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Retired RAAF and Qantas personnel have marked the 50th anniversary of Operation Babylift during the Vietnam War by meeting the rescued “babies” in Canberra.
In an event hosted by the Australian War Memorial late last month, the now-grown passengers of Australian aircraft that carried them as orphaned babies from South Vietnam in April 1975 met the pilots and crew who operated the flights for a commemoration ceremony.
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According to Air Commodore (retd) Ian Scott, the operation to evacuate the children was the “most well-known” of the RAAF’s missions during the Vietnam War.
“Feeding and nursing those children on the tarmac gave us a perspective on the real victims, the real losers in war, the innocent,” he said.
“At the time we did not question the wisdom of shuttling those poor kids off to places unknown around the world, but it seemed to us at the time the best thing for their survival.
“But that didn’t address the issue of being torn from their family, their country and their culture that many of them faced as they grew up in foreign lands.”
One speaker at the event, Suanne Prager, was on board Air Commodore Scott’s flight in 1975. She was adopted by a family in Adelaide and in 2007 reunited with her biological mother, Ha Thi Hoa, who died in January this year.
“My mum explained how she sought help for the stresses she was facing leading up to Saigon falling,” said Prager.
“I was Amerasian. She feared for my health and safety. My sibling had the same illness I had when I was two. She died and I survived. She wanted to give me a chance that she couldn’t provide at that time.”
“The 50th anniversary is such a significant event. I wanted to talk about the experience of finding my Vietnamese mum so her life had meaning for future generations.”
Announced on 2 April 1975, the first two RAAF C-130 Hercules flights left Saigon on 4 April, bringing 194 children to Bangkok, where they were put on a specially-chartered Qantas Boeing 747 to Australia. Two more flights followed on 17 April.
Tragically, 200 people – 143 of whom were children mostly under 12 months of age – were killed in the US Babylift program when their C-5A Galaxy crashed shortly after take-off from Saigon, though the remainder of the flights departed safely.
“Babylift was initiated by the US Government as north Vietnam communist forces pushed south in early 1975,” the Department of Veterans’ Affairs said in a statement in April this year.
“Thousands of orphans had been brought to Saigon, many of them in need of medical help that wasn’t available. Many were born of American soldiers and there was a fear they would be murdered by communist forces.
“The Australian Government committed aircraft in the form of Detachment S (for Saigon), made up of 10 transport planes from 36 and 37 squadrons, mostly C-130 Hercules. Detachment S operated out of Bangkok as well as Butterworth air force base in Malaysia, initially providing aid to refugees around South Vietnam.”
