Word: thieu
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...hard time remembering a week like it. The U.S. and the world were trying to pick up the pieces after Henry Kissinger's failed Middle East mission. Saudi Arabia's King Faisal was assassinated. In Indochina, the Cambodian government seemed helpless, while President Nguyen Van Thieu's panicking army yielded province by province to North Vietnamese troops. Portugal, a member of NATO, was continuing its slide leftward. All of this presented serious problems for a U.S. recently too preoccupied with the recession to pay a great deal of attention to world events. President Ford ordered a review...
INDOCHINA. The swift and almost uncontested Communist offensive in South Viet Nam raised an unsettling question: Had 50,000 American lives and $150 billion in U.S. aid been spent in vain? The government of Nguyen Van Thieu was proving much weaker than had been thought, and the fast fallback of his forces approached an all-out rout. Obviously, U.S. intelligence about Thieu and his powers had been grievously faulty. First, the former imperial capital of Hue fell to the Communists; then so did five more provinces, bringing the total under their control to 13 (out of 44). But the real...
...number of coastal enclaves, and it is only a matter of time before they, too, fall. The abrupt collapse of government resistance in Danang climaxed a week in which Communist troops advanced almost at will down the central plains of South Viet Nam. In Saigon, President Nguyen Van Thieu was under pressure to yield powers to a more broadly based government...
Even if South Viet Nam survives, at best it will be in truncated form, having shrunk to the provinces around Saigon and the Mekong Delta. Even so, it was abundantly clear that Thieu's decision two weeks ago to abandon some outlying hard-to-defend provinces to the Communists had started a rout of his forces...
...reason for this painful loss of precious materiel was the very suddenness of Thieu's decision to abandon several provinces. Soldiers had no time to organize orderly retreats. In northern Quang Tri province, one of the army's best regional defense groups suffered a 15% desertion rate just before the Communist attack on the once lovely Hue; most of the deserters were concerned about the fate of their families. The retreat from Hue reached the frightening proportions of a stampede. Soldiers left behind 105-mm. howitzers and threw away rifles...