Photograph Source: Steffen Schmitz – CC BY-SA 4.0

Fifty years ago, on 30 April 1975, the revolutionary forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front entered Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam. Two days earlier, in a desperate attempt to avert further war, the US brought in a ‘peace candidate’ – former General Duong Văn Minh – to be the president. It was ‘Big Minh’, as he was known, who ordered his forces to surrender to the Communist troops, which then meant the withdrawal of the US forces on that day. Eventually, on 2 July 1976, North and South Vietnam were formally reunified under the presidency of Tôn Duc Thắng, a long-time communist leader, who had taken over as the President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the north) after the death of Ho Chi Minh in 1969. Uncle Tôn, as he was known, worked closely with General Le Duan to unify the country, and to build an economy out of the devastation left after sixty-seven years of French colonialism (from 1887 to 1954) and then twenty-one years of brutal war (1954 to 1975).

It is difficult to understand the situation after 1975 without a full assessment of the destruction of the twenty-one years of war. The Vietnamese communists organised a mass army of patriotic people who refused to surrender despite the horrific violence meted out against them by the United States, the major industrial power of that time. Between 1954 and 1975, the United States armed forces dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, more than the 2 million tons of bombs dropped during World War II in all theatres of the war. In Vietnam, the US dropped 4.6 million tons of bombs, including during harsh,........

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