PU The Vietnam War - Class 7 Spring Offensive to The Fall of Saigon & Rise of Socialist Republic

Name: PU The Vietnam War - Class 7 Spring Offensive to The Fall of Saigon & Rise of Socialist Republic
Start: 2025-05-15T19:00:00-04:00
Location: People's University at the Ohio County Public Library

Schedule

Thu, 15 May, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

People's University at the Ohio County Public Library | Wheeling, WV

Civil War: From the Spring Offensive to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
This lecture will examine the final episode of the Vietnamese Civil War, focusing on the period from the Spring Offensive to the reunification of Vietnam and the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). Often overlooked by American historians of the Vietnam War due to the diminished role of the United States after its military disengagement, this episode is crucial to understanding the nature and conclusion of the Vietnam War.
The lecture begins with the 1972 Spring Offensive, a large-scale military campaign launched by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) to deliver a decisive blow to the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) following the withdrawal of the vast majority of American troops from Vietnam and before the resolution of Paris Peace Accords. Those negotiations formally ended American involvement in the Vietnam conflict but failed to bring lasting peace as the DRVN and RVN continued hostilities.
The discussion will then cover the dramatic collapse of the RVN during the 1975 Hồ Chí Minh Campaign, culminating when North Vietnamese troops sacked Sài Gòn on April 30—commonly known as “Black April.” This marked the end of a three-decade-long Vietnamese Civil War and ended in the reunification of Vietnam under the explicit aegis of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP). At the same time, Cambodia and Laos also fell to Communist revolutions led by the Pathet Lao and the Khmer Rouge.
This lecture will also explore the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War and the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) in 1976. This single-party socialist state, governed under the explicit aegis of the Vietnamese Communist Party, faced significant challenges during the post-war period, often referred to as the Subsidy Period (Thời kỳ Bao cấp). This era was characterized by economic hardship, reeducation programs targeting the Communist Party’s political rivals, the Vietnamese refugee crisis, and the Third Indochina War, which included Vietnam’s 1978 invasion of Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge and the subsequent Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979.
INSTRUCTOR Cody J. Billock is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University specializing in the history of the Vietnam War. His dissertation tentatively entitled “Cold War Citadel: Huế & the Global Vietnamese Civil War,” employs the central Vietnamese city of Huế to argue that the three decades of war between 1945-1975 was one defined by one continuous conflict between communist and anti-communist groups. Billock has proficiency in the French, Chinese, and Vietnamese languages and has conducted extensive archival research in Vietnam, France, and the US.