Operation PASSAGE TO FREEDOM

August 1, 1954

Overview

The Geneva Accords establish a ten-month period of free movement between the two regroupment zones. In Operation PASSAGE TO FREEDOM, which last for nine months, more than 100 U.S. Navy and military Sea Transportation Service ships evacuate approximately 311,000 refugees, 69,000 tons of cargo, and 8,000 vehicles from Communist North Vietnam to the non-Communist South. This includes Vietnamese soldiers who later serve in the South Vietnamese Army. About 500,000 additional people, many of them Catholics, flee the North in French, British, and Vietnamese vessels. In total, nearly 1 million people move from North to South Vietnam.1

¹Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941–1960, United States Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1985), 225–227; Edward J. Marolda, The Approaching Storm: Conflict in Asia, 1945–1965, U.S. Navy and the Vietnam War (Washington, D.C.: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2009), 19; Edward J. Marolda, Ready Seapower: History of the U.S. Seventh Fleet (Washington, D.C.: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2012), 39–40; Edward J. Marolda, By Sea, Air, and Land: An Illustrated History of the U.S. Navy and the War in Southeast Asia (Washington D.C.: Naval Historical Center, 1994), 6–7; Spencer C. Tucker, ed. Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1998), 554. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, (4th edition; New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 62–63; Ronald B. Frankum, Jr., Operation Passage to Freedom: The United States Navy in Vietnam, 1954–1955 (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2007), xix–xxi, 66, 214–217.