Two months after the signing of the peace agreement with Vietnam, the last American combat troops leave South Vietnam as Hanoi releases the last American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. America’s eight-year direct intervention in the Vietnam War was over. In Saigon, some 7,000 civilian employees of the US Department of Defense remained to assist South Vietnam in what appeared to be a fierce and continuing war with communist North Vietnam.
In 1961, after two decades of indirect military aid, US President John F. Kennedy sent the first major US military force to Vietnam to bolster South Vietnam’s ineffective autocratic rule against the Communist North. Three years later, with the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered limited bombing raids on North Vietnam and Congress authorized the use of US troops. In 1965, the North Vietnamese offensives left President Johnson with two choices: intensify US involvement or withdraw. Johnson ordered the first, and troop levels quickly climbed to over 300,000 as the US Air Force began the largest bombing campaign in history.
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In the following years, the prolonged duration of the war, the high number of American casualties, and the revelation of American involvement in war crimes, such as the My Lai massacre, helped bring many people to the States. -United against the Vietnam War. The Communist Tet offensive of 1968 dashed American hopes of an imminent end to the conflict and galvanized American opposition to the war. In response, Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not seek re-election, citing what he saw as his responsibility in creating a perilous national division over Vietnam. He also authorized the start of peace talks.
In the spring of 1969, as anti-war protests intensified in the United States, the strength of American troops in the war-torn country peaked at nearly 550,000 men. Richard Nixon, the new American president, began that year the withdrawal of American troops and the “Vietnamization” of the war effort, but he intensified the bombardments. Significant U.S. troop withdrawals continued into the early 1970s as President Nixon expanded air and ground operations into Cambodia and Laos in an attempt to block enemy supply routes along Vietnam’s borders. This expansion of the war, which yielded few positive results, led to new waves of protests in the United States and elsewhere.
Finally, in January 1973, representatives of the United States, North and South Vietnam and the Vietcong signed a peace accord in Paris, ending the direct military involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War. Its main provisions included a ceasefire throughout Vietnam, the withdrawal of US forces, the release of prisoners of war, and the reunification of North and South Vietnam by peaceful means. The South Vietnamese government was to remain in place until new elections were held, and North Vietnamese forces in the south were not to advance or be reinforced.
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In reality, however, the deal was little more than a rescue gesture on the part of the US government. Even before the last American troops left on March 29, the Communists violated the ceasefire, and by early 1974 full-scale warfare had resumed. At the end of 1974, South Vietnamese authorities reported that 80,000 of their soldiers and civilians had been killed in the fighting during the year, making it the costliest of the Vietnam War.
On April 30, 1975, the last Americans still in South Vietnam were expelled from the country by plane as Saigon fell into the hands of communist forces. North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin, accepting South Vietnam’s surrender later in the day, remarked: “You have nothing to fear; between Vietnamese, there are neither winners nor losers. Only the Americans were defeated. The Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular foreign war in US history and claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans. No less than two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians have been killed.
