For the Sake of All Living Things (73 page)

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.