South Vietnam in 1975: The Year of Communist Victory

Abstract

A MAJOR TURNING POINT of the war in South Vietnam was the loss of Phuoc Long Province 70 miles north of Saigon on January 7, 1975, after a three-week communist offensive. It was not of great strategic importance but it was the first province to fall since the temporary loss of Quang Tri in 1972, and this time national mourning was proclaimed. To the writer, in Saigon at the time, the public reaction was one of mounting apprehension mixed with widespread cynicism; corruption in the Army was believed by many to be so gross that outpost defenders were having to pay other units for artillery support and air supply. The dread in Saigon was compounded by the knowledge that the North Vietnamese gradually had extended the Ho Chi Minh trail after the 1973 ceasefire into a network of all-weather roads from the North through Laos and Cambodia, cutting down travel time to the Mekong delta from four months of night marches to 17 days.' The government had moved belatedly in August 1974 to thin out and consolidate its over-extended outpost system in the delta (as the communists had done earlier), abandoning a considerable number in the process since it could no longer afford the prodigious artillery and air support to which it had become accustomed through American training.2 The communists had built up their forces considerably and varying estimates of their eventual total strength in the South ranged up to 350,000 regular northern combat and supply troops plus 100,000 southern guerrillas. The government had about 465,000 regulars plus 1,400,000 local defense personnel and over a half million men in other paramilitary formations; its airforce of about 1200 operational aircraft at any given time was the only one used in action (aside from two small