50 Years On: Lessons Learned from the Fall of Saigon

April 30, 2025, marked 50 years since the fall of South Vietnam and the complete withdrawal of U.S. Forces from Saigon. On April 29, 1975, the U.S. government began Operation Frequent Wind, an effort to evacuate U.S. citizens and certain vulnerable, displaced Vietnamese personnel by helicopter before the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) took control of the capital city. Operation Frequent Wind was the last of several efforts by U.S. and allied militaries to evacuate refugees from Vietnam. In what was perhaps the largest humanitarian operation for military forces since the Second World War, nearly 141,000 refugees were evacuated, brought to refugee camps, and resettled in the United States or allied countries.

The United States and allied combat forces had already withdrawn from South Vietnam by early 1973, under the terms of the Paris Peace Accords. Before that, in 1968 the United States had over 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam, and forces were also provided by Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Thailand. All of these departed on or before 1973, under the terms of the Paris agreement.

Just over two years later, the NVA stunned South Vietnam and its allies with its rapid advance, called Campaign 275, to overthrow the South Vietnamese government. The campaign created a humanitarian crisis that displaced millions, many of whom fled the NVA in fear of retaliation.

The United States led the evacuation effort but Australia, New Zealand, France, Canada, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and others also provided aid by allowing use of their territory, assisting with evacuation, or accepting refugees. It must be said, however, that the broader effort to evacuate and resettle refugees in 1975 was, primarily, a U.S. effort. Of the 141,000 refugees evacuated in 1975, nearly all were removed by the United States and 129,000 were resettled in the United States.

In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saigon, U.S. President Gerald Ford asked his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to prepare a memorandum of lessons learned from the U.S. experience in Vietnam. In response, Kissinger primarily recommended resisting the “temptation” to apply lessons from Vietnam, given its complex and unique circumstances.

This caution against oversimplification is well-placed regarding the Vietnam conflict in general. However, with the benefit of hindsight over 50 years, the evacuation and resettlement operation continues to provide lessons of practical value for military operations and case studies in international humanitarian law (IHL).

Measures Relating to Child Welfare

In April and May of 1975, Denmark applied a rarely used provision of IHL by receiving orphaned children during armed conflict and returning them after the end of the conflict. This occurred because a German citizen, Henning Becker, was operating a children’s home near Saigon to care for orphaned children from minority tribes. On April 15, 1975, Becker coordinated with the South Vietnamese Government to evacuate 211 of these children to Europe. Becker then reached out to the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who agreed to receive the children expressly under the terms of Article 24 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV).

Article 24 provides that parties to a conflict shall facilitate the reception of “children under 15 who are orphaned or are separated from their families as a result of the war.” These children are to be cared for in a neutral country “for the duration of the conflict.” The purpose of Article 24 is to ensure protection for these children and to see they “are not left to their own resources.”

Denmark was not a natural choice, given its distance and cultural differences (Article 24 states the education of the children “shall, as far as possible, be entrusted to people of a similar cultural tradition”). Regardless, Denmark stated on April 21, 1975, that it would accept and care for the children, provided the South Vietnamese government granted an exit visa for each child, and that all parties involved understood and agreed that the children would be returned at the end of conflict.

Becker left Saigon on April 25, 1975, with just over 200 children. They arrived in Denmark on April 30. On May 9, 1975, Danish authorities notified Becker that the conflict had ended, and therefore, the children would be returned. Becker responded by filing an application with the European Commission of Human Rights, arguing that returning the children to Vietnam would subject them to cruel and inhuman treatment in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In October 1975, the European Commission of Human Rights issued a decision that sought to strike a practical balance between the provisions of GC IV and the European Convention. It concluded that Denmark sought to properly apply GC IV. In the opinion of the Commission, States had adopted Article 24 of GC IV in consideration of “the welfare of evacuated children,” including repatriating them to the country in which they have family and cultural ties.

However, the Commission recognized that repatriation can, under some circumstances, constitute a violation of human rights. In this case, according to the Commission, Denmark had taken reasonable steps to ensure the children’s safety would not be jeopardized by their repatriation. This included coordinating repatriation with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, obtaining assurances from the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, and allowing children over the age of fifteen to remain in Denmark, if they wished.

Separate from this case, a small number of Vietnamese refugees requested and were allowed to return to Vietnam after being evacuated by the U.S. military to Guam. Upon their return they were arrested and placed in re-education camps. However, it is not clear what happened to those repatriated by the Danish Government.

