Online photo essay of North Vietnam photosHANOI, Vietnam -- The final, frenzied days of the Vietnam War were rich with dramatic images. Panicked Vietnamese scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy. An American helicopter lifted off with evacuees still trying to climb aboard.
But these powerful images from April 1975 -- and almost all of the conflict's best-remembered pictures -- were taken by foreign and South Vietnamese photographers with access to only one side of the story.
Largely unseen to this day are equally striking images by North Vietnamese photographers, whose dangerous work enlivened otherwise drab communist newspapers but rarely reached the outside world.
A quarter-century after the war's end, a trio of leading North Vietnamese war photographers opened their musty archives to the Associated Press and recounted tales of working under fire in steamy jungles.
Their photos, pulled from dog-eared scrapbooks and frayed folders, offer a dramatically different perspective on many aspects of the war, including the final day -- April 30, 1975.
The enduring pictures by Western photographers that day in U.S.-backed South Vietnam were filled with unmitigated fear of the imminent communist takeover.
But Dinh Quang Thanh, who followed a North Vietnamese tank to the front steps of the Presidential Palace, captured a very different mood -- throngs of South Vietnamese civilians cheering, waving and offering food to North Vietnamese troops entering Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
"We'd been listening to South Vietnamese radio saying there would be a blood bath if the communists took over," said Thanh, now 64 and retired. "We knew this was propaganda, and I wanted to document the truth with my camera."
One photo shows four soldiers dashing inside the palace to hoist their flag in triumph. South Vietnamese troops and government ministers, who put up no resistance, wear a hangdog look of resignation, but there's no sense of terror.
The North Vietnamese photographers shared the same miserable jungle conditions as the soldiers and saw themselves as full-fledged members of the guerrilla army rather than independent journalists.
"I considered myself a soldier, and the camera was my weapon," Thanh said.
Their state-controlled newspapers never published images that might have undermined the war effort. Still, the photographers insist their work was an accurate portrait of the tremendous hardships the northern soldiers and civilians endured during a war that claimed 3 million Vietnamese lives nationwide.
Trong Thanh spent five years working along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the legendary network of mostly dirt paths that snaked through mountains and jungles, allowing communist guerrillas to ferry weapons and troops to the south.
When he headed out in 1968, Thanh carried three bulky cameras, 400 rolls of film and processing chemicals. He stored his negatives in a pouch that he wore like a belt -- even when he slept.
"The Americans sometimes bombed 24 hours a day. You never knew when you would have to run away. Many photographers lost their film and cameras this way," said Trong Thanh, 58. When he needed to move fast, he tossed out food or clothing -- but never his irreplaceable photo gear.
Mai Nam, who shot life in the underground tunnel network that was so instrumental to the North's victory, was hampered when the batteries for his flash died. His solution: extract gunpowder from bullets for small fires. The eerie glow illuminated concerts by female singers and water buffalo that shared the cramped netherworld.
"Our cameras were old and not very good. The film came from Russia after it was past its expiration date. It was extremely hard to keep our equipment dry in the wet climate," said Nam, 69.
His most famous picture shows a flaming American F-105 plane crashing toward the ground like an arrowhead and the pilot, who ejected seconds earlier, floating down to imminent capture.
The North Vietnamese cameramen neither expected nor received fame or fortune, and with few exceptions, the outside world has not seen their work. That is beginning to change.
"Requiem," a highly acclaimed book featuring the work of photographers on both sides who died in the conflict was published in 1997 by two wartime cameramen, Tim Page, a free-lancer, and Horst Faas, now an Associated Press senior photo editor.
Trong Thanh has had perhaps the best individual success so far, publishing two books of his war photos, one in the United States and the other in Japan.
Ironically, his favorite -- and the only war picture to adorn his studio -- was never published during the conflict.
The black-and-white image shows a kneeling North Vietnamese soldier sharing his canteen with a dazed South Vietnamese fighter wounded in a 1971 battle.
Trong Thanh's North Vietnamese editors wouldn't touch the picture, believing it could "weaken the fighting spirit" by humanizing the conflict.
When it finally debuted at a 1991 exhibit in the United States, young people accepted it as genuine, but many older Americans rejected it as a setup, he said.
"There's no way I could have fabricated this photo," he said. "But that's what some people want to believe."