THE ANATOMY OF A DEBACLE

"How could it happen?" a stunned South Vietnamese official wondered last week. "I just don't see how it could happen." His bafflement was shared by much of the world after the swift collapse of Saigon's fighting forces with almost no resistance in the face of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. With rare exceptions, the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) did not even stand its ground and fight, dissolving instead into panic and flight in a historic military debacle.

What went wrong? Almost everything:

Failure of the Paris Accords

Amid much international fanfare, representatives from the U.S., South Viet Nam, North Viet Nam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government signed an "Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet Nam" on Jan. 27, 1973 in Paris. Yet the fighting never really stopped; nor were Saigon and the Communists ever able to agree on how to carry out some of the accords' major provisions. They never exchanged maps delineating areas under their respective control (which would have recognized each other's de jure rights in those areas); they never set up the National Council of Reconciliation and Concord, which was supposed to have organized national elections; they never designated points where their forces could receive replacements of supplies. When Viet Cong troops showed up at assembly points for resettlement in Communist-held areas, government forces often ambushed them. As for Hanoi, it seemed to view the whole agreement as simply another means of fulfilling Ho Chi Minh's maxim: "Fight until the Americans are gone, and then fight again until the puppet government is overthrown."

All signatories of the accords violated them. The U.S. broke the spirit, though not the letter, of the agreement by rushing an enormous amount of materiel to Saigon just before the cease-fire took effect. In the first year of the ceasefire, government forces expanded the land area under their control by some 20%, bringing roughly 1 million additional people under the South Vietnamese flag. South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, who felt with some justification that he was being placed in an untenable no-win situation, also did all he could to block the open political struggle in South Viet Nam that was envisaged by the accords.

Thieu had some compelling reasons for acting as he did.

The agreement did not require the North Vietnamese to withdraw their estimated 145,000 troops from South Viet Nam; it did not even dispute Hanoi's absurd assertion that it had no troops in the South. In fact, the Communists did nothing to alleviate Thieu's fears that cease-fire or no, they were still determined to rule the South. Hanoi moved huge numbers of new troops into the South until overall Communist strength had grown by a startling 40%, to 220,000 combat troops at the start of the present offensive (the Viet Cong comprise only a small part of the Communist forces). The Communists turned muddy jungle supply trails into paved all-weather highways, and began sending their units hundreds of new weapons.

The International Commission of Control and Supervision, established to monitor the uneasy truce, was paralyzed almost from the start. Its two Communist members, Poland and Hungary, usually refused to investigate alleged violations by Hanoi. Yet the non-Communist members of the commission--Indonesia and Canada--were generally willing to look into charges against Saigon. The Canadians became so disgusted with the impotence of the ICCS that they resigned in August 1973, and were replaced by Iran.

Only two provisions of the Paris Accords have been fulfilled --the withdrawal of U.S. personnel from South Viet Nam and the return by Hanoi of American prisoners of war. For that reason, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has been accused of negotiating the cease-fire primarily to provide a cloak of respectability under which the U.S. could get out of Viet Nam. Although the agreement theoretically left room for Saigon and the PRG to work out political accommodations, the differences that had long separated the two sides remained. Averell Harriman, who headed the Paris talks with the Communists during Lyndon Johnson's Administration, argues that the U.S. should have sought a political agreement before a ceasefire.

Failure of Intelligence

In an unusually candid mea culpa, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger admitted: "It is obvious in retrospect that the strength, resiliency and steadfastness of those [Saigon] forces were more highly valued than they should have been." The collapse of ARVN shattered one of the most widely cultivated Washington illusions: that Vietnamization--launched in 1969 as part of Richard Nixon's "Guam Doctrine"--had so improved the fighting ability of South Viet Nam that the country no longer needed U.S. troops to defend it.

Washington may have been fooling itself about ARVN's capabilities. Yet, the U.S. did not fool itself one bit as far as Communist potential was concerned. The build-up of North Vietnamese troops and the massive movement of supplies southward had been accurately recorded by intelligence agents and satellite photos. Although U.S. officials concluded that Hanoi was capable of mounting an attack, they assumed--partly because the biggest previous Communist offensives came during the 1968 and 1972 U.S. election years--that the next major attack would not come until 1976. It is widely believed that Hanoi did not originally intend the current drive to be an all-out offensive; only after ARVN began disintegrating did the Communists decide to keep rolling. Probably the greatest failure was in overestimating ARVN's ability to resist.

What happened? Perhaps ARVN was never as good as many American officials have often claimed. Saigon's forces apparently are still plagued by the weaknesses that have bedeviled them for the past two decades: poor motivation (including an unclear idea of why they are fighting), low pay ($20 per month) and officers who attained their commands through nepotism or corruption, or because they come from wealthy families, and who thus have often been indifferent and cruel to the line troops who come primarily from peasant or poor urban backgrounds.

Since the ceasefire, these weaknesses have been accentuated by plunging morale. An inflation rate of 65% in 1973 and 40% in 1974 reduced the soldier's real pay even further.

The withdrawal of U.S. advisers, who had played a key role in leading and coordinating ARVN's operations even after Vietnamization began, removed a crucial psychological prop.

