HISTORICAL SUMMATION
Part 3 (1972-1974)
Prepared for
The Washington News-Times
J. L. Sullivan
April 1985
HOW DID THE REPUBLIC of Cambodia fall? What changes, what political events and tactical decisions, brought the rise of the Khmer Krahom?
The Battle of Chenla II was the Antietam, Gettysburg and Shenandoah of the Cambodian “civil” war. It marked the end of Lon Nol’s “Popular Crusade,” which had seen over 80,000 Khmer youths volunteer, in just the first months, to fight the Viet Namese Communists. Never again did FANK seriously attempt to dislodge any major opposing force. Nor did FANK ever mount a sustained counter-offensive, even though intelligence reports indicated dramatic tactical changes, changes which meant the national military could have retaken vast tracts of land virtually unopposed. Still, like the Confederate States in America 109 years earlier, the Khmer Republic held on, sometimes via the most heroic military actions, for three more torturous years.
The Battle of Chenla II—the military ramification of the storm set off by Hanoi’s early 1970 decision to accelerate its Campaign X to conquer Cambodia—raged until late December 1971. Then the fighting abruptly stopped, gave way to an unexpected lull, an eye in the storm, because North Viet Nam’s Communist leadership suddenly shifted its short-term political aims and thus its tactical disposition. With Free World public attention concentrating on Phnom Penh as if the city were all of Cambodia, Hanoi decided to temporarily drain its military forces from the Khmer countryside. Why, when the North Viet Namese Army was on the verge of toppling Phnom Penh, did Hanoi’s Politburo order this sudden abort? What did the ensuing drain-off of NVA troops, and the subsequent NVA disaster of the Easter offensive in South Viet Nam, mean for Cambodia and the Krahom movement? What effect did the Paris peace talks and the signed agreement have on the Cambodian nation?
And what events and pressures in the United States, France, South Viet Nam and China influenced all the Khmer factions?
The behavior of the Khmer Krahom in the late months of 1971 deserves special attention. Its actions were omens foreshadowing not only the immediate future but a future beyond the second eye of the storm.
CHENLA II—BATTLEFIELD ACTIVITIES
The Battle of Chenla II raged until year’s end. On 2 November FANK forces counterattacked about Phum Pa Kham lifting the siege and driving the attacking North Viet Namese back into their plantation bases. In the counterattack, 291 Viet Namese were killed.
Five days later the NVA launched a new series of attacks west of Phnom Penh. On 10 November elements of these units shelled Pochentong Airport at Phnom Penh killing 25 civilians and soldiers, wounding 30, and destroying 9 aircraft. Cambodia’s main international radio transmitter west of the airport was hit by Communist sappers, leaving 19 Khmer dead and the nation radio-silent for hours.
At Rumlong on 13 November a task force of 400 FANK troops was mauled (370 killed) by advancing NVA units. A reinforcing column of 400 was slaughtered when it was fed piecemeal into the maw of Communist fire. Circumventing FANK’s column, NVA units from the Northern Corridor headed for Phnom Penh. On 16 November the NVA vanguard was temporarily halted ten miles from the capital by heavy U.S. and South Viet Namese bombings. Three days later Lon Nol, reversing his order of August, issued an urgent plea to South Viet Nam for ARVN assistance. On 22 November 25,000 South Viet Namese ground troops entered Cambodia. Meanwhile, the NVA attacked and overran a FANK column and garrisons about Baray on 1 and 2 December setting off the largest stampede of Khmer national troops of the war. Parts of Baray had been lost to the NVA in 1970. FANK had recaptured Baray early during Chenla II only to lose it all to the NVA division-size force. During this attack 10,000 FANK soldiers fled unrelenting NVA artillery fire. Within a week Radio Hanoi was claiming 12,000 FANK “soldiers” killed in this battle alone.
By 7 December, North Viet Namese artillery units on the front west of Phnom Penh, dug in in an arc about the capital, began renewed shelling of the city.
From the Northern Corridor the NVA advanced seven more miles. Refugees from the entire northern region deluged the already swamped capital. For a week the battle seesawed. FANK, its back to the wall, fought hard and gained small victories. On 11 December FANK abandoned Phnom Penh’s major defensive position, at Phnom Baset, only eight miles from the capital’s heart.
Then, only days later, the ARVN column with FANK reinforcements rolled into the capital zone under cover of U.S. air support. They found the NVA had withdrawn. Scattered fighting continued until 20 December.
The meaning of Chenla II for Lon Nol, his government and FANK can be found in 600 years of fatalism. Throughout the campaign Lon Nol slowly transformed the national battle into a mystical Buddhist-Brahmin campaign. Like the leaders of nearly all Khmer factions, he became swept up in the concepts of Khmer purity, the Khmer patriot and fanatical racial pride. Chenla II was the high point and then the breaking point. A new pessimism grabbed the nationals and this manifested itself in FANK’s never again seriously attempting to dislodge a major opposing force, in FANK’s not even gathering the intelligence which would have told the national military leaders that the NVA had pulled out and that FANK could have retaken many areas nearly unopposed. FANK’s force of 130,000 to 150,000 had not improved substantially since 1970. What it had gained in experience and better equipment, it had lost in morale. From the day the column at Baray broke, FANK’s offensive spirit, like that of the American Confederacy after Gettysburg, was destroyed.
