and rifle ammunition issued to troops was cut by 50 percent. Davidson cites North Vietnamese General Van Tien Dung, the commander of the 1975 offensive that ended the war, who wrote shortly after his victory that the US cuts forced President Thieu to “fight a poor man’s war.” The North Vietnamese general also reported that ARVN’s firepower fell by nearly 60 percent and its mobility by half.³²

Veith provides extensive additional evidence along the same lines, including how the aid cuts affected specific battles. For example, in August 1974, after the fall of the small but strategic town of Thoung Dec, which controlled an important route to the port city of Danang, aid cuts were an important factor in the ARVN’s inability to retake that town. The ARVN artillery could only fire six rounds of 105 mm shells and four rounds of 175 mm shells per gun per day. This added up to less than 500 total rounds both in support of the attack and to protect outposts spread over a province and a half. Nor could the ARVN commander use his armor to support attacking troops because he lacked sufficient fuel. Veith notes that “in the eyes of the increasingly demoralized ARVN troops, PAVN supplies appeared plentiful.”³³ Meanwhile, by the middle of 1974, South Vietnamese civilian morale – battered by inflation, general economic decline, and the mounting evidence that the United States would not reenter the war with air and naval power under any circumstances – was low and sinking further.³⁴

Finally, Veith stresses that the impact of aid cuts on South Vietnam’s military forces was not only predictable, but predicted. In mid-December 1973, several months after Congress first voted to cut aid funding for South Vietnam, the US Army cut off all funds for operations and maintenance for the rest of the 1973 fiscal year (which ran through June 1974). General Murray immediately warned that within six months there would be critical shortages of replacement parts, ammunition, and other supplies vital to ARVN’s ability to fight. In April and May of 1974, ARVN conducted a highly successful offensive operation, a two-week campaign against PAVN forces on both sides of the Cambodian border northwest of Saigon. It turned out to be ARVN’s last offensive operation because it was followed by ARVN’s rapid decline. Le Gro, who covered the campaign in detail, explains, “severe constraints on ammunition expenditures, fuel usage, and flying hours permitted no new initiatives.” To which Veith adds, “It was the exact period Murray had warned about: the point where the effects of the supply cut-off would hit.”³⁵

Black April

The military struggle that took place in South Vietnam in the spring of 1975 was the largest Southeast Asian war in history fought strictly by Southeast Asians. It was fought by more than one million Vietnamese conventional, guerrilla, and militia forces and other combatants, and it claimed at least 200,000 lives, about equally divided between soldiers and combatants.³⁶ Almost the entire North Vietnamese army was committed to the battle, including most of the country’s air defenses. The attacking PAVN force consisted of more than 300,000 combat and support troops equipped with about 700 tanks (twice the number in ARVN hands), 400 artillery pieces, and more than 200 antiaircraft weapons. To this must be added 40,000 PAVN troops in Cambodia, 50,000 support personnel in Laos, 70,000 PAVN troops in reserve in the North ready for immediate deployment in the South, and Vietcong guerrillas in South Vietnam. Compared to the weakened ARVN, this was an overwhelming force that, unlike in 1972, was backed by a modern and effective logistics system to keep it well supplied.³⁷ Hanoi also proved to be flexible and ready to exploit unexpected opportunities. For example, during December 1974 and January 1975 PAVN troops overran an entire province in the central part of South Vietnam. That encouraged the Politburo, but even more encouraging was the failure of the United States to respond, as both Hanoi and Saigon had expected, with airpower. As a result, new plans were drawn up for further successful major attacks.³⁸ In March 1975 these attacks swelled into the offensive that first forced a chaotic and disastrous ARVN retreat from the territory it held in the Central Highlands, the strategic plateau along South Vietnam’s border with Laos and Cambodia, and then ended with the Ho Chi Minh Campaign, which produced the conquest of Saigon, the South Vietnamese government’s surrender on April 30, and the end of the war.

