"With respect to North Vietnam's conquest of the Republic of Vietnam, North Vietnam had initially projected that it would take two years for it to implement its plan to capture South Vietnam. In 1975, the North Vietnamese planned to cut South Vietnam in half and then create conditions to allow for the unification of North and South Vietnam in 1976. In fact, ironically, the North Vietnamese captured all of South Vietnam during the spring of 1975, in the space of less than two months. No one ever anticipated that it would take North Vietnam only fifty-five days- beginning on 10 March 1975 when its troops crossed the Vietnamese-Cambodian border to attack Ban Me Thuot and ending on 30 April 1975, the day the unconstitutional President Duong Van Minh announced an unconditional surrender at 1015 in the morning, after a little over two days in office as president. As soon as Duong Van Minh made this announcement, North Vietnamese and VC troops advanced straight into Saigon with virtually no opposition, because almost all our troops deployed into defensive positions laid down their arms following General Minh's orders, and then escaped rather than trust their lives to the communists."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Colonel Ha Mai Viet, Steel and Blood: South Vietnamese Armor and the War for Southeast Asia (2008), p. 236
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Vietnam War
236 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Vietnam War →
Related Quotes
"Intelligence on Vietcong positions and movements frequently arrived too late to be actionable, delayed in an informat…"
"The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us who have allowed it to …"
"You sense a strong sense of mission among the fighting men in Viet Nam, an enormous compassion for all victims of Com…"
"By Thanksgiving, 1967, we still had not made any really final decision about whether or not we'd return for another t…"
"The Vietnam war literally brought this country to its knees because, without going into the technicalities of what Co…"
"Now then, the question is, How can we move to begin to change what's going on in this country. I maintain, as we have…"
"We thought, We will go to Vietnam and be Audie Murphies. Kick in the door, run in the hooch, give it a good burst- ki…"
"And for the men in the audience, hands down, the worst PTSD in the war is in the women who served as surgical nurses …"
"The Road to Viet Nam, and to the other important places Mr. Hope visits at Christmas, had to end for Bob and me after…"
"There were only two types of people when I came home- those who were against what we did and those who said nothing. …"