Pessimism became depression. Without spirit, without hope, internal chaos became rampant. Eighty percent of Cambodia’s primary schools were closed. On 16 and 18 December 1971, anti-Lon Nol and antigovernment riots broke out in Phnom Penh. Though the capital was on the verge of collapse the government found the energy to ban all protests, political meetings and public demonstrations. As living conditions deteriorated, the need for external support increased, but the will of the main source of that support, the United States, continued to crumble.
Government authority existed only in scattered enclaves. In January 1971, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency reported that the North Viet Namese Army (in reality, all Communist factions) “controlled” 65 percent of the land and 35 percent of the people. The same report indicated that the Viet Namese had recruited 10,000 Khmers into their army and had induced an additional 35,000 to 50,000 to join their political infrastructure (the KVM) in the “liberated” areas. By mid-1971 NVA control had spread over 75 percent of the land, and the population of Phnom Penh had more than doubled to 1.5 million. By January 1972 the percentage of land and people controlled by Communist factions was at an all-time high.
And yet disclosures about FANK during Chenla II—not about its pathetic maneuverings or its corruption, but about its strength—are astounding. Had it been better led, what might have been the results for Southeast Asia? Was Chenla II the nail, for want of which the battle, the war, was lost? And what other ramifications did the lack of that nail have? Did it lead the United States to back into appeasement? Calling it a decent interval? Did that loss set up the Kampuchean genocide?
THE KRAHOM
Just before and during the multi-battle Chenla II campaign, the Krahom, for the first time on a massive scale, evacuated all the inhabitants from a region and then, in actions they labeled “pure flame,” scorched the earth to deny all others the “natural and population resources” of the area. From north of Kompong Thom down through Phum Chamkar to Tang Kouk, Krahom yotheas torched some 400 hamlets. By force they evacuated at least 50,000 villagers and forced a nearly equal number of elderly and very young to become refugees. Though “pure flame” had been used earlier, this policy of transferring the population as a means of control, of forcing “unproductive elements” to flee and become a burden upon the government, of annihilation of resisters, and of rendering the land barren, was elevated to a new level during Chenla II.
Some historians have said American bombing both killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused the turmoil within Cambodia that created the Krahom and the ensuing holocaust. These historians cite refugee reports and bombing maps to support their theories. The KK (and to some extent the NVA and KVM) used the threat of U.S. bombings throughout the Northern Corridor to induce the rice farmers to quit their lands. When the North Viet Namese Army advanced across this deserted and charred “pure flame” region, Americans did heavily bomb the area. To the peasants who’d been evacuated, the bombings (the NVA went unseen) confirmed to them the words of Krahom yotheas.
The often strained and mended relationship between the North Viet Namese, with its Hanoi-led Khmer Viet Minh, and the nationalist Maoist Krahom was now destroyed. With strength gained through conscription of FANK deserters and the relatively nonpolitical, Sihanouk-supporting peasants (the Khmer Rumdoah, which remained unorganized, fragmented, and under the influence or control of the KVM or KK), the Krahom attacked the rear of the NVA. Unlike June 1970, which saw a small number of skirmishes, or the heavier ambushes of November 1970, which widened the KK-NVA rift (on the surface ameliorated in May 1971), the Chenla II attacks were devastating. For the first time the Krahom attacked in battalion-sized units. They so terrorized the rear of the NVA 5th and 91st divisions that the pathetic FANK column escaped total annihilation.
Of the sixteen Krahom battalions (5,400 troops) fielded as the battle commenced, a quarter were destroyed in early suicide attacks against FANK positions when the North Viet Namese pulled back without notifying the indigenous Communist force. Another quarter never saw battle but were used for evacuee control. How many were lost to Allied bombings is unknown. Upwards of 2,000, in units from squads to battalions, attacked the NVA.
To the outside world Norodom Sihanouk remained the official head of the seemingly monolithic resistance, yet within Krahom-controlled areas, political cadre increased the frequency and severity of their denunciations of the Prince. Krahom leaders continued to maintain ghostlike public profiles while they consolidated their powers, Ieng Sary became chief emissary to Mao, often snubbing Sihanouk. Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn and Hou Nim—known as the “three ghosts” because in spite of their reported deaths three and a half years earlier their presence continued to be felt—rose to hold administrative, organizational and ideological power in the Krahom block. Rising to head the Krahom military (and covertly to hold the office of secretary-general of the Khmer Communist Party) was Saloth Sar (Pol Pot).
THE NVA DRAIN-OFF
The North Viet Namese suffered a strange fate during Chenla II. Essentially they won a great military victory. On 10 December the Associated Press reported that U.S. officials estimated Communist forces (no breakdown by factions) controlled “as much as 80 percent of Cambodia and can do anything they want.... They could take Cambodia in a week, if they cut loose everything they had.”
