On the morning of April 29, 1975, USS Midway (CVA-41) was operating off the coast of South Vietnam when the order came to begin the evacuation of Saigon. Operation Frequent Wind — the largest helicopter evacuation in history — was underway, and Midway was at the center of it. Over the next eighteen hours, her flight deck and those of other ships received hundreds of helicopter flights carrying Americans, South Vietnamese nationals, and anyone else who could be gotten out before North Vietnamese forces closed the ring around the capital. What happened on that flight deck over those eighteen hours belongs to the most dramatic moments in the history of naval aviation.
The Ship
USS Midway (CVA-41) was a Midway-class carrier, commissioned in 1945 — too late for World War II, but in time for everything that came after. She served longer than any other carrier in U.S. Navy history, accumulating decades of Pacific deployments from a homeport she made famous: the forward-deployed billet at Yokosuka, Japan, which she occupied from 1973 until her decommissioning in 1992. By 1975 she was thirty years old, battle-tested, uniquely modified through a series of major overhauls that had expanded her flight deck and updated her capabilities, and stationed closer to the action than any other American carrier.
For the 1975 deployment and Frequent Wind, Midway had Air Wing Five (CVW-5) aboard — the forward-deployed air wing that called Atsugi Naval Air Facility home when not at sea. Midway was commanded by Captain Lawrence Chambers.
The Fall of Saigon
The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 had ended direct American military involvement in Vietnam, but they had not ended the war. Through 1974 and into 1975, North Vietnamese forces advanced steadily southward. By April 1975, it was clear that South Vietnam's government was collapsing. The final offensive began in earnest in March 1975. By late April, Saigon itself was surrounded.
The U.S. government had been planning for various contingency evacuations for months, but the pace of the North Vietnamese advance outran the planning. Operation Frequent Wind — the fixed-wing and helicopter evacuation of American citizens and designated South Vietnamese nationals — was authorized on April 29, 1975. Midway was among the ships that received the evacuees.
Operation Frequent Wind
Marine Corps CH-53 and CH-46 helicopters flew repeated sorties from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and from designated rooftop landing zones throughout the city, lifting out evacuees and returning for more. The flights continued through the night of April 29-30. Midway, operating in the South China Sea with other ships of Task Force 76, received helicopters and their passengers, turned them around, and sent them back for more runs.
As the evacuation progressed, a complication arrived that no one had fully anticipated: South Vietnamese Air Force pilots, faced with the fall of their country, began flying their aircraft out to the fleet. Helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft began arriving uninvited, their pilots looking for somewhere to land. Midway's flight deck began to fill with South Vietnamese military aircraft that had been abandoned after landing.
Captain Chambers made a decision that has become one of the most famous in naval history. To make room for more arriving helicopters — helicopters still carrying evacuees — he ordered South Vietnamese aircraft pushed overboard into the South China Sea. Hueys worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each went over the side so that the next helicopter full of people had somewhere to put down. The Navy later estimated that more than two dozen aircraft were pushed overboard or ditched in the water beside the fleet during the evacuation.
The Bird Dog
Among the most remarkable moments of Frequent Wind was the arrival of a South Vietnamese Air Force O-1 Bird Dog — a small, single-engine liaison aircraft — that appeared over Midway flying low and slow. The pilot dropped a note requesting permission to land. He had his wife and children aboard. He had nowhere else to go.
Captain Chambers ordered the flight deck cleared. Helicopters were pushed aside. The tiny Bird Dog came in and landed safely on a carrier flight deck that was never designed to receive it. The pilot, Major Buang-Ly, had made an improvised escape with his family aboard a two-seat aircraft built for artillery spotting. The photograph of that landing has been in print continuously since 1975. It is one of the defining images of the end of the Vietnam War.
Legacy
USS Midway's role in Operation Frequent Wind was the most visible chapter of a deployment that included the final weeks of American involvement in Southeast Asia. The sailors who were aboard her that April remember the weight of what they witnessed: the helicopters that kept coming, the aircraft pushed into the sea, the families on the flight deck who had just lost everything except their lives. Midway went on to serve another seventeen years, finally decommissioning in 1992. Today she is preserved as a museum ship in San Diego, where the Bird Dog that Major Buang-Ly landed on her deck is on display.
If you served aboard USS Midway or want to honor someone who did, browse the Midway 1975 collection. The full Midway collection covers her entire career in the store.