The details of this offensive are available in many places, most comprehensively in Veith’s Black April, the South Vietnamese term for when Saigon fell, and will not be covered here. Instead, the focus will be on how the ARVN comported itself during the fighting. The conventional wisdom, which transcends the orthodox/revisionist divide, is that the ARVN fought poorly, with its leaders in particular coming in for criticism for making mistakes and also in many cases for deserting their troops. Willbanks writes that the ARVN at times fought well but finds these instances “the exception rather than the rule, due to abysmal combat leadership.”³⁹ Davidson is especially scathing when he calls the ARVN’s final effort “a craven, every-man-for-himself scuttle for the exits.” He says this despite having noted earlier the corrosive effects of declining US aid on the ARVN’s ability to maintain its fighting strength, all this while Hanoi was able to refit, reinforce, and reequip its divisions in South Vietnam and also expand and modernize the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Davidson is not entirely negative: he also cites the “epic stand” by the ARVN’s 18th Division in defense of the town of Xuan Loc, about sixty miles from Saigon, to illustrate how during the Ho Chi Minh Campaign the ARVN demonstrated “for the last time that, when properly led, it had the ‘right stuff.’”⁴⁰

The consensus regarding the ARVN’s leadership failures and its consequent failure to fight is widespread. Even Sorley concedes this point, albeit with important caveats. He quotes Douglas Pike’s statement that the ARVN “didn’t fight at all” in 1975. However, he then quotes Thomas Polgar, the highly capable CIA station chief in Saigon at the time, who assessed what happened in 1975 by contrasting it to what happened in 1972. In 1972, Polgar observed, the South Vietnamese “fought like hell” because they understood the “Americans were in it.” In 1975, believing they did not have American support, “their morale gave out and they did not fight.” Sorley generally follows Polgar. He writes that by 1975 the South Vietnamese “had run out of conviction.” This, however, was caused by “the realization that their sometime ally the United States had abandoned them and by the impending depletion of their means to carry on the fight.” All that said, Sorley adds, “it must be admitted, they [the South Vietnamese] ran out of leadership.”⁴¹

In referring to the heroic ARVN stand at Xuan Loc, Willbanks suggests that had such an effort been more common, the war’s outcome might have been “drastically different.”⁴² This is a point that Le Gro, Sorley, and Veith also address, but it takes them to a more positive assessment of ARVN’s performance during its last years. Le Gro notes that between the cease-fire of 1973 and the final defeat in 1975, “unit for unit” and “man for man,” the South Vietnamese “repeatedly proved themselves superior to their enemies.”⁴³ Sorley’s defense of the ARVN is that it proved itself in 1972 when it had the American backing it deserved. In “Reassessing ARVN,” he argues that South Vietnamese forces “performed admirably” in defeating the Tet Offensive and the smaller Communist offensives that followed during 1968. Tet was ARVN’s “first real test,” and it passed. Despite some setbacks, it continued to do well between 1969 and 1972, gradually taking more and more territory from the enemy. In 1972, “with courage and blood,” South Vietnam defeated Hanoi’s Easter Offensive. Sorley praises ARVN’s performance between the Paris Accords and Hanoi’s final offensive. By 1975, however, deserted by the United States, the situation was hopeless to the point where nothing better than what actually happened could have been expected. Yet he also points out that during that massive fifty-five-day onslaught “much hard fighting took place.” This Sorley adds, is a tribute to the South Vietnamese, who by then had to know “what the final outcome would inevitably be.”⁴⁴

In reviewing how the ARVN has been evaluated, Sorley reminds its critics that during the Cold War the United States had to station several hundred thousand troops in West Germany “precisely because the Germans could not stave off Soviet or Warsaw Pact aggression without American help.” After the Korean War, 50,000 American troops remained in South Korea for the same reason. Yet, Sorley notes with some bitterness, it was not suggested that the West German or South Korean armed forces should be “ridiculed or reviled” because they needed US help. “Only South Vietnam … was singled out for such unfair and mean-spirited treatment.”⁴⁵

The claim that the ARVN performed respectably during the 1975 fighting that culminated in Black April plays little or no role in most versions of the revisionist viewpoint on the Vietnam War. Keith Taylor devotes one sentence to the 1975 fighting in his history of the Vietnamese people. Walton and Dave Richard Palmer have slightly more to say on the fighting that year but barely mention the AVRN’s performance. Bruce Palmer, Sorley, Davidson, and especially Willbanks have somewhat more to say, with the first two providing a more positive assessment of ARVN than the last two, but their main concerns in discussing the events in question lie elsewhere. The same applies to Le Gro, whose coverage of the December 1974–April 1975 fighting is comprehensive and detailed.

Veith takes a different approach. He reinforces the revisionist case by documenting, considerably more extensively than other authors, how US aid cuts after 1973 were the fundamental factor that undermined ARVN’s ability to defend South Vietnam, an issue that has been discussed earlier in this chapter. He also adds another element to the revisionist case, albeit one that is a matter of debate within the revisionist camp: the argument that the ARVN, even in defeat, acquitted itself well in the four months of fighting that culminated in Black April until it was overwhelmed by superior force.