But they didn’t. Why? Was it an awakening to the desires of the Khmer people? Chenla II had set off a deeper “true” Khmer revolution than had yet occurred. Concurrent with the NVA offensive, a new concept of Khmer Patriot spread amongst all segments of society. This new sense of nationalism and racial integrity permeated all zones, whether controlled by the KVM/NVA, the KK or FANK. Though the concept held varying nuances in different regions, it helped bind the disparate zones and, by giving the people a common cause, preparing them for a single, unified takeover.
Or was it NVA political savvy—the realization that if Phnom Penh, and thus Cambodia, fell, the waning American commitment to Southeast Asia might be rekindled? Gallup polls in late 1971 showed that a majority (50 to 55 percent) of Americans approved of President Nixon’s war policies. Would a toppling of Phnom Penh have been used to reverse American withdrawals? Or was the North Viet Namese leadership responding to military factors that outweighed these reasons?
Hanoi maintained its belief in the simple assumption that domestic political pressures would sooner or later force American leaders to accept the Communist terms for disengagement. “Those terms...amounted to unconditional surrender—unilateral withdrawal of all American troops and the replacement of the anticommunist...[Saigon] regime with a Lublin-model Communist front government,” wrote Stewart Alsop in Newsweek in September 1969. That observation remained valid in 1971, especially with the new domestic political storm brewing in the United States.
On 13 June 1971, The New York Times began publishing excerpts of the 47-volume, 7,000-page Pentagon analysis of how, over thirty years, the United States had become committed to the defense of Indochina. Long after the controversy generated by the publication of the “sensitive” Pentagon Papers had become a footnote to the war, some scholars condemned the excerpts as “highly selective.” For example, the papers contain details of the Truman administration’s military aid to France in its war against the Communist Viet Minh, but omit details of the U.S. effort to convince the French to grant full independence to their colonies. This becomes important only in light of the emphasis placed on the meaning of that U.S. aid by the antiwar movement in the early 1970s and the impact of that movement on U.S. policy. Facts such as the above did not appear in The New York Times’s “complete and unabridged” 677-page volume. (Complete and unabridged with respect to what it had published in its own pages, not with respect to the Pentagon document—by page count The New York Times’s account is 9½percent of the Pentagon study.) The tone of The New York Times edition was set early when it critiqued U.S. military planners. “The conflict in Indochina,” Neil Sheehan wrote in the introduction, “is approached as a practical matter that will yield to the unfettered application of well-trained minds, and of the bountiful resources in men, weapons and money that a great power can command.”
Hanoi’s America watchers were also paying attention to the continuing My Lai uproar. Five percent of all American network television coverage of the entire war—473 of 9,447 stories aired from 1963 to 1977—dealt with this one atrocity. What happened there is abhorrent. Still, it is incredible that the American media became fixated on an event that accounted for only 3/1000 of one percent (.0003) of the deaths in Indochina during that period.
The North Viet Namese Communist leadership—secure in the belief it had a firm hold over the Cambodian revolution, seeing expanding negative U.S. domestic reaction to news from Southeast Asia, knowing that Nixon’s approval rating was based on the American people’s desire for a guarantee that all U.S. servicemen held captive by North Viet Nam would be fairly treated and released when all U.S. troops were withdrawn, and placing great emphasis on the increasing limitations set upon the Nixon administration by the U.S. Congress—ceased their attacks on Phnom Penh and redeployed much of that force to the east, not for any of the reasons suggested above but because Hanoi had decided to go for broke in South Viet Nam. This decision, made at the time the KK was engaging the NVA about the Northern Corridor, was a precursor to the largest military offensive to that time in Southeast Asia, North Viet Nam’s Nguyen Hue, or Easter, Offensive.
Why did North Viet Nam decide to go for broke? Communist propaganda states that the NVA were attempting to shore up the remnant of the Southern rebel government, the PRG (which the NVA still held in house arrest near Kratie), and its forces, the VC (though Southern rebel units were now manned almost exclusively by Northerners, and, generally, Southern officers were being passed over for promotion and the positions given to Northerners). One must suspect that with U.S. troops mostly withdrawn (all American ground forces were disengaged from combat roles by March 1972) the new NVA strategic target became the destruction of the Republic of Viet Nam Armed Forces (RVNAF). Cambodia could wait.
North Viet Nam’s generals saw Southeast Asia as a single mobile battlefield for trucks and armor, whereas the US-ARVN, FANK and Royal Lao militaries tended to see Southeast Asia as three (or, with North Viet Nam, four) separate theaters. Outside Cambodia, the NVA, in mid-November 1971, began a massive buildup at Ho Chi Minh Trail trailheads leading from North Viet Nam into Laos. Concurrently, major road construction was reported throughout the Laotian panhandle, and new and expanded surface-to-air missile sites were photographed all along the trail network. In response, the United States increased the number of B-52 sorties over Laos and thus decreased the number over Cambodia.
