Saigon Has Fallen by Peter Arnett

Author:Peter Arnett [Arnett, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Nonfiction, Retail, Vietnam War
ISBN: 9780795346439
Google: n2c1rgEACAAJ
Publisher: Rosettabooks, LLC
Published: 2015-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

10

A “Shattering”

Final Offensive

The rapidly emerging communist military threat to the existence of South Vietnam comes cloaked in an air of mystery. The communist side makes a virtue of secrecy, its generals rarely seen in public while they plan the grand designs of war in nondescript buildings in Hanoi, or, when traveling to the southern battlefields, sometimes preferring to be incognito, dressed in commonplace clothing. Within a closed society where the media is just another tool of government, secrets are easily kept and obedience is mandatory.

So it is that the 50-year-old General Van Tien Dung, chief of staff of the North Vietnamese armed forces, clandestinely assembles the largest military armada in his country’s long history of warfare. The mission, ordered by the Hanoi Politburo, is to finally liberate the south after a struggle that began in the late 1950s. His planning is helped by the legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap, who orchestrated the successful war against the French, and launched the later war against the Americans.

General Dung is to accompany his troops into the first battle area in the Western Highlands, and he travels by road, his command group code-named A-75. Once in South Vietnam he uses the highway system his forces have covertly constructed in the years since the 1973 Paris Agreements, a new network that replaces the old Ho Chi Minh Trail and is later revealed to have been constructed with 30,000 combat soldiers and “shock youth,” including women. One 25-foot-wide paved stretch reaches from the border to Loc Ninh, near Saigon, and is the terminus for 3,000 miles of oil pipelines and a cable-telephone link with Hanoi.

General Dung’s first target is Ban Me Thuot in the southern Central Highlands of South Vietnam, a nondescript city with a population of 150,000, a political and economic center and the headquarters of the South’s 25th Infantry Division. Saigon intelligence is vaguely aware of communist troop movements in the highlands, but assumes they are directed at the two more important and better defended cities farther to the north, Pleiku and Kontum. The presence of the highest-ranking communist general, if known, would immediately have set alarm bells ringing in Saigon, but Dung’s concealment holds, helped by an elaborate subterfuge in Hanoi that has his Volga sedan making trips from his home to military headquarters at 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. each day, and at 5 p.m. soldiers going to the courtyard at his home to play volleyball, a recreation he is known to enjoy.

General Dung provides graphic details of the opening shots of the final communist offensive in a series of articles published in Hanoi the following year. He says he personally commanded the battle from a nearby observation point. At 2 o’clock on the morning of March 10, 1975, Dung’s forces assemble under the towering forests of the Cambodian border mountains, move through the tangled undergrowth around primitive villages and abandoned rubber plantations, and head toward Ban Me Thuot. His intelligence has determined that his attacking force has an advantage of 5.5 troops to 1 over the other side.

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