Dương Văn Minh
Dương Văn Minh had led the coup against Diệm in 1963. By the mid-1970s, he had leaned toward the "Third Party" (Thành Phần Thứ Ba), South Vietnamese elites who favored dialogues and cooperation with the North. Communist infiltrators in the South tried to work out political deals to let Dương Văn Minh ascend to the Presidency, with the hope that he would prevent a last stand, a destructive battle for Saigon. Although many South Vietnamese units were ready to defend Saigon, and the ARVN 4th Corps was still intact in the Mekong Delta, Dương Văn Minh ordered a surrender on April 30, 1975, sparing Saigon from destruction. Nevertheless, the reputation of the North Vietnamese army towards perceived traitors preceded them, and hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese fled the country by all means: airplanes, helicopters, ships, fishing boats, and barges. Most were picked up by the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the South China Sea or landed in Thailand. The seaborne refugees came to be known as "boat people". In a famous case, a South Vietnamese pilot, with his wife and children aboard a small Cessna plane, landed safely without a tailhook on the aircraft carrier . This mass exodus of (mostly South) Vietnamese political refugees continued into the 1980s as refugees fled from persecution, political oppression and economic collapse caused by the new Communist regime.