Last Stand, District 1, Saigon, 30 April 1975

After a morning round of shell fire, the Eastern end of District 1 is starting to burn. The last ARVN artillery, firing from the officers' training school, has been destroyed in counter-battery fire.



The three NVA tanks spearheading a whole division cross the bridge leading directly to the Presidential Palace.



Blocking their way are two lone ARVN M41 Walker Bulldogs....

And I haven't done the previous AAR yet... Too many games...

Here, finally is the AAR:

http://www.venetic.co/VietnamLastStand.html

Tough fight for both sides. Would have been nice if at least one of those Walker Bulldogs had scored a hit.

You mentioned this was based on an actual fight. I haven't really researched this before, but you got me curious. What generally happened to the ARVN prisoners?

On 30 April 1975, various of them were rounded up in downtown Saigon. I have just finished Neil Davis's biography and he tells about the ones at the Presidential Palace waiting on the side lawn for the NVA to arrive. They were held in captivity for a while and then were released. Various officers were sent off to re-education camps. The unwritten policy of the Communists seems to be that they didn't have holding facilities for an entire army, so most of them returned to civilian life within a matter of weeks or months. It was different if you were an officer in an elite ARVN unit or had something else that marked you out (a "Sat Cong" tattoo for example) - some of those soldiers were imprisoned in camps for years, and some died there. There were relatively few shootings of prisoners on 30 April 1975 - some did happen, but the wholesale massacres that were predicted did not occur. Some local VC and their fellow travellers also shot certain informers, collaborators etc., but PAVN clamped down on that quickly.

That's good to know. I should read up on that sometime. Never really read much into what happened in Vietnam after it all ended.

Tiziano Terzani's book "Giai Phong! The Fall and Liberation of Saigon" covers that period quite well, although he takes some things too much at face value.

Great AAR. Just like a movie as yours always are.

I have read a good bit on the fall of Saigon and the aftermath. There was not the blood bath that was feared, but things were pretty bad nonetheless. Those "re-education" camps were very often nothing but forced labor concentration camps. They toiled all day on half rations (or worse) and spent the nights in propaganda lectures and writing about their "misdeeds" in opposing the communist takeover of their country.

Tom