South Vietnam’s Journey into Oblivion

Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973–75
by George J. Veith
Encounter Books, 2012, 456 pages, US$29.95

George J. Veith’s Black April tells the story of South Vietnam’s journey into oblivion. His thesis is that the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) possessed an integrity and pluck its detractors ignore, and would have been even more effective at the end if the post-Watergate Congress had provided the vital resources it had promised, including desperately needed fuel and parts for its air force. By 1975 the Vietnamese communists had lost the ideological and guerrilla warfare they had waged against the people of South Vietnam for more than fifteen years, and so the final showdown between Hanoi and Saigon was settled by a conventional military invasion. South Vietnam’s anti-communist cause, notwithstanding monumental mistakes on the part of its key leaders, was a just one, but in the end betrayed.

Black April, with remarkable scholarship and attention to detail, further…