Online photo essay of North Vietnam photos

HANOI, 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.

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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.

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