Though Chenla II was FANK’s breaking point, the republic’s death was far off. A major event, the next tsunami—caused by the NVA drain-off—was yet to occur.
STAGING
In December 1971, the NVA 5th and 7th divisions, and part of the 91st, were pulled from “international duty.” This is why, when the 25,000-troop ARVN emergency relief force entered Cambodia at the beginning of December, they found very few NVA soldiers to engage. This sort of pullback was not new. In April, May and June 1970, the NVA had pulled back from the Khmer heartland, first to protect the fall-back from the border sanctuaries of other NVA units fleeing the US-ARVN incursion and then to rebuild those sanctuaries in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal. Again in February 1971, in reaction to the Laotian Incursion (Operation Lam Son 719) by ARVN units staging at Khe Sanh, South Viet Nam, and leapfrogging to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail at Tchepone, Laos, the NVA drew combat and support units from Cambodia.
In late 1971 the NVA continued to maintain its COKA headquarters near Siem Reap. Elements of the 91st Division remained in the North and Northwest. Other units remained spread about the interior (near COSVN headquarters at Kratie and elsewhere), yet, employing more than 15,000 vehicles, the NVA shifted forces from Cambodia, Laos and North Viet Nam. This shift, given great importance by Krahom leaders, created a fundamental change in the balance of forces in Cambodia. Entire armies had been removed, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were now massed in the border sanctuaries.
In the first two months of 1972 U.S. bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and of transfer points above and below the demilitarized zone in Viet Nam intensified in an attempt to forestall the anticipated offensive in South Viet Nam. Along the Cambodian border in South Viet Nam, the ARVN generally withdrew and entrenched, letting B-52s and tactical air strikes slow the NVA buildup and advance. Indeed, throughout 1972 the bombing of Cambodia remained at low levels. The sorties flown in all 1972 equaled 40 percent of those flown in 1971, and the majority of the 1972 flight’s were along the border trail network in the NVA-held northeastern highlands. Significant bombing did not return to the Cambodian interior until after the January 1973 signing of the Paris peace agreement.
The Cambodian Communists saw 1972 as a year to consolidate gains, look for opportunities and stimulate internal contradictions—political struggle versus armed struggle—inside the ranks of all their enemies. Outside of the border provinces only a few major engagements occurred during the year. From 12 to 28 February, a 6,000-man FANK force attempted to unseat the 4,000 NVA holding Angkor Wat near Siem Reap. During this operation Lon Nol reinforced his troops with an additional 4,000 soldiers. Still FANK was unable, or unwilling, to dislodge the North Viet Namese from this long-established headquarters complex. For the remainder of the year FANK battalions settled into a lethargic defensive pattern of protecting enclaved cities. Their mobility, as measured by battalion-days in the field, equaled about 70 percent of that of 1971. Even this, however, is probably a padded figure. On 21 February 1972, Richard Nixon became an unwitting accomplice to Krahom goals by removing one of the main and longest-running motivations for U.S. commitment to Southeast Asia. On that date the American President was greeted in Peking by Prime Minster Zhou Enlai. Suddenly, U.S. containment policies were deemed senseless.
THE EASTER, OR NGUYEN HUE, OFFENSIVE
The NVA offensive into South Viet Nam was World War II Panzerlike action—fast, hard and with a modern twist, helicopters. Some have reduced the violence to Allied air power versus NVA tanks and surface-to-air (Sam-7) missiles. Yet a more conventional victory—crushing firepower decimating an enemy fixed in position by infantry units—has never been gained. The offensive and the victory of the counteroffensive constitute, in the United States, the least-known period of the entire war. In launching the Nguyen Hue Offensive, North Viet Nam’s leaders made a fatal assumption. But the consequences of their error were mitigated by Allied political bungling and by Communist “scientific” propaganda. And though these events may seem isolated and distant from Cambodia, the results formed part of the continuum of events leading to the rise of Pol Pot’s forces.
On 29 and 30 March 1972 the North Viet Namese Army came out of its enclaved, tactically defensive posture and launched the long-expected-offensive against the South. Twelve divisions, 150,000 men supported by more than 500 Soviet tanks plus heavy artillery and self-propelled antiaircraft guns, surged across the demilitarized zone (DMZ), in from Cambodia and Laos, in from the sea.
The first attacks swept across the DMZ from Khe Sanh to Dong Ha, killing hundreds of troops and civilians. On day two, NVA gunners hit twelve DMZ outposts with a cumulative 5,000 rounds of artillery fire. Firebases and small posts were abandoned; and the first skirmish of the second front was fought near Tay Ninh. On 1 April the NVA 304th Division supported by attached artillery and surface-to-air missile units, about 30,000 men, swept across the DMZ, routing the thinly spread ARVN 3d Division. South of the DMZ, Highway QL 9 filled with fleeing refugees. By 4 April most of Quang Tri Province had fallen. About 40,000 refugees fled the onslaught.
