The 56 Steps: How Saigon's Last Staircase Became a City's Collapse

Collapsing Empires Stories · Oct 16, 2026 · 15m

A Saigon rooftop staircase now in an American museum - on March 30, 1975 hundreds climbed it toward a helicopter; what led three million people to that stair?

The 56 Steps: How Saigon's Last Staircase Became a City's Collapse

In this episode, we follow the fifty-six days between a March intelligence assessment that South Vietnam could hold through the dry season and the desperate rooftop evacuations at the end of March 1975. We trace decisions, movements, and misread signals that turned a city’s long war into a sudden collapse - so how did Saigon end up at that staircase?

Person: President…