His immediate successor lasted a week before handing over to Minh. And there was no president in the presidential palace. There were no deputies in the old French opera house where the National Assembly used to meet. There was nobody in the ornate little town hall. There were, on that first day of the new era, no Americans in the fort-like embassy on Thong Nhat Boulevard, just the detritus of the previous day’s chaotic evacuation and the looting that followed. Incidents like that were enough to convince most people that the sooner the communists took full control, the better. He touched his waistband to indicate a gun, and then casually lifted Dalby’s expensive camera off his neck. Stewart Dalby of the Financial Times and I were walking along Tu Do, one of Saigon’s main streets, when a hard-looking man with his shirt out over his trousers stood in our way. In the centre, there was potentially more to fear from lawlessness and looters. That was not true either: casualties were heavy on both sides, but the fighting stopped just short of the city limits. Vietnamese joked that the communists took Saigon “without breaking a light bulb”. Had the last South Vietnamese president, General Duong Van Minh, not ordered the army to lay down its arms, Saigon would have fared very badly indeed. Although few knew it, the North Vietnamese had been prepared to batter the city with heavy artillery and to fight their way in, block by block, if the defence they met had been stronger. And in fact, as the liberation music echoed down the streets, it had just escaped again. Saigon shuddered, but felt it had escaped the worst. Through all the years of conflict, war had not often touched Saigon, with the exceptions of the occasional rocket attack, some restaurant bombings and the dramatic but limited incursion into the city – indeed, into the grounds of the US embassy itself – during the Tet offensive in 1968. Its established role as the capital of non-communist Vietnam had vanished overnight, its soldiers had disappeared, and many of its generals, politicians and civil servants were at that moment bobbing up and down on the decks of warships in the South China Sea, with US Navy blankets pulled round their shoulders. It was, of course, not just Saigon’s daily routine that had been utterly disrupted. But hardly anybody knew what to do – whether to go to work or not, whether there would be anything to buy in the market, whether there would be petrol, or whether new fighting might break out. It was 30 April 1975, and sharp early sunlight illuminated Saigon’s largely empty streets, at a time when the city’s frenetic traffic would normally have already begun to buzz. During the night the engineers of the victorious army had rigged up loudspeakers, and from about 5am the same tinny liberation melodies were incessantly played. The day after the North Vietnamese took Saigon, the city was woken by triumphal song.
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