thedrifter
12-27-03, 09:23 AM
Last Days Of Cambodia
As America's involvement in Indochina came to an end in the spring of 1975, the Khmer Rouge closed in on Phnom Penh for the kill.
By Wil Deac
January 1974: The three cauldrons of Indochina were boiling at different rates. Despite a year-old truce, fighting raged for control of South Vietnam, now without the participation of U.S. combat troops. In Laos, where America's secret war had ended, Communists and Royalists were trying to form a new government. And Cambodia was in its 46th month of a conflict that had become a civil war. The Khmer Rouge--the organization of Cambodian insurgents--had evolved to the point where it could fight the war with minimal North Vietnamese assistance. Its opponent, the Forces Armées Nationales Khmères (FANK), was concentrated in largely besieged urban centers, kept alive by water and airborne resupply.
An all-out effort by the Khmer Rouge to storm Phnom Penh, the capital and the key to control of the country, had been shattered by U.S. air power in mid-1973. Then, when U.S. congressional action ended direct American military intervention, the Communists had been too weakened to do more than force a lopsided stalemate on President Lon Nol's Khmer Republic. By the end of the year, the insurgents had recovered enough to try once more to isolate and take Phnom Penh. They started with a terror campaign aimed at destabilizing the government. Rockets arced into the capital from the northwest even as 1974 began. These were followed by 105mm artillery barrages from captured artillery pieces. The bombardment resulted in 1,277 casualties during the first four months of the year and razed sections of the city.
On January 6, 1974, the day the Khmer Rouge finally launched its offensive, a Communist hit team tried to kill FANK Commander in Chief Lt. Gen. Sosthène Fernandez. Two missiles from a shoulder-fired launcher streaked one after the other toward the general's villa. They burst in the branches of a tree shading the house. The would-be assassins fled after throwing two grenades and wounding a guard.
Ponchentong, the capital's combined international airport and air force base situated 41Ž2 miles west of the city center, was the Khmer Rouge offensive's initial objective. Two insurgent regiments swarmed across the sparsely treed flatland to gouge a pocket out of Phnom Penh's northwest defense perimeter. Instead of pinching the pocket at its base and then surrounding the attackers, FANK's 28th Brigade and 1st Division pushed in from the south and east, respectively. A 7th Division element was ordered to move in from the north. Predictably, when the Khmer Rouge troops were jackhammered by artillery shells and air bombardment, they slipped away to the west before the 7th Division could even make contact. Among the 26 prisoners the FANK was able to rake in were a half-dozen youngsters from the Communist all-female 122nd Rifle Battalion.
In the southeastern defense sector, meanwhile, the FANK's 3rd Division's line on the far bank of a river south of the capital was penetrated by a handful of Khmer Rouge infiltrators. The sudden outburst of gunfire spread panic from one battalion to another. By the next day, most of the south side of the waterway was in Communist hands. It was not until February that the government regained lost ground and stabilized its lines south and northwest of Phnom Penh. The fighting vividly illustrated the weaknesses of the Cambodian army, which was in fact more numerous and better armed than the insurgents. Thrown into a war it had not expected, the FANK's increase from 35,000 soldiers to a questionable strength of 250,000 men resulted in inadequate training and organization. Established by the French, who had occupied Cambodia for nearly a century, the FANK was still undergoing restructuring and rearming according to U.S. standards. Unfortunately, American tutelage also was causing the FANK to be overdependent on mechanization, artillery and air support.
While the individual FANK soldier was an excellent fighter, his leader left much to be desired. Too many of the officers were incompetent and corrupt, chosen on the basis of cronyism and nepotism rather than for ability. High-level corruption included the pocketing of pay for thousands of nonexistent troops, charging underpaid soldiers for food and equipment (which meant that their families were sometimes forced to accompany them into combat zones to survive), and trading with the enemy. Those factors, along with a politically unstable regime, contributed to a dissatisfied, poorly motivated army.
The Khmer Rouge, conversely, was determined, strictly led and accustomed to spartan warfare. The insurgent group numbered perhaps 50,000 main force troops in early 1974. Its weapons mainly came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from China or were captured. Most of its soldiers were youths from the countryside who were traditionally suspicious and resentful of their urban counterparts. Some of the Khmer Rouge troops were angry victims of FANK combat callousness or had suffered because of the 539,112 tons of American bombs that had cratered village fields between 1969 and 1973. The majority supported Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the "god-king" ruler who had been overthrown in 1970 by the urban elite and who, from exile in Beijing, exhorted his countrymen to avenge him.
The Parti Communiste Khmer (PCK), an extremist faction of the Khmer Rouge, kept a low profile and let the insurgent masses believe in a united pro-Sihanouk front while secretly upstaging and gradually eliminating competing elements within the Khmer Rouge. It would not be until the late 1970s that the world would learn that the PCK chief was Solath Sar, better known as Pol Pot. It is little wonder, given the FANK's fatal weaknesses and Khmer Rouge fanaticism, that the Khmer Rouge was able to take over most of the country and maneuver the government to fight a defensive war after a disastrous military defeat north of the capital in 1971 (see "Chenla II: Prelude to Disaster," in the June 1992 issue).
