Word: routing
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...November 1973. The eventual result, according to Ford, was that 18 North Vietnamese divisions had been sent into the South. That, in turn, led President Thieu to order what Ford termed, in an understatement, a "poorly executed . . . strategic withdrawal" from the northern provinces. That withdrawal turned into a rout...
Last week, however, the momentum of the month-old rout slowed considerably. Instead of gobbling up additional provinces, the Communists seemed to be digesting what they had gained during the first four weeks of the offensive; they now seemed to be carefully probing the government's remaining defenses. In the scattered fighting, ARVN troops were no longer dropping their weapons and running almost as soon as the Communists opened fire; in a number of skirmishes, in fact, Saigon's troops performed relatively well, standing their ground and driving back the attackers. At week's end, ARVN forces...
...policemen, civil servants and as many as 200,000 civilians who were employed by or worked closely with the Americans. The armed forces alone account for a sizable number of refugees: Vietnamese soldiers travel with their families, and with anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 troops in full rout, there could be half a million or so dependents fleeing with them...
...reasonably orderly withdrawal turned into a rout." Hundreds of fighter planes were left behind intact on regional airfields, and masses of valuable equipment ? essential if the government ever hoped to mount an effective counterattack ? were abandoned...
...week at the age of 87 in his exile capital of Taipei, he was still clinging to the sacred fiction that it was he and nobody else who was the legitimate father of all of modern China. His death could hardly have been more dramatically timed. To Chiang, the rout of anti-Communist forces in Indochina must have seemed the inevitable continuation of the long and losing Asian struggle against Communism, in which he was the principal casualty...