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South Vietnam
The Republic of Vietnam, the southern half of a country divided at the 17th parallel
South Vietnam existed for barely two decades, but its name still carries the weight of one of the defining wars of the late twentieth century. The Republic of Vietnam, with its capital in Saigon, governed the half of the country south of the 17th parallel after the 1954 Geneva Accords, while a communist government in Hanoi ruled the north. Backed by the United States, which had more than half a million troops there at the 1969 peak, it fought a long war against northern forces and the southern insurgency known in the West as the Viet Cong. Its fall on April 30, 1975, ended the war and set off an exodus of refugees by land and sea.
The republic covered about 173,800 square kilometers, from the Ben Hai River and the Demilitarized Zone at the 17th parallel south to the tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula. Its northern half was a narrow strip between the South China Sea and the Annamite Range, with the old imperial city of Hue, the port of Da Nang, and a chain of coastal rice plains. Inland, the Central Highlands rose to cooler plateaus of forest, tea, and coffee. The south opened into the vast, flat Mekong Delta, a maze of channels and paddies that made the region one of Asia's great rice bowls. Saigon, its capital and largest city, is now Ho Chi Minh City. The whole territory is today the southern half of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
France's defeat in Indochina led to the 1954 Geneva Accords, which divided Vietnam pending national elections that never took place. In the south, Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem deposed the former emperor Bao Dai in a 1955 referendum and proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam on October 26. Diem was killed in a military coup in 1963, and a series of governments followed as the war widened. American combat troops arrived in 1965 and withdrew after the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973. In the spring of 1975 northern forces advanced rapidly and entered Saigon on April 30. A Provisional Revolutionary Government administered the south until formal reunification on July 2, 1976. Over the following years hundreds of thousands of southerners left by sea, and large diaspora communities grew in the United States, Australia, and France.