Under heavy cloud cover, second-front blitzkrieg assaults rumbled out of Cambodia’s Mondolkiri and Kratie provinces and crashed against the ARVN defenders of An Loc in Binh Long Province. Reports of the period are fascinating. During World War II and the Korean War the media were sympathetic to our beleaguered allies, but not so in the case of South Viet Nam. Beginning on 3 April, American news coverage nearly universally criticized the ARVN for pulling back without fully engaging enemy forces. They failed, however, to mention that the enemy was numerically superior and was advancing behind superior firepower.
The RVNAF (Republic of Viet Nam Armed Forced: regular forces = ARVN, provincial forces = PF and regional forces = RF) were, with the exception of the Airborne and Marine divisions, stationed in their home provinces, where they were spread thin. When the NVA were dispersed and operating in their terrorism-and-harassment mode, the RVNAF offered maximum protection to the population. But when the Communists massed for tactical offensives, the RVNAF, spread out as they were, were unable to hold and could only blunt the initial assaults. The ARVN then had to adjust to the enemy’s numerical superiority by shifting forces to the attacked area. Often, the response time was days; however, once aerial and ground forces reacted and fixed the attackers, the advantage fell to the defenders.
On 6 April the skies cleared and U.S. pilots flew 225 sorties against attackers below the DMZ, and NVA mobility slowed. South of the Central highlands the NVA captured Loc Ninh and trapped the ARVN 5th Infantry Division to the south.
The Communists opened their third major front on 8 April, assaulting east out of Ratanakiri Province, through Duc Co and Plei Ngai and across to the north-south Highway 14. There they cut Kontum from Plei Ku and potential reinforcements. To the south An Loc fell under siege, and American installations at Cam Ranh Bay and Nui Ba Den were hit by rockets. To the north, the next day, U.S. and ARVN air power fixed (prevented from maneuvering) an element of the NVA 304th Division. With their lines of communication and supply broken, the Northerners were trapped beneath a rain of bombs. One thousand men were killed and thirty tanks destroyed.
American ground forces were no longer a part of the Viet Nam War but air power was an ever-greater part. On 10 April two additional aircraft carriers were ordered to the theater, bringing the U.S. total to six. B-52s began hitting NVA lines west of Kontum and within 1½ kilometers of An Loc.
By mid-April, to keep the ARVN dispersed and reinforcements away from the main attack points, NVA rocketeers dropped dozens of 122mm shells on Saigon, Da Nang and other civilian concentrations, while small units assaulted over a hundred sites in the South, nearly all for the first time since Tet 1968.
At first, NVA generals were ecstatic. Although the bombings were taking a significant toll, their progress was awesome. The ARVN 3d, 5th and 22d divisions were at the point of collapse. Major firebases in the north and central regions had been overrun. Underestimating the resilience of the ARVN and the capabilities of regional and provincial forces, and expecting the South to fall, the NVA leaders pulled strategic reserve units from Cambodia and ignored serious reports of Khmer Krahom positioning and attacks.
Meanwhile President Nixon moved away from America’s long-term policy of strategic defense—that America would not attack the source of the war, North Viet Nam—and ordered U.S. strategic bombers to hit Hanoi and Haiphong. Within a day, the first major antiwar protests of 1972 erupted on America’s college campuses. Within a week, as South Viet Nam fought for its very existence, eight Ivy League college presidents issued a statement condemning U.S. bombing of the North. As NVA attacks intensified at An Loc, at Ah Khe and throughout the Central Highlands, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Democratic Caucus voted (4-20) to set a termination date for American support. As the NVA opened up a minor front in the Mekong Delta, as NVA divisions nearly annihilated the ARVN 22d Division, as the number of refugees in South Viet Nam skyrocketed to over 1.5 million and as a dozen Cambodian towns in the Parrot’s Beak were overrun by North Viet Namese, 90,000 Americans demonstrated against the war in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Within a month, in addition to their gains in South Viet Nam, the NVA held all of Cambodia east of the Mekong with the exception of Neak Luong, Svay Rieng City, a few minor enclaves and the vast tracts the KK had usurped in the absence of any strong presence.
By 1 May, American B-52 and fighter-bomber sorties over North Viet Nam had risen to 350 per day. Now, as nearly 200,000 Communist soldiers attacked on three major fronts in South Viet Nam and as the South Viet Namese people, instead of joining the “popular uprising” resisted or fled ruthless and indiscriminate NVA artillery fire, sixty U.S. college presidents petitioned for the immediate and complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Indochina.
On 8 May President Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong and other North Viet Namese harbors, ordered a naval blockade of North Viet Nam and ordered the rail lines from China bombed. He announced that these orders would be rescinded when all U.S. POWs were released and an internationally supervised cease-fire was signed. In exchange for those conditions, not only would he rescind these orders but he would withdraw all Americans within 120 days. Hundreds of thousands of antiwar demonstrators took to the streets of America.
