Celebrations in Ho Chi Minh City to mark 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War

HO CHI MINH CITY - Thousands of Vietnamese celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War on April 30, in what the country’s communist leader said was a “victory of justice over tyranny”.

Celebrations culminated in a grand parade in Ho Chi Minh City, with thousands of marching troops and an air show with Russian-made fighter jets and helicopters, as Vietnamese waved red flags and sung patriotic songs.

“It was a victory of justice over tyranny,” Vietnam’s communist party chief and the country’s top leader To Lam said on April 30, citing one of Ho Chi Minh’s mottos: “Vietnam is one, the Vietnamese people are one. Rivers may dry up, mountains may erode, but that truth will never change.”

State television broadcast images of the country’s largest celebration of the historic event in half a century, featuring fighter jets and helicopters flying overhead with national flags.

Leading the parade in the city now named after founding leader Ho Chi Minh was a float bearing his portrait.

The historic anniversary commemorates the first act of the country’s reunification on April 30, 1975, when Communist-run North Vietnam seized Saigon, the capital of the US-backed South.

The victory, about two years after Washington withdrew its last combat troops from the country, marked the end of a 20-year conflict that killed some three million Vietnamese and nearly 60,000 Americans, many of them young soldiers conscripted into the military.

The fall of Saigon was seared into many memories by the images of US helicopters evacuating some 7,000 people, many of them Vietnamese, as North Vietnamese tanks closed in. The final flight took off from the roof of the US embassy at 7.53am on April 30, carrying the last US Marines out of Saigon.

Saigon was later renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

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