A pretty good description of the fall and evacuation of South Vietnam in 1975, including newsreel footage, maps, observations of witnesses, and interpretation by expert talking heads. It's balanced and objective but it pulls no punches.
All this happened forty years ago and now students read about this momentous war in history books, I guess, so maybe a brief context should be offered.
Vietnam was divided into the communist north and the corrupt south. The south also had guerrilla fighters who were disrupting everyday life and committing foul deeds. They were aided by the regular army of North Vietnam.
In the mid 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided it was time to put an end to the communist aggression and began to send troops and other facilities to South Vietnam, almost half a million men. It didn't work out and a peace treaty was finally signed in 1973. The peace was to be managed by the South Vietnamese government with American assistance in case of a resumption of aggression by the north.
That treaty, guaranteeing the south's independence, was signed by President Richard Nixon, whom the north feared. As soon as he was out of office, the north attacked South Vietnam again. The American public, fed up with ten years of a brutal war and the loss of 58,000 dead and 130,000 maimed, were not about to interfere.
The South was unable to properly defend itself despite American equipment. Leadership in the dictatorial South Vietnamese government and military was poor and riddled with communist spies and sympathizers. Eventually the drive by the army of North Vietnam reached the southern capital of Saigon and the remaining American staff, as well as every Vietnamese family who had been associated with them, scrambled frantically to escape in every way possible. The North Vietnamese were fond of mass executions.
Whatever "order" there was in the escape was due to plans organized and executed without the ambassador's knowledge, by his own staff and by State Department personnel. The ambassador continued to insist that talk of evacuation was defeatist. When an unauthorized flight of South Vietnamese military men and their families reached the Philippines, the man responsible was fired.
That "evacuation" is the subject of this documentary. Much of the responsibility is pinned directly on the ambassador, Graham Martin, who had formulated no plans for an escape because he believed the army of the north would never reach Saigon. And it was a most humiliating mêlée, with terrified people, men, women, and babies, hanging on to departing airliners during take off runs and falling to the tarmac.
A task force of some fifty ships stood offshore from Saigon. Only Americans were to be evacuated, but each helicopter was mobbed by desperate and loyal South Vietnamese civilians. Not just high ranking Vietnamese military but the wives and families of Americans, their tailors and cooks. Helicopters with hangers on dangling from their skids left from the roof of the American embassy and other locations. So many helicopters landed on the decks of one ship that, in order to make room for the next arrivals, the first arrivals were pushed overboard.
The media photos and the videos shown at the time give an impression of near chaos and the impression seems to have been accurate enough. The evacuation was a pitiless process. But then the whole war -- which had lasted thirty years for the Vietnamese -- seems mindless in retrospect.
All this happened forty years ago and now students read about this momentous war in history books, I guess, so maybe a brief context should be offered.
Vietnam was divided into the communist north and the corrupt south. The south also had guerrilla fighters who were disrupting everyday life and committing foul deeds. They were aided by the regular army of North Vietnam.
In the mid 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided it was time to put an end to the communist aggression and began to send troops and other facilities to South Vietnam, almost half a million men. It didn't work out and a peace treaty was finally signed in 1973. The peace was to be managed by the South Vietnamese government with American assistance in case of a resumption of aggression by the north.
That treaty, guaranteeing the south's independence, was signed by President Richard Nixon, whom the north feared. As soon as he was out of office, the north attacked South Vietnam again. The American public, fed up with ten years of a brutal war and the loss of 58,000 dead and 130,000 maimed, were not about to interfere.
The South was unable to properly defend itself despite American equipment. Leadership in the dictatorial South Vietnamese government and military was poor and riddled with communist spies and sympathizers. Eventually the drive by the army of North Vietnam reached the southern capital of Saigon and the remaining American staff, as well as every Vietnamese family who had been associated with them, scrambled frantically to escape in every way possible. The North Vietnamese were fond of mass executions.
Whatever "order" there was in the escape was due to plans organized and executed without the ambassador's knowledge, by his own staff and by State Department personnel. The ambassador continued to insist that talk of evacuation was defeatist. When an unauthorized flight of South Vietnamese military men and their families reached the Philippines, the man responsible was fired.
That "evacuation" is the subject of this documentary. Much of the responsibility is pinned directly on the ambassador, Graham Martin, who had formulated no plans for an escape because he believed the army of the north would never reach Saigon. And it was a most humiliating mêlée, with terrified people, men, women, and babies, hanging on to departing airliners during take off runs and falling to the tarmac.
A task force of some fifty ships stood offshore from Saigon. Only Americans were to be evacuated, but each helicopter was mobbed by desperate and loyal South Vietnamese civilians. Not just high ranking Vietnamese military but the wives and families of Americans, their tailors and cooks. Helicopters with hangers on dangling from their skids left from the roof of the American embassy and other locations. So many helicopters landed on the decks of one ship that, in order to make room for the next arrivals, the first arrivals were pushed overboard.
The media photos and the videos shown at the time give an impression of near chaos and the impression seems to have been accurate enough. The evacuation was a pitiless process. But then the whole war -- which had lasted thirty years for the Vietnamese -- seems mindless in retrospect.