FACTS AND SPECULATIONS
Although the offensive would continue for another hundred days, the NVA had lost the element of surprise. The ARVN had responded on all fronts, shifting forces to match the massed attack points of the Communists, and the offensive had been blunted. That’s not to say the NVA did not continue to advance in some areas. As in their small-unit operations, once the Allies fixed them in position they attempted to withdraw, escape, regroup and reattack elsewhere. Nixon’s semistrategic offensive against North Viet Nam stimulated no major reaction from either Moscow or Peking. One suspects the Soviets and Chinese were conceding the war and acquiescing to a new order, as in Korea, of a split Viet Nam. North Viet Nam had wreaked havoc on the South, yet by mid-May analysts for all superpowers knew the North would not topple South Viet Nam. Soviet and Chinese aid to the NVA decreased, not as a response to American military moves cutting supply lines, but because of political fluctuations in the face of America’s show of will to stick by its fighting ally. But Nixon’s 8 May announcement, for the first time, did not demand the withdrawal of Northern troops from the South (a pivotal point later in the year). In Hanoi, political and military leaders interpreted the President’s speech as acceptance of a cease-fire-in-place concurrent with U.S. withdrawal. Ex-VC Minister of Justice Truong Nhu Tang noted in his book A Vietcong Memoir:
Practically the entire North Vietnamese army was now inside South Vietnam—to stay....Nixon and Kissinger had decided...they could have no choice but to accept...the fait accompli of a full Northern military presence....Their decision was of course induced by powerful factors. The American press was already screaming its rage about renewed bombing of the North. Nor was there anything subtle about the reaction in Congress, which...was well on its way toward legislating the United States out of the war.
At this point one sees, on the one hand, a major offensive by the NVA being crushed by the ARVN and by Allied air power; an American military shift from a strategic defensive to a semistrategic offensive posture, no significant political response by North Viet Nam’s major allies, and a cutback in Communist materiel supply. On the other hand, in America, the reactions of antiwar demonstrators, the media and Congress (on 9 May the Senate resolved to cut off all war funds) had convinced the administration that it must, in Nixon’s words, “...bring the war to a decisive military conclusion.” The Nixon regime thus accepted the one element President Thieu feared most, allowing the NVA to remain on Southern territory. In Communist terms, the North Viet Namese had achieved their major goal, that of stimulating their enemies’ internal contradictions—separating South Viet Nam from the United States and President Nixon from the American people. As an example of that latter separation, an analysis of television news coverage (three major networks only) for the period 15 April to 15 May 1972 reveals that of 258 stories, 132 supported “antiwar” viewpoints, 15 presented “pro-war” perspectives and the remaining 111 were neutral. Of all the NVA shellings of civilian areas, of the leveling of entire cities, America saw only two clips. There was not a single mention of NVA weapons captured. On the surface this seems insignificant, but the capture of enemy weapons has always been a symbol of victory in battle, so the zero mention juxtaposed with mentions of ARVN losses is significant. And only one story was a battle analysis. Again, Truong Nhu Tang makes a relevant point:
The idea that continued American intervention was immoral was gaining widespread credence in the United States....These were signs that told us the offensive was a success and at this stage of the war we received them with as much satisfaction as we received news of any military victory.
ARVN counterattacks and other military successes increased throughout May. A thousand paratroopers hit the NVA behind their lines in Quang Tri Province and killed 300. B-52s inflicted immense casualties on NVA massed formations. Along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and in North Viet Nam, B-52s destroyed pipelines and pumping stations, reducing the amount of fuel available to the NVA’s fleet of vehicles. The ARVN 23d Division counterattacked at Kontum and the 9th and 21st divisions at An Loc. In the midst of the fighting, Richard Nixon flew to Moscow for a summit meeting with Leonid Brezhnev. As the NVA reattacked Kontum (the tank-led frontal assault was shattered in the city by B-52s) and as they opened a fourth major front against provincial and regional forces in the Mekong Delta, politicians in Saigon and Hanoi both feared sellouts by their superpower patrons.
Although North Viet Nam committed a 200,000-troop force to the spring offensive, some commentators labeled it “Hanoi’s essentially political offensive.” In the long run, they were right. Hanoi’s political goals were to capitalize on U.S. domestic antiwar sentiment, to discredit Saigon and Viet Namization, and to convince the United States to acquiesce to their negotiation demands. Senator George McGovern told the American people on 7 June that he would go “anywhere in the world” to negotiate an end to the war. On 3 June, Seymour Hersh had made the secret Peers Report on My Lai public. On the 17th, five men were arrested while breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. A month later, as the U.S. Senate voted to force the withdrawal of U.S. support within 120 days of the release of all American POWs, Ramsey Clark and Jane Fonda “visited” Hanoi. In August, as an average of 206 South Viet Namese civilians were killed or seriously wounded every day (60-day average) by attacking NVA, 3,000 antiwar protestors marched behind death masks at the Republican National Convention in Miami.