One question that may never be settled is whether a reduction in supplies -- because of cutbacks in U.S. military aid -- fatally undermined ARVN's confidence. According to one line of argument, that same scarcity made it impossible for ARVN to continue the tactics learned from the U.S. -- constant harassment and interdiction of Communist troops to keep them off balance and to prevent them from massing in numbers capable of launching a coordinated, deadly offensive. Ceilings were placed on the number of shells that field guns and mortars could fire daily, and there was a severe cutback in helicopter and warplane missions in order to conserve fuel and because of a lack of spare parts. Thus, as this argument goes, ARVN was hamstrung, reduced to a passive, defensive role in which it could only respond to an enemy attack when it was too late. This may have played no small role in the disintegration in ARVN's confidence and willingness to fight. Of course, some observers argue that ARVN learned its lessons all too well from the U.S. and became appallingly wasteful in using what should have been ample supplies.

At the time the Paris Accords were negotiated, Washington apparently misrepresented the degree to which it could guarantee aid to Saigon. The U.S. commitment to Saigon may have been unintentionally ambiguous. It is possible that Secretary of State Kissinger, in the wake of Nixon's 1972 land slide and several diplomatic triumphs of his own, simply did not expect Congress to challenge the Administration's requests.

His bitter critics charge, however, that Kissinger deliberately misled the South Vietnamese to buy a "decent interval" during which the U.S. could withdraw its troops and leave Saigon strong enough to survive a few years so that when the collapse came, it would not be viewed as a setback for Washington.

At any rate, the South Vietnamese relied heavily on assurances from almost every level of U.S. diplomats and military officers that after the G.I.s departed, aid would definitely not diminish.

Both Washington and Saigon realized that ARVN's only chance of standing alone was if it had enormous amounts of U.S. supplies.

Even so, most experts believed that in the face of a major Communist attack, ARVN would again require the support of U.S. bombers. The fact that the Administration had not obtained congressional approval or even a moral commitment for this aid should have made the U.S. Government more circumspect.

Despite the Administration's finger-pointing at Congress, Capitol Hill has approved generous aid bills for South Viet Nam since the Paris Accords. In fiscal 1973, the Administration got $3.8 billion in aid (of which $3.3 billion was military); this year it asked for $1.4 billion in military aid and so far has got $700 million, with Congress still to vote on $300 million in supplementary funds. Plainly, congressional reductions did not pauperize Saigon. When the debacle began a month ago, ARVN was still equipped with some of the world's best weaponry -- U.S. grenade launchers, artillery, M-16 rifles, M48 tanks, helicopters, jet warplanes, trucks, transports and an extensive communications network.

What can be argued is that the reductions were large enough to rule out a one-to-one replacement of equipment lost in battle by ARVN. At the same time, there was no diminution in Moscow and Peking's backing of Hanoi; aid in 1974 is estimated to have totaled $1.57 billion. Defense Secretary Schlesinger maintains that Pentagon analysts underestimated the adverse impact an aid cutback would have on ARVN's "morale and organizational cohesion and resiliency."

That may be true. But in a broader sense, it could be argued that Hue and Danang were abandoned not because South Vietnamese troops lacked ammunition and equipment, but because of a disastrous failure of leadership and loss of will to fight. Congressional delays in approving the latest request for supplementary aid were seen in Saigon as a demoralizing signal and in Hanoi as an encouraging one. But after a decade of direct involvement, $150 billion and 56,000 American lives, it is hard to see how a few hundred million dollars more would have been decisive.

Absence of Leadership Compounding ARVN's endemic problems has been the failure of leadership, not only by division and regional commanders, but especially by President Thieu. Autocratic and arbitrary, he has promoted relatives and cronies to high government and military positions, suppressed opponents and closed his eyes to widespread corruption.

Thieu's obsessive reclusiveness has cost his country dearly in recent weeks. Apparently, after consulting only two close aides, he summarily ordered ARVN to abandon three provinces in the Central Highlands and the northernmost province of Quang Tri. Most Pentagon analysts acknowledge that on paper Thieu's strategy may have been sound: by shrinking his lines of defense, he should have, theoretically, made it easier to protect the most important areas of the country. But the same analysts roundly condemn Thieu's execution of that strategy. A "retrograde" maneuver -- as the experts euphemistically term such a withdrawal -- requires extensive planning and a coordinated command structure. Elaborate measures must be taken to save all equipment possible and to destroy what cannot be moved. "Above all," says a Pentagon tactician, "you must inform your subordinates of all phases of the plan."

Thieu gave his officers only six hours' notice before the retreat and not even enough time to fuel vehicles. At Hue it was even worse. "It was like a yo-yo," says a U.S. expert. "First, Thieu gave the order to pull back and defend Danang. Then he countermanded it and ordered that Hue be held.

Then he changed his mind again and told the troops to withdraw.

A reasonably orderly withdrawal turned into a rout." Hundreds of fighter planes were left behind intact on regional airfields, and masses of valuable equipment -- essential if the government ever hoped to mount an effective counterattack -- were abandoned.

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