Learn the plight of the babies who were airlifted at the end of the Vietnam War in a program called Operation Babylift
Learn the plight of the babies who were airlifted at the end of the Vietnam War in a program called Operation Babylift.
On the first day of the operation, there was a tragic crash that killed 78 babies.
Hanoi Hannah and the Perfume River Squad Episode
Hi, this is Kelly Chase and you are listening to History Detective, a podcast where I delve into the past to uncover the mysteries of history. Before I get started, I wanted to let you know that I have just released a book called History, Her Story, Our Story, Inspirational Women Who Shaped Our World. You can find a link in the show notes.
Today I would like to share the story of the war orphans who, at the end of the Vietnam War, were airlifted out of the country in a humanitarian effort to find homes for these innocent victims of the conflict in Vietnam. Unfortunately, on the day that it began, the 4th of April 1975, there was a tragedy. A plane crash that killed many of the orphans and personnel trying to evacuate them. This is the tumultuous story of Operation Babylift.
The war in Vietnam, which had begun more than a decade before, had devastating social implications on the Vietnamese population. One of these effects was the rise in orphans as a direct result of the conflict. Some of these orphans where children who may have had a Vietnamese mother and an American GI father, and some were children whose parents had been killed in the conflict. But in any case, there were a lot of children who needed caring for. There were many humanitarian and religious organisations who were setting up orphanages to try and alleviate the situation. Often their solution was to adopt the Vietnamese babies out to overseas Western countries.
In 1975, when the North had won the war and the Americans and Australians were withdrawing, The American President, Gerald Ford, came up with a plan to evacuate more than 3000 of these war orphans to western countries like America and Australia. This is a seemingly noble plan, but it fails to recognise the deeper psychological implications that might arise from being taken from your culture and dropped into a predominantly white society where the majority of the population do not look like you.
The reason that America and Australia felt the need to step in a ‘rescue’ orphans, is that the war that they had been a part of was the cause for there being so many orphans in the first place. Women working in humanitarian aid had been setting up orphanages in Vietnam for more than a decade to help the ever increasing amount of orphans. As in any war time situation, concrete numbers of the of children who became orphans as a result of the war is contestable, but some people believed there were more than 1 million orphaned children in Vietnam in the early 1970s.
In Australia, there were political hurdles to intercontinental adoption. Australia was coming off the back of the Immigration Restriction Act otherwise known as the White Australia Policy, which was a policy specifically designed to exclude non-white people immigrating to Australia. These restrictions were beginning to be eased, but it is difficult to change ingrained attitudes about race overnight. Regardless, the plight of orphan children did pull on the heartstrings of those in charge and of the 3000 babies who were airlifted from Saigon, 194 of them came to Australia.
But let’s recap the events of the first day of Operation Babylift, the 4th April 1975, the day that 78 children died in a tragic plane crash that was supposed to be their salvation.
A C-5 Cargo plane was loaded up with Vietnamese babies and their care takers, nurses and air force personnel. Shortly after take-off, there was a malfunction when the locks on a rear loading ramp failed and cargo doors blew open. This resulted in the plane crash landing in a rice paddy. 138 people died in the crash including 78 of the orphan children they were attempting to rescue, but there were 175 survivors. One of those survivors was the chief medical officer who was on board the plane when it crashed, Regina Aune. Because there was not enough room in the plane, they had loaded some of the children into the cargo bay. She explains, "We put them in little groups and we secured them to the floor of the aircraft, with cargo tie-down straps and … blankets and pillows and whatever we could to kind of secure them to the floor." In the crash, the cargo compartment carrying children, civilians and crew members was crushed, and although she was injured she worked tirelessly to rescue the surviving children and carry them to safety.
In my research for this episode, I read a book written from a dual perspective, it was called Operation Babylift: Mission Accomplished: A Memoir of Hope and Healing. The book was co-written by the afore mentioned Regina Aune and one of the now grown-up orphan children Aryn Lockhart. What is fascinating about Aryn’s side of the story is that she was only an infant at the time of the crash and she always believed that she was a survivor of the crash, but her world was shattered when as an adult, when she began investigating her own past, there was uncertainty cast on whether or not she was on the plane. I highly recommend reading their book, there is even an audiobook available. I will pop a link in the show notes.
Anyway, because of this disastrous beginning to President Gerald Ford’s orphan rescue plan, his presidential team went into PR mode and flew him and his wife, Lady Betty Ford, to meet the first plane to successfully arrive in America on the 5th of April. The daily diary of the president has a remarkably clinical description of the day’s events.
“9:12pm The President and the First Lady boarded evacuation bus No. 1. The President and the First Lady participated in briefing on evacuation procedures.
10:19pm: The President carried an orphan to bus No.1. 10:27: The President carried a second orphan to bus No.2.”
A memoir from the First Lady’s press secretary, Sheila Weidenfeld, was a considerably more empathetic report of the experience. “Mrs. Ford and the rest of us flew to San Francisco on Air Force One to be there when the first planeload of orphans arrived. It was an incredible scene. There were more than 300 children on board, and most were unsettled and some had been sick. It had been an exhausting trip, and the arrival was emotionally draining for all, passengers and observers. Since they had not released the list of yesterday's crash victims, there were prospective parents at the airport who did not know whether their adoptive children were alive or dead. I'll never forget the look on the face of one woman who was waiting nervously to find out. She got good news, her child had arrived safely. She remained composed until she looked up and saw Mrs. Ford standing there and then something - a compassionate look from the First Lady? - made her crumble, and she began crying and crying.” It is an interesting source as it clearly shows that there were loving families ready to help the orphaned children who were being displaced from their country and culture.
One thing is for sure, that even though the pictures we see from this time are in black and white, the moral and ethical questions that are raised by this historical event are certainly far from black and white. Instead we find that there are so many grey areas when it comes to making judgements about whether or not Operation Babylift was the right thing to do.
Another book called Operation Babylift by Ian Shaw, tells the story from an Australian lens and shares a thorough and detailed history of the volunteer women who lived in Vietnam for over a decade during the Vietnam War. These women worked tirelessly to establish orphanages and raise supplies and money for the sick and abandoned children who were a direct consequence of the conflict.
On the other hand, lawsuits have been filed arguing that many of the children in the airlift were not orphans. They said that poor families in Vietnam would sometimes place children in orphanages if they could not feed them. But these parents did not intend to give them up permanently, and would often visit their children.
A former Australian adoptee explains her feelings, "what I've struggled with … is that we've been plucked from our Asian heritage and then we've been placed in a Western background and we've had to assimilate into Western lifestyles…unfortunately, a lot of us are still trying to learn that side of the Vietnamese culture because we haven’t been educated enough. I haven’t been around a lot of Vietnamese people which I’m trying to do that now in my adulthood."
Another former adoptee tells of his experience with racism, "I experienced quite a lot of racism growing up. But I also experienced a lot of exclusion because I was not white, even though I was brought up to be white” "I was told so often at school that I’m different, I'm Asian, 'you don't belong here', 'go back to where you come from'”.
Humans, history and especially war, are complex and nuanced and for every one event, there thousands of different perspectives. What was right for one person, is not necessarily right for another. A person who whole heartedly believed they were doing good, may have invertedly been doing harm. So whatever part of history you are studying, make sure you try and discover as many perspectives as possible about the events and remember, there may never be a correct history.
This Kelly Chase, on the Case.
If you would like to hear another story about the Vietnam War, make sure you check out Hanoi Hannah and the Perfume River Squad. Or if you are interested in more history of unwilling orphan migration, check out the Child Migrants episode. Both of these are available on the History Detective YouTube or the podcast feed.
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