Word: saigon
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...TIME'S correspondents in Saigon, the public apprehension and spidery, semisecret political maneuvering that followed President Thieu's resignation last week had a certain grim familiarity. To Roy Rowan, the scene was eerily reminiscent of Shanghai in 1949 during the collapse of the Chiang Kai-shek regime which he covered for LIFE. "The same gnawing fear that gripped Shanghai has taken hold in Saigon," Rowan cabled last week. "You saw the same scenes: inflation requiring shopping bags full of paper money, wailing police sirens, and the endless debate among correspondents about whether to stay or leave...
With South Viet Nam's territory shrinking daily, Photographers Mark Godfrey and Dirck Halstead, who have traveled to the front in Indochina by Jeep, taxi and helicopter in the past, now found the story-and the war-coming to them in Saigon. The fatalistic, enervating mood of defeat they found there contrasted sharply with the elan of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong victors in Danang, captured in an exclusive series of behind-the-lines shots in this issue by the Iranian photographer Abbas...
...Martin was grim. For months he had been the most diehard American supporter of Thieu. Now he had a bitter task. He was conveying a message that had originated with the Viet Cong's representatives in Paris: beginning midnight Sunday, Thieu had exactly 48 hours to resign, or Saigon would be leveled...
There was not the faintest hope that Saigon could yet reverse the tide of the battle; the military situation in favor of the Communists was unquestionably irreversible. Nor was there any chance that the U.S. might intervene to prevent a Communist takeover. After more than two decades of various degrees of American involvement in Viet Nam, President Ford last week declared with utter finality that for the U.S., the war was over. A massive Communist force, which had closed in on Saigon from all sides with staggering speed, lay waiting after abruptly halting its advance. Unmistakably, the battlefield lull meant...
...recently as last week, there was evidence of the endlessly ingenious uses of the military aid for which Ford asked. Saigon troops had a new type of American-supplied bomb, the Defense Department acknowledged--an "asphyxiation bomb." Officially called canister bomb, the units, or CBUs, and originally intended as a device for exploding mines in front of advancing troops, these bombs absorbed all the oxygen within a 200-yard radius. At Xuan Loc, last week's main battlefield, hundreds of PRG soldiers were said to have died of suffocation...