Denmark’s actions may be seen as an attempt to comply strictly with IHL. The Commission decision allowed this as an interplay between IHL and international human rights law in unusual circumstances. The takeaway is that there is a precedent for the application of Article 24 GC IV, including the express requirement for repatriation at the end of the conflict. However, this final step must include reasonable measures to ensure the children’s protection.

Framing the Responsibility to Evacuate and Resettle

Although the military operation to evacuate and resettle Vietnamese refugees in 1975 was not the first refugee operation for the U.S. military, it was perhaps the first time U.S. officials faced a situation in which over 100,000 people faced an imminent risk of harm precisely because of their association with the United States and its allies. This situation triggered a series of public statements by officials describing a responsibility or obligation to evacuate and resettle Vietnamese refugees (the term “Vietnamese refugees” is used here for brevity to refer to Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian persons who were displaced, sought asylum or became refugees as the US withdrew from Vietnam).

The United States never ratified the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, and had only ratified its 1967 Protocol just over six years prior to its evacuation of Vietnam. The Refugee Act of 1980 would not be passed for five more years to establish a U.S. statutory framework for admitting refugees into the United States. Additionally, and perhaps most notably, there was no statute specifically authorizing immigration to the United States or allied countries by Vietnamese nationals who assisted the U.S. or allied governments.

Consequently, confusion surrounded the legal authority to resettle Vietnamese refugees in the United States and elsewhere. They were ultimately admitted in the United States as parolees under the Attorney General’s rarely used power to formally grant admission under Section 212(d)(5) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act. In other countries they were often admitted under similar, temporary, humanitarian visas.

Political theorists have long argued that resettlement, or asylum in cases like this, is primarily granted as an act of humanity, applied impartially, and prioritized for those who need it most. Alternatively, it may be granted by an accepting State as a reward for association, or even as reparation for past injustice. In this way, grants of asylum are applied partially and prioritized for those who deserve it most.

The idea behind a special legislative immigration scheme, such as the U.S. Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), is to identify those most deserving of lawful admission, through dedicated service to the receiving State. There are many problems in practice with SIVs, as clearly demonstrated by the fact that most Afghan refugees were admitted to the United States in 2021 under a grant of humanitarian parole, like those Vietnamese refugees admitted in 1975.

Nevertheless, statutory recognition of those considered most deserving of admission provides a more structured response than temporary admission on humanitarian grounds that are distributed ad hoc, such as the U.S. parole admissions. Indeed, in Kabul in 2021, U.S. officials on the ground struggled to identify who would stay and who would go, among the masses of desperate Afghans. But some semblance of structure existed in that officials could prioritize those who held SIVs or evidence to indicate they “could be approvable” for the visa. This structure did not exist in Vietnam in 1975. Instead, U.S. officials hoped to create lists of individuals who might be chosen for evacuation. However, the plan was too large to be practically implemented and was resisted by the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, who feared planning would incite panic. The result was chaos.

Other States assisted in the evacuation and accepted Vietnamese refugees, including all countries that previously provided forces in South Vietnam. These receiving countries also lacked special legislative visas for Vietnamese persons, and their responses to Vietnam were varied and complex. For example, Australia’s Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, who was opposed to Australia’s participation in the conflict in Vietnam, stated in Parliament that Australia would assist with evacuation, and accept an undetermined number of refugees “with long and close associations with the Australian presence in Vietnam,” and “whose life was considered to be in danger.” Ultimately, however, Australia accepted only 24 individuals in this category (approximately 500 others were accepted under existing immigration laws).

The low number of accepted refugees was primarily due to the fact that Whitlam did not consider persons associated with Australia to be at risk of retaliation (Whitlam was reported to have said to his Foreign Minister “these Vietnamese sob stories don’t wring my withers”). But an Australian Senate report strongly criticized Whitlam’s actions, explaining that by “being in Vietnam Australia incurred a residual responsibility, not to mention a moral responsibility, to assist in the evacuation from Vietnam of those who had assisted our forces there and whose lives were believed to be in danger because of this assistance.”

Other officials echoed this sense of responsibility, including U.S. President Gerald Ford, who stated on several occasions that the United States held a “special obligation” to evacuate and protect Vietnamese refugees who were now at risk because of their service to the U.S. Government. These public statements, coupled with State practice, may raise questions of whether there is an emerging norm of customary international law under these narrow circumstances. Specifically, does a departing foreign force hold a legal obligation to evacuate associated host nation persons if the departure leaves them vulnerable to retaliatory attacks? The likely answer is that the experience in Vietnam and later conflicts fall short of the standard of settled State practice out of a sense of legal obligation.

