Friday, April 30, 2010

Fall of Saigon





















This WaPo headline from 35 years ago says "Vietcong" but, actually, Saigon's 30,000 defending troops surrendered to 100,000 North Vietnamese troops who had converged on the city 55 days after twenty North Vietnamese Army divisions invaded the South.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Mark Tempest said...

And how many days was it after the Democrat Congress refused to honor our commitment to the South Vietnamese by cutting off any funding to allow support of the RVN?

TSB said...

Eagle1,

Good point. The RVN might have been doomed anyway by the very terms of the 1973 peace accords, but it didn't help that Congress declined President Ford's request for a supplemental appropriation of $300 million for a last-ditch defense of Saigon.

In his 1975 budget, President Nixon had requested $1.45 million for military aid to South Vietnam, but Congress cut his request to $700 million.