In February the Oklahoma City made a three-day protocol port visit to Kaohsiung in the Republic of China on Taiwan. The flagship also paid a three-day visit to Sasebo, Japan. Then, on 22 January 1973, the flagship commenced a six-day visit to Hong Kong. Although referred to as a protocol visit, it was mainly for the R&R of the crew and the embarked staff. I exchanged calls with the British resident governor in Hong Kong, and in the course of our conversation, the governor asked me if I had ever served in the Seventh Fleet before taking over as its commander. I responded that I had been assigned to ships serving in the Seventh Fleet a total of seven times, beginning with service as the gunnery officer of a destroyer during World War II. The governor asked me if, at that time, I thought I would ever be commander of the Seventh Fleet. My response: At that time, I wasn’t sure I was going to be promoted to lieutenant! My relations with the civic leaders and heads of state of the nations and major ports on the Pacific Rim were remarkably good at that time. I never encountered anything but a warm and cordial reception on any visit to the countries in the area.
With the war ended, and Operation End Sweep a success, Seventh Fleet focused on joint operations with Pacific allies in areas such as antisubmarine warfare and antiair warfare, which had not been extensively exercised during the period of Tonkin Gulf operations.
After the Linebacker II air campaign against Hanoi in the Christmas bombings, it appeared that the United States would be able to leave the field of battle in Southeast Asia in peace under honorable conditions. The defense of the South Vietnamese would now be their own responsibility, with the United States’ assurance that the ARVN would be properly equipped and logistically supported. Base structures, logistics facilities, and communication networks, along with tanks, artillery and aircraft, were turned over to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam for the defense of their homeland.
However, the United States did not fulfill its agreement to provide South Vietnam with a realistic capability upon which to build a nation or to defend themselves, and military aid for South Vietnam was virtually forgotten during the confusion of the Watergate scandal.
Early in 1975, a veteran North Vietnamese army, equipped and supported by their Communist sponsors in China and the USSR, again invaded South Vietnam, rolling across the agreed cease-fire lines in the most brutal disregard of the accords the North Vietnamese had signed only two years earlier. They linked up with the thousands of Communist troops who had been left behind in South Vietnam by the 1972 agreement and were reinforced by North Vietnam army regulars prepositioned in the sanctuaries of Laos. The ARVN was smashed and overrun. In April 1975 victorious North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon. The long war was over. All Vietnam was surrendered to the Communists in Hanoi.
LOSS OF SOUTH VIETNAM
It can be rationalized that the South Vietnamese lost the war in 1975 after the United States had won it with a cease-fire in 1973. However, in retrospect, it is evident that our terms for the cease-fire were inadequate to eliminate the Communist threat inside South Vietnam, and the subsequent military aid and financial support were insufficient to preserve the required level of readiness needed for the self-defense of South Vietnam. When the North Vietnamese violated the cease-fire agreement with their final invasion of the South in August 1975, the national leadership and the American people looked the other way while our former ally was overwhelmed and occupied by a veteran and professional North Vietnamese army, fully modernized with Communist-bloc weapons and logistic support. Domestically, with the 1973 cease-fire in place, a war-weary United States had accepted legislation — the War Powers Act — that would make it difficult for a president to again involve the country in hostilities in Southeast Asia. In 1975, when North Vietnam was on the march to Saigon, President Ford observed to the press that he could see no way for the United States to assist South Vietnam in its losing fight for survival.
For their part, the military leadership, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the in-theater commanders did push hard during the war for the authority to conduct bold decisive campaigns such as closing the Laotian supply route sanctuaries, and they argued in favor of budgets larger than the “guns and butter” policy would provide in order to better equip and train the armed forces engaged in Southeast Asia.
The operating forces in the field fought with courage and perseverance in spite of apathy and lack of moral support at home. Throughout the war, the military campaigns were generally successful and the battles hard-fought. In the invasion of Laos, which destroyed the North Vietnamese logistical sanctuaries, more than one hundred U.S. Army helicopters were lost in combat, with roughly the same number of Army pilots and crewmen killed or missing in action. These figures do not include the airborne troops who were being lifted into, and out of, the battle.
The tactical squadrons of the Air Force, Marines, and Navy provided essential close support to the ground forces in-country and were the only U.S. combat components engaged in the war in North Vietnam. With U.S. ground forces fully withdrawn from the conflict by the summer of 1972, the U.S. combat effort became almost entirely a matter of tactical air operations. About half the total sorties into North Vietnam were flown by naval aircraft. In the course of the war, 538 carrier planes were shot down, including 385 A-4 Skyhawks. In most cases the crews were not recovered. Among those lost in combat over the course of the conflict were sixty-seven air wing commanders, squadron commanders, and squadron XOs, all leading combat missions against the enemy. The total combat losses equated to about forty squadrons of tactical carrier aircraft.
A particular irritant to the forces engaged in Vietnam was the inhibiting rules of engagement. These restrictive ROE were to avoid unintentional “collateral damage” to civilians in the conduct of an attack on a military objective, but they forced strike groups to repeat predictable paths in approaching and departing target areas, eliminating the element of surprise and allowing the enemy to deploy surface-to-air missiles and MiG-21 fighters in concentrations along the entry and exit routes of the U.S. striking groups. The emphasis on avoiding collateral damage was an effort to demonstrate to the rest of the world the consideration of the U.S. toward limiting nonmilitary casualties. The extent to which this civilian control became micromanagement is evident by the fact that it was widely known that during the Rolling Thunder campaign, President Lyndon B. Johnson was personally selecting the targets to be attacked by the next day’s sortie from the JCS-CinCPac target list.
A LONGER-TERM VIEW
The following is a personal view that has evolved from my contemporary involvement in headquarters planning and my association with so many of the decision makers during the Cold War, as well as a continuing postwar interest in, and study of, its history. I will admit to what some may consider an optimistic appraisal, but it is not a superficial “feel-good” emotion but the pragmatic product of a long-term and consuming period of reflection and analysis. During the 1950s and 1960s, the United States pursued a national strategy of containment against what was perceived as the Communist monolith of the Soviet Union and an even more hostile China. Holding the line in Korea, and then in Vietnam, was paramount in a long-term struggle that threatened national survival. For years we held to the domino theory — once one country falls to the Communists, it’s only a matter of time before the next and then the next fall in succession.
In 1975 we turned our backs and allowed South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to fall. Something had changed that made holding the line in Vietnam no longer critical. For years, the North Vietnamese had played the Soviets and the Red Chinese off each other as both vied for leadership as champions of “People’s Liberation” movements in the third world. Despite both being Communist, the two nations distrusted each other. Ironically, the Soviets’ massive effort to achieve nuclear parity with the United States had made it an enormous threat to China. Perceiving its own long-term survival now threatened, China sought to amend its relationship with the United States, a nation it once fought on the Korean peninsula. President Nixon’s trip to China was a landmark diplomatic move that signaled to Hanoi that the sides were changing. Realizing that China’s dependability as an ally was now questionable, Hanoi launched the Easter offensive to end the war on its terms. Fortunately, Nixon fought back and won — for the time being.