Half a century ago, the RAAF and also Qantas joined one of the great humanitarian missions at the end of the Vietnam War, using C-130 and even Dakota aircraft plus a Qantas Boeing 747 to evacuate infants and other refugees from Vietnam.
This was called Operation Babylift, mounted in April 1975 in the chaotic final days before Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces.
Operation Babylift, like more recent RAAF missions to evacuate Australian nationals from foreign warzones, was a significant logistics effort, staged far from home at short notice under difficult conditions.
In Canberra on Wednesday, participants in Operation Babylift, plus some of the (now grown up) infants they transported, gathered at the Australian War Memorial to commemorate the event’s 50th anniversary.
Operation Babylift was just part of a larger US-led operation delivering aid and evacuating refugees from South Vietnam. Australia had withdrawn the last combat troops at the end of 1972 and the US in March 1973.
As North Vietnamese troops advanced, thousands crowded into Saigon, creating a looming humanitarian catastrophe. US President Gerald Ford coined the name Operation Babylift to evacuate around 3,000 orphans, many the children of liaisons between Vietnamese women and US soldiers.
Australia agreed to help, deploying what was called Detachment S (for Saigon), initially two C-130 Hercules from 36 and 37 Squadrons and two C-47 Dakotas from Transport Support Fight, Butterworth, Malaysia.
Eventually the mission included eight Hercules, a very significant effort which tested the kills of aircrew flying to and from chaotic crowded airports in the final throes of a long war.
“The airport was fairly busy with a lot air transport and ground strike sorties departing morning, noon and night and radio chatter was …intense,” recalled retired Air Commodore Ian Scott, a participant in the missions.
“We had rudimentary intelligence and very rudimentary tactics. What we would try to do is to take off, climb as steeply as we can to get up to our cruise altitude. When we came back into Saigon into Tan Son Nhat airfield, we would try to do a circling approach or a very steep approach to avoid small arms ground fire.”
Initially it was thought babies bound for Australia could travel from Saigon aboard a chartered Qantas Boeing 747 but it was quickly concluded the airliner should land at Bangkok, with infants transported from Saigon aboard the RAAF’s C-130s.
The first flight carried 87 babies and the next 107, many loaded aboard, the smallest in cardboard boxes stacked side by side on the cargo hold floor. In all 281 children were transported to Australia and around 3,000 to the US.
Operation Babylift wasn’t without tragedy and controversy. The first departing aircraft was a USAF C-5A Galaxy which crashed soon after take-off, killing 138, including 78 children and two Australian women.
Not all those evacuated were orphans – some had been placed into orphanages by poor but still living relatives. Some alleged their youngsters had been, in effect, kidnapped, and launched legal action in the US.
Not all Detachment S activities were about evacuating babies. The detachment conducted many more flights inside Vietnam, evacuating refugees ahead of the North Vietnamese forces and delivering relief supplies.