How Australia betrayed loyal local staff in the shadow of Saigon’s fall in 1975
The last Australian flight out of Saigon on Anzac Day, 1975, left behind vulnerable embassy staff who could and should have been saved.
The mood was subdued, as you would expect. This dispiriting day, Anzac Day 1975, had been a long time coming for those who had lived and breathed the war in Vietnam as it hurtled to a chaotic denouement.
There would be no going back. They were boarding the last Australian flight out of Saigon.
But when ABC correspondent Richard Palfreyman strapped in and looked around the cavernous hold of the RAAF C-130 he was appalled by what he saw: dozens of empty seats and, worse, ample space for the pets of evacuated United Nations personnel, neatly stacked in cages.
Palfreyman felt ashamed when the aircraft lurched into the sky barely a third full. He still does. The story of how Australia turned its back on loyal local staff who had worked for and served this country angers him even now, 50 years on, etching another grim chapter in the tragedy that was the Vietnam War.
“The Australian Hercules took off from Tan Son Nhat (airport) late on the afternoon of April 25 bound for Bangkok,” he writes in a new memoir, extracted in The Weekend Australian on Saturday. “For all on board, it was a depressing and sad departure from a country that Australia had once fought for and supported as an ally.
“The irony that it was Anzac Day was lost on no one.”
Years later, Palfreyman would interview the Australian ambassador, Geoffrey Price, who was also on that emotional flight out of the South Vietnamese capital. The ABC man didn’t know it at the time Saigon fell, but Price had pushed back against instructions from Canberra to delay the processing of exit visas for South Vietnamese personnel who had worked for the Australian government or military and feared retribution from the advancing communists, as well as staff of the embassy in today’s Ho Chi Minh City.
As we will see, this would be to Price’s enduring detriment as a career diplomat. Gough Whitlam wanted nothing more to do with the South Vietnamese after his Labor government formally ended Australia’s 11-year involvement in the war in 1973, honouring an election pledge to bring the last troops home. Of the 60,000 Australians who fought in Vietnam, 523 died and nearly 2400 were wounded – a cruel toll, but one dwarfed by the estimated three million Vietnamese killed on both sides, north and south, alongside the 58,000 Americans who perished.
Whitlam’s priority, in fact, was to avoid antagonising the soon-to-be-victorious regime in Hanoi. He told cabinet he was not “having hundreds of f..king Vietnamese Balts coming into this country,” according to then minister Clyde Cameron, underlining the prime minister’s reluctance to resettle potentially troublesome anti-communists, whether from the Baltic states post-World War II, eastern Europe or Vietnam.
Declassified cabinet papers from 1975, the year of Whitlam’s dismissal, revealed the Australian government had assured the North Vietnamese it would not engage in “mass evacuations from Vietnam”.
The embassy in Hanoi was instructed to convey the message that Australia “would be very sorry to see the refugee question affect” relations between the two nations.
Price, a deeply principled man, was trying to find a way out for Saigon station’s local employees, who were terrified by what the communists might do to them. On April 20, as the North Vietnamese Army’s advance on the capital gathered pace, he cabled Canberra that the “fate of our locally engaged staff together with relatives of wives married to embassy officers is causing us all much distress”.
The reply next day was emphatic. Price was told the Vietnamese staff were not to be regarded as “endangered by their Australian embassy associations and they should not – repeat should not – be granted entry into Australia.”
By then, Palfreyman – along with colleagues Peter Munckton and David Brill – had moved into the Caravelle Hotel, a high-rise also housing the Australia embassy. They took sturdy internal rooms without outward facing windows vulnerable to rockets or gunfire. Brill, a cameraman who had been covering Vietnam since 1970, had seen for himself how close the North Vietnamese Army, the NVA, was to Saigon.
He secured a seat on a South Vietnamese military chopper to Xuan Loc, only 75km from the city, and realised it was all over. “I could see then there was no way the ARVN was going to hold them,” he remembers, referring to the doomed Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
Saigon was a seething pit of chaos and panic; even the journalists were thinking of fleeing. The Australians attended a meeting in the restaurant atop the Caravelle where hard-bitten US correspondents kicked around the idea of chartering a Boeing-707 airliner to evacuate the foreign press corps.
The ABC team was determined to stay – against the wishes of the broadcaster’s imperious managing director, Talbot Duckmanton, who declared he had never lost a journalist on his watch and it wasn’t about to happen now. He ordered the trio out.
