Still rootless: the child refugees of Vietnam war's chaotic final days
The evacuation of 3,000 children, many of them orphans, from Vietnam before the fall of Saigon began in tragedy, when the first flight crashed. Simon Parry meets a survivor and some of the other beneficiaries of Operation Babylift who, 40 years on, are yearning to connect with their roots
Operation Babylift – a plan to fly thousands of orphans, children of United States servicemen and disabled youngsters to new lives overseas before the fall of Saigon, on April 30, 1975 – was meant to shine a glimmer of hope into the dark days of the war’s end. The inaugural flight of the mission, however, crashed minutes after take-off.
As the then American president, Gerald Ford, waited to greet some of the children as they arrived in the US, the two-deck C-5A cargo plane took off from Tan Son Nhut Air Base, headed for its first stop, Clark Air Base, in the Philippines, on the afternoon of April 4, 1975.
With 313 people – many of them orphans and other vulnerable children, with US military and diplomatic officials caring for them – on board, the plane began climbing out across the South China Sea. It had reached 23,000 feet when an explosion, initially thought to be caused by an enemy missile, blew the cargo door off the rear of the plane.
Wrestling with decompression and a hydraulics failure, which, at one point, sent the plane into a near-fatal sheer climb, the pilots struggled to bring the aircraft under control and steer it back towards Tan Son Nhut.
A few miles short of the runway, it crashed. The plane broke into four parts, which then burst into flames across a 3km or 4km stretch of countryside. The 78 babies and children and 50 adults who had been seated on the lower deck died instantly. Ten of those seated on the upper deck perished but 175 passengers survived.
