The untold story of the last Australian plane out of Saigon

The din of war was growing louder and the North Vietnamese Army was getting closer when the last Royal Australian Air Force plane out of Saigon experienced a delay.

The hitch had nothing to do with the ordnance exploding at the perimeter of Tan Son Nhut Air Base, nor a fault with the C-130E Hercules that had landed hours earlier to serve as the backstop for two evacuation flights that had whisked Australian embassy staff, journalists and others to safety in Bangkok. It was personnel: all on board understood the significance of leaving on Anzac Day, 1975, and two in particular were jostling to claim a place in history.

“Each of them wanted to be the last person with boots on the ground,” the plane’s captain, John “Jack” Fanderlinden, said.

The loadmaster, Sergeant Halary Ashman “Sam” Sims, and one of four Airfield Defence Guards left behind from the embassy both tried to claim bragging rights from opposite ends of the plane. For Sims, it was his job to be last on board.

In the cockpit, Flying Officer Fanderlinden could not see the stand-off but worked out what was happening when Sims told him he was going to “jump out and make sure the undercarriage is OK”.

“Sam hopped out [the back door] so they could see that he was the last Aussie on the ground. He apparently walked around, stomped on the ground and made it perfectly obvious to everybody, then leapt back on board, shut the door and we were off.”

RAAF Captain John Fanderlinden.Credit: Kate Geraghty

After nearly 13 years of Australian involvement in the decades-long Vietnam War, in which more than 60,000 Defence personnel had served, 523 were killed and about 2400 wounded, Fanderlinden lifted A97-178 into the air in the afternoon of April 25, 1975. Australia’s combat role had ended three years earlier, and the RAAF planes were assigned to United Nations evacuations, but Fanderlinden’s crew and passengers were the last Australian Defence Force members to leave. Saigon fell five days later.

The end of the war on April 30, known as a day of liberation and reunification in Vietnam but considered a day of shame for the vanquished, spawned a refugee crisis and led to a wave of migration that forever altered Australian society. There are more than 300,000 people of Vietnamese heritage in Australia, and Vietnamese is the fourth most spoken language. There are an estimated 35,000 surviving Australian veterans of the war.

A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson said the relationship between the two countries has “never been stronger” and described Vietnam as “an active player in regional and global affairs, and a key partner for Australia”.

On Anzac Day, a dawn service will be held on the grounds of the Australian embassy in Hanoi, while another will be held in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) on the grounds of the British consulate, hosted by the New Zealand consulate.

Fifty years ago, Australia had two parallel diplomatic missions. The embassy in the southern capital, which occupied the seventh floor of the Caravelle Hotel, was evacuated on April 25.

Fanderlinden remembers the day differently than other accounts. In his research, he found a “blatantly wrong” description of the four Airfield Defence Guards being left behind to fend for themselves. Rather, he had already landed and shut down while the second of the evacuation flights was “buttoning up” for departure.

“My orders were, I was to be the backstop for those two aeroplanes. If either of them broke down, their load was going to come on to my aeroplane, including the ambassador and whoever else on whichever aeroplane broke down, and [I would] destroy the Herc that couldn’t get airborne,” Fanderlinden said.

“The second order was to pick up these four Airfield Defence Guards because they were part of the embassy mob and they were at the airfield when the ambassador and everyone was leaving on the second Herc.”

There are reports of the four men having no clue when a rescue might come as they were waiting for a Hercules that was off the Vietnamese coast.

“My recollection is totally different,” Fanderlinden said. “Now that’s me. I didn’t do any circling over the coast. The most dangerous place to be is actually in the air. I wanted to be on the ground and minimal time in the air.”

He and his crew were on the ground for a couple of hours, waiting not only for the four guards but also nuns and nurses; between 30 and 40 people were on the last flight. He spent part of the time near base ops, where he got updated intelligence from the CIA and had to refile his flight plan, and watched South Vietnamese fighters and bombers depart for short, sharp attack runs as fighting neared.

“We could see the war going on around us. We could see fighter aeroplanes from the South getting bombed up and everything, flying to the perimeter … bombing and strafing, 10 minutes, very quick missions. It was noisy because all of this ordnance was going off,” he said.

“Interestingly enough, with all this destruction going on around us, I was watching normal activity taking place like construction work and repairing stuff.”

He wandered over and made friends with some workmen, who offered to share their lunch. “It looked a bit dodgy,” Fanderlinden recalled, but it tasted fine.

“They were looking forward to the end of the war when stability would return to the country. I thought they could have been Viet Cong even.

“No backstop for me, so if my aeroplane broke down, bad luck. I needed someone on my side.”

With the call sign Black Jack, Fanderlinden flew 28 sorties in the last month of the war and encountered some “excitement”.

He helped in the chaos of the evacuation from Phan Rang on Vietnam’s south central coast, with an average of 250 passengers in the back, to the Can Tho airfield in the Mekong Delta, the only place he felt uncomfortable as he did not know who the enemy was.

An air view of the C5-A crash site in Saigon on April 4, 1975.Credit: AP Radiophoto

He was airborne in the Hercules when the US C-5A Galaxy crashed outside Tan Son Nhut Air Base on April 4, killing 138 people including the last two Australians to die in the war: nun Margaret Moses and nurse Lee Makk. Fanderlinden circled above the site while the fighters returned to base and survivors were rescued.

While it was later revealed maintenance failures caused the crash, at the time rumours of surface-to-air missiles abounded. The air base was kept dark at night and Fanderlinden had his lights off while taxiing. By intuition, he slammed on the brakes: his loadmaster jumped out to discover they had come close to crashing into helicopters parked at the base and exploding.

Fanderlinden spent his life looking forward. He rose through the RAAF’s ranks, had a second high-flying career at BAE Systems and had a family.

The anniversary gave him a reason to reflect. After an Anzac Day visit to Gallipoli, he will speak about his Vietnam experiences at Fighter World in Williamtown on April 30.

He regrets losing touch with his plane, which was traded to the US and later sold to a contractor, and wishes it had a place in a museum.

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