Still the fighting, the offensive and counteroffensive continued, but the NVA had been hurt by Hanoi’s miscalculation of the RVNAF’s abilities and by the premature assumption on the part of Hanoi’s Politburo that the state of American resolve was so low there would be no significant response by U.S. air power. The NVA suffered an estimated 100,000 casualties plus the loss of 50 percent of its heavy equipment. Those figures are astonishing. A modern army unit which loses 15 to 20 percent of its fighting men is considered operationally out of commission, and with regard to the NVA, subsequent military and political activities indicate that it was so crippled. North Viet Nam’s most famous general, Vo Nguyen Giap, victor of Dien Bien Phu and designer of the Khe Sanh and Tet 1968 offensives, was eased from power and replaced by Senior General Van Tien Dung.
Still the offensive did not stop, though by 1 September it was a matter of public show not territorial gain, a matter of keeping up the appearance of a major offensive though the NVA had actually reverted to the tactical defensive generally launching only battalion-sized cross-border forays. Meanwhile, the morale of the ARVN, flush with mounting victories, was riding an adrenaline high. As for television, there were no news stories about NVA defections, though they reached an estimated 20,000 during the offensive.
For the Khmer Communists, both the KK and the KVM, and thus for the battle for Cambodia, there was probably no single event more important than the NVA Easter offensive. FANK and the republic had become nearly totally dependent on foreign financial assistance. In the wake of his disastrous meddling and his mishandling of Chenla II, in March 1972 Lon Nol dissolved the National Assembly and declared himself president and supreme commander of the armed forces. Internal conflicts, corruption and ineptitude increased. American support for Lon Nol increased as his situation worsened.
The decimation of major NVA elements made the NVA unable to return to their deep Cambodian bases and protect their hold on that country’s revolution. The drain-off occurred in late 1971; the offensive had been launched in March 1972 and had continued until August. The drain-off continued during the last months of the offensive because Hanoi’s desire to obtain the greatest political concessions of the war required every last troop it could scrape up. In that nine-month period the KK purged much of the KVM infrastructure and conquered (not “inherited”—the most frequently used word in histories of the period) many of the old NVA “liberated” zones.
THE PARIS PEACE AGREEMENT
On 27 January 1973 “An Agreement Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet Nam” was signed in Paris by American, North Viet Namese, South Viet Namese and Viet Cong representatives. American and Communist officials signed one version; Saigon’s agents signed another. The Saigon version stood fast by Nguyen Van Thieu’s unwillingness to acknowledge or legitimize the Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government. The settlement included eleven essential points, of which the most important were a cease-fire-in-place coupled with the withdrawal of all American forces (including advisors) and the dismantling of all U.S. bases within 60 days, the release of all U.S. prisoners of war, the recognition of the NVA’s right to maintain troops on Southern territory, the withdrawal of all foreign troops from and the prohibition of resupply lines through or sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos, recognition of the temporary status of the 17th Parallel DMZ until reunification of North and South, North Viet Namese “respect” for South Viet Nam’s right to self-determination, and a renunciation of the use of military force to “reunite” the country. No Khmer faction signed any version of the agreement.
American, Viet Namese and Cambodian military actions of 1973 can be understood only in light of events prior to the Paris accords: the Nguyen Hue Offensive, the Christmas bombings, Operation Enhancement Plus, land-grab tactics, and Norodom Sihanouk’s and Lon Nol’s offers and other actions.
Bombing allegedly had broken the ability and the will of the NVA to continue its massed blitzkrieg spring-summer offensive in South Viet Nam. After pulling seasoned forces from Laos and Cambodia and augmenting them with green troops from North Viet Nam, after suffering 100,000 combat casualties and after the destruction of 50 percent of its armor, artillery and trucks, the NVA dropped this military strategy and reverted to dispersed terrorism and small-unit engagements. In Saigon, in Washington and in Phnom Penh, as well as in Hanoi, Peking and Moscow, military planners and political leaders rediscovered the effectiveness of tactical-strategic bombing. Even though ARVN ground force counterattacks, supported by U.S. and South Viet Namese tactical air power, played a greater role than the oft-noted B-52s, some observers, including many leading civilian detractors of South Viet Nam’s forces, concluded that bombing won the battle.
In the periods of the drain-off from Cambodia, of the reversion to guerrilla tactics and the rebuilding of forces, when the NVA could not sustain combat, Hanoi launched the political offensive that led to the initial “breakthrough” agreements of October 1972. Those agreements led the Nixon White House to implement Operation Enhancement Plus, a move to transfer two billion dollars in materiel from U.S. forces to the RVNAF. (The figure included the value of bases of little use to the defending forces, who had a parallel network of bases, plus used weapons valued at replacement cost. The amount of arms and munitions was still significant.)
The breakthrough agreement was seen in Hanoi as America’s capitulation. In negotiations after the agreement was “reached” (Saigon’s leadership never accepted it), North Viet Nam increased its demands. On 21 October Pham Van Dong announced five conditions for the cease-fire, including the realignment of Saigon’s governmental structure to reflect a VC-RVN coalition and the demand for a general election within six months. On the 26th, Le Duc Tho, in an atmosphere of U.S. congressional, media and public disgust with the war, won agreement for a total U.S. withdrawal and the permanent presence of the NVA in the South.
In response President Nixon declared there would be no signing until all issues were resolved. This need for resolution, Pham Van Dong stated, forced the NVA to launch 142 attacks on 2 and 3 November in South Viet Nam.