Nevertheless, the evacuation and resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in 1975 provides an example of a departing foreign force acting to protect vulnerable host nation personnel. We may learn from the experience that evacuation and resettlement is more effective under an established statutory framework that recognizes a moral responsibility to those made vulnerable by assisting us.

Guidelines to Care for Refugees

After the evacuation, more than 100,000 refugees were brought to U.S. military installations in the Philippines, Wake Island, and Guam. Others arrived on their own in these and other locations where the U.S. military cared for them. Some were forwarded to other countries, but most were sent to U.S. military installations within the United States, namely Elgin Air Force Base, Camp Pendelton, Fort Indiantown Gap, and Fort Chafee, where they were housed and cared for by the U.S. military.

Refugee operations bring unfamiliar challenges to military forces. The U.S. military had cared for refugees before, including transporting and housing over 30,000 Hungarian refugees for months at Camp Kilmer in 1956. The U.S. Navy also transported over 300,000 Vietnamese from North to South after the French withdrawal in 1955, pursuant to Article 14(d) of the Geneva Agreements of 1954. But the scale, duration and visibility of the 1975 operation, called Operation New Life, was unprecedented.

In preparing for Operation Allies Welcome for Afghan refugees in 2021, U.S. officials reviewed after-action reports from Operation New Life. They did this, in part, because there is no codified set of standards of treatment the military must provide refugees. However, in reviewing Operation New Life, one lesson that might have been missed was that refugee resettlement takes a long time, leaving the refugees in an undefined waiting room without resources.

U.S. led refugee operations are, ostensibly, interagency efforts led by civilian agencies. However, large-scale refugee operations, especially those in response to an emergency, require massive capabilities in logistics and manpower. Consequently, while the staff of civilian agencies may provide strategic guidance, the military is the face of the operation, interacting with refugees on the ground, spending the money and trying to solve the web of unanticipated issues that arise throughout the operation.

The military must face questions, such as: How do we protect vulnerable populations among the refugees? How do we process and screen the refugees, particularly those without documents? How do we provide proper medical care and prevent the spread of disease? How do we respond when some refugees ask to return? How do we respond when we find unaccompanied minors? How do we avoid unrest and impatience? Can we provide education, and if so, how? Should we permit refugees to obtain employment in the camps? Do we permit freedom of movement on, or off the military installation?

An interesting example of how U.S. personnel handled one of these issues concerns the question of freedom of movement. Vietnamese refugees were not permitted to leave the security of U.S. military installations. Conversely, early in Operation Allies Welcome, U.S. officials determined that because the Afghan evacuees were in the United States lawfully as parolees, they were permitted freedom of movement, and could walk off the installation and abandon the resettlement process if they chose. Some Afghan evacuees did leave the installation for various reasons, though it was a small minority. The effect this freedom of movement had on impatience or unrest within the camps is speculative. However, while Vietnamese refugees conducted several visible protests over their impatience at the process, this did not occur among Afghan evacuees.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has established standards for refugee camps that attempt to address at least some of the issues described above. The U.S. military may not have consulted these standards, but did attempt to meet basic needs, albeit in the context of short-term operations.

Moving forward, the United States and allied militaries may wish to codify more comprehensive guidance on refugee camp operations. Such guidance would be more effective if promulgated at an interagency level, with clear designations of responsibilities. Such guidance should also contemplate that refugee operations are almost always more complex, and last longer than initially expected.

Conclusion

Looking back 50 years, the efforts of the United States and allied militaries to evacuate and resettle South Vietnamese refugees was “a precedent worth setting,” as expressed by LTG John Vessey, then the Deputy Chief of Staff for US Army Operations in 1975 and later Chief of Staff. That precedent paved the way for substantial relief for the many refugees that followed, including over 130,000 Afghan evacuees. No doubt the precedent set in motion 50 years ago will continue to inform the inevitable refugee operations of the future.

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Major R. Scott Adams is currently an investigator with the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General. 

The views expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense. 

Articles of War is a forum for professionals to share opinions and cultivate ideas. Articles of War does not screen articles to fit a particular editorial agenda, nor endorse or advocate material that is published. Authorship does not indicate affiliation with Articles of War, the Lieber Institute, or the United States Military Academy West Point.

Photo credit: U.S. Navy