Fortunately for them, communications between Sydney and Saigon were patchy, to say the least. An international phone connection was nearly impossible to obtain, while satellite uplinks were prohibitively expensive.
“The only way they could reach us from Australia was through the telex in the Reuters office,” Munckton says. “So we made a point of making ourselves scarce.”
They got their film and voice tapes away by makeshift courier, prevailing on airline crew and sometimes passengers to carry the cans to Bangkok, where Munckton’s wife, Anne, held the fort, or to Hong Kong for transmission to head office. As the end neared, the RAAF sent in a detachment of six transport aircraft under UN auspices to evacuate refugees to Saigon and to join an American-led airlift of Vietnamese orphans and the children of allied servicemen, called Operation Babylift.
Disastrously, the very first flight to leave, a giant US Air Force Galaxy aircraft, plunged to earth 12 minutes after take-off, killing 138 people, 78 of them children. (The cause proved to be mechanical failure, not a shootdown.)
Brill’s footage from the crash scene was so powerful the ABC stumped up for the satellite to beam it to Sydney.
The RAAF’s Detachment S had its problems, too. On April 2, a Hercules piloted by Brian Young from No.36 Squadron was stormed by ARVN deserters at Phan Rang, 300km northeast of Saigon, with Munckton and Brill on hand to capture the drama. By the time the plane landed in Can Tho, south of the capital, the alarm bells were ringing in Canberra. Had the Australian military been party to a mutiny? A furious Whitlam banned the newsmen from travelling on RAAF aircraft, severely clipping their wings.
Whitlam was much more comfortable basking in the warm glow of Operation Babylift, despite its gruesome opening. In Bangkok, Anne Munckton helped transfer babies, snug in cardboard boxes, from the air force transports to flights that carried them to Australia. The duplicity of the government’s position stuck in the craw of Price’s diplomats, who were ordered to scour Saigon’s orphanages for suitable candidates.
Australia would take photogenic Vietnamese kids, but the mums and dads who stood to be persecuted for their service to the embassy were on their own.
“The plight of adult Vietnamese and their families seemed to strike no chord with Canberra,” Palfreyman says.
Among those flown out, sometimes to a personal welcome from the lanky Australian PM, was nine-year-old orphan Van Minh Nguyen. He arrived in Sydney on April 17, 1975, to find he was still very much on his own. The family who adopted him reneged after a few years, returning him to state care. He didn’t find a real home until he joined the navy at 15.
Now aged 59, a magnanimous Nguyen tells The Australian: “Serving my adopted country means giving back to Australia by protecting our freedom, way of life and liberty. My time in the Royal Australian Navy taught me that the friendships forged during recruit and trade training are lifelong bonds. Regardless of the length of service, we’re family.”
That climactic day in Saigon was perversely quiet. The NVA had encircled the city, but its commanders were still preparing the final assault. Black-clad Vietcong irregulars, though, were engaged in sporadic street fighting with the ARVN holdouts.
Palfreyman, Munckton and Brill were told it was now or never: the ambassador and his rearguard of staff were leaving for the airport in a convoy of vehicles, and they should join them. Or not. Either way, the RAAF wouldn’t be back.
Price had locked up his official residence on Rue Pasteur and entrusted the family’s dog to the cook, Mr Ba. The telexes continued to chatter in the embassy until lunchtime, when the machines were shut down, Palfreyman writes. The receptionist, Mrs Minh, remained at her desk on the seventh floor, fighting back tears while fielding one frantic phone call after another from people desperate to know what had happened to their visa applications. Sorry, she said, they’re no longer being processed.
Palfreyman captures the scene vividly in his memoir, continuing: “On the Australian embassy balcony overlooking the National Assembly and the Continental Palace Hotel where Graham Greene had drafted The Quiet American, David Brill filmed the Australian flag being lowered, folded and handed to Ambassador Price. He carried it indoors and, still holding it, dedicated a final message to Canberra. It included the wry comment about the trying time his staff had faced in recent weeks; it thanked Foreign Affairs staff for their help and ended with ‘Goodbye from Saigon’.”
Security for the journey to Tan Son Nhat was provided by a contingent of four RAAF airfield defence guards brought in on the last flight. Unbelievably, the team led by Sergeant John Hansen had deployed unarmed, on the tenuous rationale that the mission was a humanitarian one. More likely, the concern was that the presence of weapons might provoke the North Vietnamese. Luckily, the defence attache at the embassy had other ideas. He opened the well-stocked armoury he kept at his home and invited the guards to take their pick. They settled on handguns that could be concealed beneath their uniforms.
