Operation Babylift: When the US Abducted 3,000 Vietnamese Children

Published at: 01/08/2025 03:54 PM

Fifty years ago, when the Vietnam War ended in April 1975, the United States carried out Operation BabyLift, in which it kidnapped more than 3,000 native and mixed race children (children who were the result of the rape of Vietnamese women by American soldiers) in a controversial action about which questions remain unanswered.

At a press conference in San Diego on April 3, 1975, U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, after being defeated, declared: “We are witnessing a tremendous humanitarian tragedy with the flight of countless Vietnamese people from the North Vietnamese offensive. I have asked U.S. officials in Saigon to act urgently to reduce the red tape that hinders the transfer of these children to the United States,” according to the archive of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, the US president announced the mobilization of 2 billion dollars in foreign aid funds to “bring thousands of children to a safe place in the United States and other countries”.

As they did in Cuba in 1960 with Operation Peter Pan, the announcement came weeks before the city was taken over by the communists, following a series of rumors (the same strategy used on the island) that circulated in Saigon that children born to Vietnamese mothers and American parents would be “massacred” and “raped” by communists.

According to research by the journalist of the portal Radio France International (RFI), Chi Phuong, “the rumors further fueled the fear of reprisals against any sympathizer of the US military and the Vietnam regime, whose first objective would be mixed race people, considered children of enemy. It was also rumored that Catholic orphanages, supported by American and international organizations, would be attacked, and that communist forces would recruit orphans as human shields or as soldiers.”

This provoked social tension led to the start of Operation Babylift, less than 48 hours after Ford's statements and with the support of the US Embassy in Saigon, as well as numerous humanitarian and volunteer organizations, the first flight took off on the 4th of April 1975 from Tan Son Nhat Airport, an American military aircraft, with more than 300 people on board, mostly children and crew.

At the time, the atmosphere was chaotic in Saigon. That disorder and confusion are still very present in the mind of Phillip R. Wise, then a 23-year-old military nurse in charge of the aviation medical section of the US Air Force at a base in the Philippines, assigned to Saigon: “I remember hearing gunshots in the back and being able to feel fear in the voices and the cries. We place children, from newborns to 3 years old, in the troop compartment, two per seat, with a pillow between them and seat belts. There were 80 seats. And the older kids and volunteers were down in the cellar, with us.”

Wise explained that “just 10 minutes after takeoff, due to a technical failure, the plane's rear door detached from the fuselage in mid-flight, more than 7,500 meters above sea level. Given the rapid decompression, we had no oxygen left to breathe in the lower part, but upstairs, we did. The crew was able to use oxygen tanks to care for themselves and then to the children. We fasten ourselves with the children to the cargo boxes. The pilot tried to return to the airport, but the hydraulic system failed and the plane crashed into a rice field.”

In this tragedy, more than 130 people died, including 44 women volunteers and 78 children. After this, other airlines such as Pan Am, World Airways, United or Flying Tiger Line continued with the mission. Operation BabyLift ended on April 26, 1975, evacuating more than 3,000 children. Around 2,000 were adopted in the United States and 1,300 were sent to countries such as France, Canada, Australia , Germany or Belgium.

That plane crash was the first official Babylift flight, and immediately, thousands of potential parents in the United States and other countries signed up to receive their children for adoption, and young war orphans, other abandoned children of American soldiers and others abandoned by families who feared for their well-being and safety, were scattered to new homes in distant lands.

Soon after, the operation was questioned when it was discovered that some of the adoptees had parents or living relatives who had not given their consent for their transfer, now, after 50 years, something is undeniable: it transformed the identities and families of those affected for life.

Almost immediately, 3 weeks after the kidnapping of children began, there were reports of Vietnamese mothers and family members protesting that they had given their children to their care without realizing that they would be evacuated from the country. Most of these adoptees wouldn't be reunited with their families for decades, if they ever did.

Operation Babylift , a mission to expel children considered orphans from Vietnam, was described as a humanitarian mission implemented by the United States, as a direct reaction to the imminent fall of Saigon. The controversy surrounding it spread as questions arose about the real motivation of U.S. efforts to evacuate children from Vietnam: Was the United States really concerned about the fate of these babies, or was it more interested in generating the only positive image possible after a disastrous war ? The complex nature of these operations invites us to explore the motivations and consequences of so-called humanitarian politics in North America.

The professor at the University of Kentucky, Bethany Sharpe, wrote a book called “ Wrong Intentions: Operation Babylift and the Consequences of Humanitarian Action”, in which she described the situation that Vietnamese families went through: “They understood orphanages as places of refuge for their children in times of extreme distress caused by ravages of the war. They took their children to these homes temporarily with the intention of recovering them. Faced with these different interpretations of the adoption process, many of the abducted children were not orphans.”

Professor Sharpe explained that “soon after arriving in the United States and settling down with new families, the parents of Vietnamese children found their children and began the process to claim them, only to discover that their legal parental rights had been canceled. A Vietnamese mother struggling to get her children back explained her understanding of adoption: To understand my story... think that you are trapped in a burning house. To save the lives of their babies, they leave them in the hands of people outside to pick them up. They are good people who would pick them up, but then they find a way to escape the fire as well, and they thank people for getting their babies back, and they try to take them away. But people say: Oh, no! These babies are already ours, they can't get them back.”

As part of the U.S. policy of abducting children under the guise of humanitarian aid, some courts in California, Michigan and Iowa ordered the repatriation of some Vietnamese children to their biological parents, but many others ordered that they remain with their adoptive parents.

In a class action brought against Henry Kissinger, claiming the right to repatriate children to their parents, the courts ruled that the lawsuit had no collective basis and therefore could not move forward. By relinquishing the responsibility to repatriate parents and children, the lawsuits erased the presence of the biological mother, reinforced the image of Vietnamese culture as a culture that does not care for its children in the same way as American mothers and families, and silenced questions about the nature of American humanity.

It seems then that the American government has whitewashed the crime of kidnapping children as a war policy and with the excuse that they are not safe in their country. Above all, because the United States does not offer a safe environment for anyone, since there is a social deterioration expressed in the indiscriminate use of weapons, cases of pedophilia, naturalization of drug use, among other realities that call into question the premise that seeks to justify such a crime.

AMELYREN BASABE /Mazo News Team