“A woman on a motorbike drove past us, and I asked her the location of the palace. In press interviews following his dramatic feat, Than said that he and his two crew members had become lost when their tank entered Saigon with other North Vietnamese Army elements following their arrival into the city that day.Įntering Saigon via the Sai Gon Bridge, Than made a wrong turn and ended up the Saigon Zoo. 843, a Soviet-made T-54, rammed through the locked iron gates of Saigon’s Presidential Palace, knocked them off their concrete pillars, sped through the palace grounds and came to a halt before the palace entrance.īui Quand Than, a 29-year-old North Vietnamese Army lieutenant-captain and the tank’s commander, jumped out of his 30-foot tank, ran into the palace, rushed up the stairs and hung an oversized North Vietnamese flag from the second floor balcony. South Vietnam’s capitulation that fateful day was caught by still and motion picture photographers and flashed around the world when North Vietnamese Army tank No. The war officially ended on April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital now known as Ho Chi Minh City, by the People’s Army of North Vietnam and its National Liberation Front. In six days, we will be commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, a conflict that killed 58,220 and wounded 153,303 American military personnel and uncounted millions of Vietnamese.
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