The convoy pulled up on the tarmac where the RAAF C-130 piloted by John Fanderlinden was waiting. Price handed the keys of the embassy Citroen to his driver, Mr Thuoi, impeccably attired in a grey tropical-weight safari suit. The tall, dignified Vietnamese had always looked out for the Australian journalists, and Brill was fond of him. He remembers Thuoi once saying that he wouldn’t leave the country, no matter what, because that would mean abandoning his mother.
Price was visibly moved when he shook hands with Thuoi for the final time, telling him that the car was his.
As Fanderlinden fired up the big Hercules’s four turboprop engines, Thuoi addressed the Australian flag on the bonnet. “He put the sheath over it, like this was the end, you know,” Brill says. “I filmed that shot … and the loadmaster was outside as well, still talking to the pilots to make sure everything was right. He pushed me on, then he got on, and we just took off out of there and went to Bangkok. To be honest, it was quite a relief. But it was also incredibly sad to think about the people we were leaving behind.
“Incredibly sad.”
About 30 passengers were seated on benches on each side of the fuselage facing in – Price and the embassy crew, of course, a few businessmen and aid workers, a group of Catholic nuns and other journalists including Denis Warner, the legendary war correspondent from Tasmania. There wasn’t only space for the pet dogs, cats and birds of the UN personnel, who had been flown out separately. Rolled carpets and bulky items of homeware were stowed in the main cabin.
Palfreyman, 80, ever the restrained newsman, says the scene was “saddening”. He pauses. Yes, shameful probably sums it up.
“Certainly, I felt that – that we were leaving people behind, that there was plenty of room and plenty of opportunity to have taken them out. In that sense, it was shameful,” he says.
Munckton, 78, agrees. He had heard about a list of Vietnamese personnel considered at particular risk due to their employment by the Australian government or military. “I think there were some 30 or 32 names on that list of Australian-associated South Vietnamese who were working in, or for or around the embassy … and they should have been given the grace to go if they wanted to go,” he says. “I don’t know that all of them would have gone, but they weren’t given that opportunity. I think there was a very tough Whitlam policy around this.”
Brill, 80, calls it a “horrible betrayal”. “I can still see the ambassador’s driver’s face … this very beautiful, distinguished man who had been with the embassy for years, and he was being left behind. It … was horrible, a horrible betrayal. And then on that plane, I remember the empty seats on that plane. It was all politics.”
Palfreyman, wrongly, sheeted some of the blame home to Price. Eventually, sections of the cable traffic between the embassy leading up to the events of April, 1975 would come into Palfreyman’s possession, showing that the ambassador, in fact, had argued strongly against the directive from Canberra to not evacuate the local staff. “It was evident that Whitlam, who’d taken personal charge of Vietnam policy, had decided to keep Hanoi on side at the expense of the defeated South Vietnam,” Palfreyman says.
Historian Sue Thompson, of the Australian National University’s National Security College, says the record shows that Price did what he could for the embassy’s Vietnamese employees.
“He fought hard for them,” she says. The epitome of the discreet diplomat, Price kept faith with a government decision he personally opposed, making no mention of the dispute in a valedictory report on his time in South Vietnam.
Nor did he ever complain about the cost he evidently paid personally. Saigon, though a hardship post during the war, was reserved for high-flyers in the diplomatic service. When Brill next ran into Price, in the mid-1980s, he was Australia’s high commissioner in Islamabad, a much humbler assignment. “He sort of had the look of a destroyed man,” the cinematographer says.
It wasn’t until 1995, after his retirement, that Price spoke out. Interviewed by Palfreyman on the ABC, he let rip. “We should have been more generous and sympathetic to our local employees,” he said. “Shamefully, we were not.”
According to his son, Price went to his grave four years later still consumed by “Australia’s petty betrayal of Vietnamese colleagues who had worked alongside him”. Palfreyman and Munckton went on to stellar careers at the ABC while Brill continued to roam the globe covering wars and big stories. The trio returned to Ho Chi Minh City this week as guests of the Vietnamese government.
As for Mr Ba, Mrs Minh, Mr Thuoi and the other embassy staff left to their fate when Saigon fell five days after Anzac Day 1975, the Australian government can’t say what became of them. It’s understood the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has no records that shed light on how they fared. Were they persecuted? Did they face re-education? Or worse?
DFAT did not respond to written questions about whether the Australian government had broached the subject with Hanoi.
Read Richard Palfreyman’s account of the last days of Saigon in The Weekend Australian on Saturday
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