See how communist forces turned Saigon into Ho Chi Minh City and created the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

NARRATOR: While the Paris agreement brought an end to years of bitter warfare between the United States and North Vietnam, it did not bring peace to South Vietnam. Under the January 27 accords, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces were permitted to stay in South Vietnam and consolidate the territory they controlled. Although an international control commission had been set up to enforce the cease-fire, it was unable and unwilling to stop the fighting that continued to erupt between the Communists and the American-backed government of South Vietnam.

By March 1975, two years and two months after the signing of the Paris peace agreement, the South Vietnamese Army was in full retreat before a superior communist force. By April, Saigon, the capital, was surrounded. President Thieu, Premier Ky, and other high-ranking military and government officials fled the country. On April 29 and 30, the United States evacuated all remaining Americans, as well as some 120,000 South Vietnamese, to ships waiting off the coast of Vietnam. As the last American helicopter lifted off from the roof of the American Embassy, North Vietnamese tanks rolled through the city and onto the grounds of the presidential palace.

A year later, on July 2, 1976, North and South Vietnam were finally unified. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi became the capital of the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam. South Vietnam, as a nation struggling toward democracy, as a battlefield of American foreign policy, ceased to exist. And the Vietnam War passed into history.