Veith argues that the evidence, including what happened from 1973 to 1975, refutes the conventional thesis that South Vietnam’s armed forces were ineffectual “because of the regime’s illegitimacy” and that “hence the war was unwinnable.” His objective is to provide a “counterweight” to that assessment of the South Vietnamese while making sure not to “whitewash their mistakes or disregard their faults.” There were “both good and poor units, excellent and lackluster leaders”; the problem is that Western commentators rarely covered or depicted the good units and leaders. Veith turns to a South Vietnamese battalion commander for context regarding two of the worst South Vietnamese disasters during the 1975 fighting, the retreat from the Central Highlands and the chaos at Danang: “We are ashamed of these things, but they do not define us.” Veith’s point, which he documents over hundreds of pages, is that South Vietnam’s military, “particularly in the 1973–1975 period, had performed much better than anyone has realized.”⁴⁶

Space permits only a few of Veith’s examples to be mentioned here. He cites a series of battles during 1975, including the 18th Division’s stand at Xuan Loc, in which ARVN troops and their commanders acquitted themselves well. Some of these battles are known only to specialists, such as a South Vietnamese counterattack in early April that resulted in the recapture of several villages on the major coastal road Route 1. At Danang, where the panic that occurred at the evacuation points was “a disgrace,” Veith points out that “for the most part” the South Vietnamese soldiers fought well. A variety of factors then contributed to the sudden breakdown of morale that ultimately occurred. Most involved other battlefield reverses, most notably the disastrous retreat from the Central Highlands town of Pleiku. But “also critical” was the decision by the US Congress to deny additional aid as the fighting raged. Veith also debunks the reports by many American journalists that in March and April of 1975 ARVN officers deserted their troops “in droves”; the reality is that very few officers commanding troops during the last days of fighting did so. Most of the military men guilty of leaving the country early were staff officers, not unit commanders.⁴⁷

Veith calls on Communist leaders to help refute the notion that the final four-day battle that ended with the fall of Saigon was an easy victory. In an article written eleven years later, Le Duc Tho called the battle “fierce,” adding that thousands of “sons and daughters” lost their lives just before Saigon fell. A general on the scene later commented that if he heard someone say the battle for Saigon was easy, “I will give him a shovel and have him dig the graves of our dead.” In terms of specifics, a postwar Hanoi study reported that in the last stages of the war, North Vietnamese forces lost 6,000 killed and wounded.⁴⁸

A number of expert reviewers have found Veith’s case for the ARVN convincing. Tom Glenn served as an intelligence officer for many years in South Vietnam and was still in Saigon on April 29, 1975, a day before the city fell. In his view, “Veith dispels the misconception that the South Vietnamese fought poorly and disintegrated in the face of a resolute North Vietnamese onslaught.” To the contrary, “Unit after unit fought with valor against overwhelming odds,” including, of course, the 18th Division at Xuan Loc.⁴⁹ Dr. William J. Gregor, professor of Social Sciences at the School of Advanced Military Studies at the US Army Command and General Staff College, concurs with this assessment. Black April, he writes in his review of that book, “makes it clear that the military forces of South Vietnam were neither inept nor cowardly.” Even more to the point, “during the Great Spring Offensive [of 1975] they often got the better of their North Vietnamese opponents tactically.” The problem ARVN could not overcome was a combination of two years of North Vietnamese preparations and the simultaneous decline of military aid to South Vietnam. Again agreeing with Veith, Gregor writes that the US Congress had abandoned the US commitment to South Vietnam.⁵⁰

Map 9 The North Vietnamese Spring Offensive, 1975

Mark Moyar credits Veith with providing a detailed account of the 1973–1975 period, which heretofore had received only “cursory treatment” from historians. He believes Veith convincingly shows that in 1975 South Vietnamese commanders and their troops “fought much better than has been believed.” As for the “root cause” of their defeat, Moyar says Veith “demonstrates persuasively” that it was the severe cuts imposed by Congress in 1974.⁵¹

The result of that defeat was Black April: the fall of Saigon and surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. The Vietnam War was finally over. For the Vietnamese people as a whole, the war had lasted about a quarter of a century. For the American people, in terms of traditional combat, it had lasted eight years, longer than any war since their country’s struggle for independence.

For the people of South Vietnam, less those thousands who escaped with the Americans during the war’s last desperate and chaotic days and more than one million so-called boat people who fled subsequently, it meant life under a Communist dictatorship based in Hanoi. For the United States as a super power, it meant a major Cold War defeat and the first war this country ever lost. For everyone interested in what happened, it meant and has continues to mean a debate that, unlike the war that spawned it, shows no sign of ending.