Reeling, stunned, confused, the army of South Viet Nam was in disordered retreat last week in the face of a continued Communist offensive. Government positions were abandoned with scarcely a fight. Leaderless, demoralized troops dropped their weapons and joined hundreds of thousands of civilians in a panicky southward flight. In the most stunning Communist victory in more than two decades, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops and tanks on Sunday overran Danang, the country's second largest city. According to reports by South Vietnamese officials, this victory gives the Communists nearly complete control of the entire northern half of South Viet Nam; Saigon's forces now hold only a number of coastal enclaves, and it is only a matter of time before they, too, fall. The abrupt collapse of government resistance in Danang climaxed a week in which Communist troops advanced almost at will down the central plains of South Viet Nam. In Saigon, President Nguyen Van Thieu was under pressure to yield powers to a more broadly based government.
What was astonishing was the speed and suddenness of the South Vietnamese collapse. The country that had fought the Communists to a stand-off since the Paris Accords of January 1973 now seemed to have lost the ability and will to resist; its defenses simply melted away before North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces. The Communists had not yet penetrated the vital Saigon region, and there was still hope that the government would be able to defend the capital. But many Viet Nam experts, who two weeks ago were predicting only limited losses for Saigon during the current dry season, now could not entirely discount the chance that the Communist momentum would carry them to total military victory in a matter of weeks.
Even if South Viet Nam survives, at best it will be in truncated form, having shrunk to the provinces around Saigon and the Mekong Delta. Even so, it was abundantly clear that Thieu's decision two weeks ago to abandon some outlying hard-to-defend provinces to the Communists had started a rout of his forces.
The loss of territory continued to be heavy; five provinces fell to Communist control last week alone, raising the total number of lost provinces to thirteen (out of 44). First to go were Quang Tin and Quang Ngai in the north. They were followed by Thua Thien; its capital, the old imperial city of Hue, easily fell to the Communists early one morning at midweek. That left only the city of Danang, swollen grotesquely with panicky refugees, as a final enclave in the entire five-province northern area that is referred to as Military Region I (see box, page 33). Some of the government's best units — such as the rangers and the First Division — were defending the city against about 35,000 Communist troops. When the attack came early Sunday, a heavy artillery and rocket barrage apparently forced the defenders to flee, allowing the Communists to roll easily over the sprawling city. They captured thousands of Saigon's troops and an enormous amount of U.S.-provided equipment, including warplanes, tanks and artillery. At week's end Lam Dong, a sparsely populated tea-growing province 85 miles northeast of Saigon, also fell. There seemed little doubt that the Communists would soon engulf practically all of Military Region II, the twelve provinces in the middle of the country.