Ten days later, as the United States turned over the Long Binh facilities to the ARVN, and as indigenous Southern rebel troops (VC) unsuccessfully revolted against a major purge attempt of Southerners by Northerners in the border-based units, Norodom Sihanouk, nominal head of the Khmer Communist government in exile, rejected Lon Nol’s offer to join the cease-fire agreement.
The situation deteriorated further in early December. Hanoi ordered strategic reserve units throughout North Viet Nam to head south to grab as much territory as possible before any agreement was finalized. (Saigon’s forces were doing the same.) Bien Hoa and Tan Son Nhut were rocketed; heavy assaults were launched in the Central Highlands and south of the DMZ. In Paris the Communists demanded that the International Supervisory Team be limited to 250 members (the United States wanted 3,000), and Saigon’s representatives demanded that Southern sovereignty be recognized. In Cambodia, Khieu Samphan rejected Lon Nol’s renewed request for negotiations. On 13 December U.S. jets caught and destroyed one hundred Soviet-built T-54 tanks heading south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. All talks broke off.
Now came Operation Linebacker II, the “Christmas bombings.” At 9:43 p.m. on 18 December 1972, U.S. B-52s unleashed their bomb loads on Hanoi. For seventeen of the next eighteen days (Christmas excluded), American planes dropped 40,000 tons of explosives on North Viet Nam. Fifteen B-52s and eleven escort planes were shot down during the raids, which amounted to 729 B-52 sorties and 1,000 fighter-bomber sorties.
During the period, Hanoi reported 1,623 civilians killed. Free world press reports were heavily critical of “America’s immoral act.” There were almost no reports of NVA attacks on civilian population centers in South Viet Nam, during the period even though Northern troops attacked or shelled cities throughout the South, peaking with fifty-six attacks on 27-December.
Operation Linebacker II ended on 30 December with indications from Hanoi’s representatives that they’d had enough. Again, military and political planners in all the countries involved concluded that the decisive element that had returned Hanoi to the negotiations was bombing. Again, bombing allegedly had won the battle. Bombing was a decisive tool.
To many in the West the issue was confused—internal contradictions were stimulated. Martin F. Herz and Leslie Rider, in The Prestige Press and the Christmas Bombing (1972), revealed major discrepancies between the reports and the reality.
“The U.S. prestige press [The New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and the commercial TV networks] was outraged....The Times said that ‘civilized man will be horrified at the renewed spectacle of the world’s mightiest air force mercilessly pounding a small Asian nation.’ ” Later it called the bombing “terrorism on an unprecedented scale.” The Post said it was “the most savage and senseless act of war ever visited, over a scant ten days, by one sovereign people upon another.”
Editorial writers and columnists also uncritically accepted certain assertions. A December 28 Post editorial said:
To pretend...that we are making “enduring peace” by carpet-bombing our way across downtown Hanoi...is to practice yet one more cruel deception upon an American public already cruelly deceived. It is, in brief, to compound what is perhaps the real immorality of this administration’s policy—the continuing readiness to dissemble, to talk of “military targets” when what we are hitting are residential centers and hospitals and commercial airports....
According to Herz and Rider; the Post accepted as fact Hanoi’s charges that residential areas of Hanoi were “carpet-bombed”; “it accused the administration of ‘cruel, deception’ ” about why the peace talks broke down; “it was convinced...that the bombing would not lead to an agreement; and it rejected the Administration’s statements that our bombers were aiming only at military targets....The Post, like the Times, had for years given greater credence to enemy claims about the war than to statements issued by U.S. officials—not always without justification.”
Yet eyewitness accounts of the damage to Hanoi contradict the claims of carpet-bombing. A Times writer reported from Hanoi after the January agreement that the damage “was grossly overstated by North Vietnamese propaganda.” A Washington Star reporter wrote from Hanoi in late March: “Some press reports had given...the impression that Hanoi had suffered badly in the war—but in fact the city is hardly touched.”
Herz and Rider concluded, “The editorial position of the prestige press doubtless affected their selection of news stories...converting news reporting to editorializing via selection and thus subverted the free formation of opinion essential to a democracy.” Further, the authors found, “The relative silence of the U.S. government...deprived the media of some information....”; that there was “no evidence that the U.S. Air Force engaged in the ‘carpet-bombing’ of civilian centers” and that “As an incentive to resume serious negotiations, the bombing...appears to have been...effective...this reality has never been acknowledged by the prestige press, which did so much to obscure the issue.”
All these perceptions and more, accurate and inaccurate, by planners, policy makers and the public, were brought to bear on Cambodia. The peace accords, by dealing with only one of four fronts, set the stage for the war’s continuation.
Now, the Krahom would begin in earnest to launch its own offensive and would simultaneously attempt to eliminate all “tainted” elements from within its own structure. And America would respond with its only “decisive tool.”
Then would follow the second eye of the storm, a lull after that most violent of firestorms—a firestorm of pure flame and arc-light combined.