Capture of Bien Hoa Air Base
North Vietnam had suffered about 50,000 casualties during the 1968 Tet Offensive and was similarly mauled in its spring 1972 offensive against the South. The People's Army of Vietnam needed time to recuperate.
In March 1975 Hanoi made its next seriously aggressive move. In the preceding two years, North Vietnam's army patiently moved into the South enormous quantities of Soviet artillery, surface-to-air missiles, and armored vehicles, along with 100,000 fresh troops.
On 10 March the North Vietnamese Army began a new offensive in South Vietnam. Northern forces isolated the provincial capitol of Ban Me Thuot by cutting off or blocking the main highways to it. It was at Ban Me Thuot that the first phenomenon which would increasingly undermine the South's morale occurred. Many of its army officers used helicopters to pick up their families and flee to the south with them.
South Vietnamese civilians then began to flee the countryside, crowding the main roads and the pathways in a mass exodus for the coast, where they ultimately jammed seaports seeking transport to the south. The refugees included not only those civilians who had helped the South's army or the Americans, but also a great mass who expected bad treatment from the communists.
By early April the end of South Vietnam was at hand. North Vietnam's forces had severed the roads around Saigon and had begun shelling Bien Hoa. A battle began on 9 April at Xuan Loc, located on National Route 1 only 37 miles northeast of Saigon. During this battle, the last remnants of South Vietnam's air force carried out its last effective operation from Bien Hoa Airfield.
Xuan Loc fell on 23 April, and there was now little to prevent or slow the Communist advance on Saigon. The loss of Xuan Loc made Bien Hoa Air base indefensible, although the VNAF continued to fly from the base until enemy artillery fire forced the evacuation of Bien Hoa on 25 April.
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