1 week Ago
At the end of the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese soldiers swarmed a Pan Am airliner to save themselves from the rapidly-advancing North Vietnamese army. CBS News correspondent Bruce Dunning, who was on board, reported: "They left their wives, their children, their aged parents on the runway, while they forced their own way on board, a rabble of young enlisted men. .
.. The plane raced down the taxiway, swerving to avoid abandoned vehicles, perhaps even running over people.
" This every-man-for-himself rout played out across South Vietnam as communist forces from the north launched their final offensive. "The question was not, 'Will they attack at some point,' but 'When will they do it'?" said Stuart Herrington, now 83, who was one of only a handful of American military personnel still left in Vietnam. "The map in my office began to show more and more red arrows, all pointing south.
" A map showing North Vietnamese troop movements in the last days of the Vietnam War. CBS News President Gerald R. Ford called South Vietnam's collapse "a great human tragedy," and ordered the immediate airlift of Vietnamese orphans – some mere babies who'd been born only weeks earlier.
CBS News correspondent Murray Fromson witnessed what happened next, when the plane carrying the children crashed into a field about five miles from the end of the runway, killing 78 orphans and 35 Americans were killed. "What can one say except, 'When will the misery in this country ever stop?'" Fromson said. With Vietnam rapidly approaching what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called "the worst case," he cabled American Ambassador Graham Martin: "We must evacuate our people and do so as soon as possible.
" Americans and Vietnamese flooded Tan Son Nhut Airport outside Saigon. But enemy shelling killed two Marines standing guard there – Darwin Judge and Charles MacMahon, the last Americans to die in Vietnam. Retired Marine Gerry Berry was a helicopter pilot aboard the armada of American ships off the.
.. David Martin.
