Vietnam marks 50 years since the end of war
is celebrating the end of the Vietnam War on Wednesday with a grand military parade and an air show 50 years after the fall of Ho Chi Minh City, the event that marked the definitive conclusion of the decades-long conflict.
The historic anniversary commemorates the first act of the country's reunification on April 30th, 1975 when Communist-run North Vietnam seized Ho Chi Minh City, the capital of the US-backed South.
The victory, about two years after Washington withdrew its last combat troops from the country, marked the end of a 20-year conflict that killed some 3 million Vietnamese and nearly 60,000 Americans, many of them young soldiers conscripted into the military.
The fall of Ho Chi Minh City was seared into many memories by the images of US helicopters evacuating some 7,000 people, many of them Vietnamese, as North Vietnamese tanks closed in. The final flight took off from the roof of the US embassy at 7.53am on April 30th, carrying the last US marines out of Ho Chi Minh City.
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Captured Viet Cong prisoners being moved by US marines in March 1965. Photograph: Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images
Ho Chi Minh City was later renamed Ho Chi Minh City in honour of the North's founding leader.
'Communist troops rolled into the South Vietnamese capital virtually unopposed, to the great relief of the population which had feared a bloody last-minute battle,' said a cable from one of the Reuters reporters in the city on the day it fell.
The cable described the victorious army as made up of 'formidably armed' troops in jungle green fatigues but also of barefoot teenagers.
The formal reunification of Vietnam was completed a year later, 22 years after the country had been split in two following the end of French colonial rule.
'The victory of April 30th is the victory of human conscience and righteousness,' a spokeswoman for Vietnam's foreign ministry told reporters last week.
She noted that Vietnam and the United States normalised diplomatic relations in 1995 and deepened ties in 2023 during a visit to Hanoi by former US president Joe Biden.
That bond is now being tested by the threat of crippling 46 per cent tariffs on Vietnamese goods that Biden's successor, Donald Trump, announced in April.
The tariffs have been largely paused until July and talks are under way. But if confirmed, they could undermine Vietnam's export-led growth that has attracted large foreign investments.
While Hanoi has re-established relations with the United States, it has maintained close ties with Russia, which is its top supplier of weapons.
A US air force strategic air command B-52 Stratofortress drops a string of 750-pound in the Republic of Vietnam during the Vietnam War, in October 1965. Photograph: US air force/The New York Times
Vietnam has also nurtured closer relations with northern neighbour China despite a complex history involving several conflicts and a rivalry in the disputed South China Sea.
China is now a big investor in its economy and the source of many of the components that are used in products that are then exported to the US
Marc Riboud's famous photograph of Jan Rose Kasmir during the 1967 march on the Pentagon, which helped turn US public opinion against the Vietnam War. Photograph: Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos
Underlining the warming ties, Vietnam's defence ministry invited the Chinese army to take part in the military parade and 118 soldiers will walk through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City 'to honour the international support Vietnam received during its struggle for independence,' said state media.
They will be marching alongside about 13,000 Vietnamese soldiers, policemen and members of other forces in a procession following an air show featuring Russian-made fighter jets and military helicopters. – Reuters
Joan Baez performs at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in London, 1965. Photograph: Keystone/
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