The Khmer Rouge also intensified attacks on shipping in the Mekong River, the 60 mile-long umbilical cord through which the capital received more than 90 percent of its supplies. During February 1974 alone, there were nine assaults from the riverbanks on 11 passing convoys, the worst occurring on the 18th. Recoilless-rifle and machine-gun fire slammed into the tug Bannock and the barge Mt. Hood. The explosion of the $1.4 million cargo of munitions turned the waterway into a Fourth of July look-alike. More than 50 tons of munitions on a second barge, towed alongside the tug Saigon 40, was ignited by B-41 rockets.
Trumped at Phnom Penh, the Communists turned their wrath on two more vulnerable provincial capitals--Kampot, to the southwest on the Gulf of Thailand, and Oudong, northwest of the capital. Khmer Rouge troops hit Kampot, noted for its pepper farming, from the north on February 26. By the end of the first week of combat, hundreds of government soldiers had deserted, and the outer defenses had crumbled, enabling the attackers to take the city's waterworks. Rockets and mortar shells cascaded into Kampot, forcing half of the frightened civilian population into the countryside. Army howitzers, naval guns and strikes by the nation's modest air force held the enemy back long enough for reinforcements to be helicoptered in from the capital.
At the beginning of March, the FANK's 12th and 20th Autonomous Infantry brigades were directed to punch out to the northeast along the Kampot*Phnom Penh highway--their objective the country's only cement factory. The counterattack fizzled. During the following week, more reinforcements were flown in--two army battalions, naval marines, more 105mm howitzers and a new commander. An unseasonal rainfall and navy supply vessels shuttling between the besieged city and the nearby Ream naval base kept the defenders from succumbing to thirst. Yet government positions continued to fall.
April seemed even less promising, as the insurgents chewed more chunks out of Kampot's northern and western defense perimeters. After pushing back the marines defending the southeastern sector, the Khmer Rouge blocked the two arms of the Kossla River that linked the city to its supply source on the Gulf of Thailand. Further trouble came from weather that hampered air operations. The final straw seemed to be a shell that dropped into the FANK artillery battery's ammunition cache. Some 3,500 shells exploded with a fiery roar that knocked out eight of the howitzers bunched around them. Only the timely arrival of two additional battalions reversed the situation.
continued....
As America's involvement in Indochina came to an end in the spring of 1975, the Khmer Rouge closed in on Phnom Penh for the kill.
By Wil Deac
January 1974: The three cauldrons of Indochina were boiling at different rates. Despite a year-old truce, fighting raged for control of South Vietnam, now without the participation of U.S. combat troops. In Laos, where America's secret war had ended, Communists and Royalists were trying to form a new government. And Cambodia was in its 46th month of a conflict that had become a civil war. The Khmer Rouge--the organization of Cambodian insurgents--had evolved to the point where it could fight the war with minimal North Vietnamese assistance. Its opponent, the Forces Armées Nationales Khmères (FANK), was concentrated in largely besieged urban centers, kept alive by water and airborne resupply.
An all-out effort by the Khmer Rouge to storm Phnom Penh, the capital and the key to control of the country, had been shattered by U.S. air power in mid-1973. Then, when U.S. congressional action ended direct American military intervention, the Communists had been too weakened to do more than force a lopsided stalemate on President Lon Nol's Khmer Republic. By the end of the year, the insurgents had recovered enough to try once more to isolate and take Phnom Penh. They started with a terror campaign aimed at destabilizing the government. Rockets arced into the capital from the northwest even as 1974 began. These were followed by 105mm artillery barrages from captured artillery pieces. The bombardment resulted in 1,277 casualties during the first four months of the year and razed sections of the city.
On January 6, 1974, the day the Khmer Rouge finally launched its offensive, a Communist hit team tried to kill FANK Commander in Chief Lt. Gen. Sosthène Fernandez. Two missiles from a shoulder-fired launcher streaked one after the other toward the general's villa. They burst in the branches of a tree shading the house. The would-be assassins fled after throwing two grenades and wounding a guard.
Ponchentong, the capital's combined international airport and air force base situated 41Ž2 miles west of the city center, was the Khmer Rouge offensive's initial objective. Two insurgent regiments swarmed across the sparsely treed flatland to gouge a pocket out of Phnom Penh's northwest defense perimeter. Instead of pinching the pocket at its base and then surrounding the attackers, FANK's 28th Brigade and 1st Division pushed in from the south and east, respectively. A 7th Division element was ordered to move in from the north. Predictably, when the Khmer Rouge troops were jackhammered by artillery shells and air bombardment, they slipped away to the west before the 7th Division could even make contact. Among the 26 prisoners the FANK was able to rake in were a half-dozen youngsters from the Communist all-female 122nd Rifle Battalion.
In the southeastern defense sector, meanwhile, the FANK's 3rd Division's line on the far bank of a river south of the capital was penetrated by a handful of Khmer Rouge infiltrators. The sudden outburst of gunfire spread panic from one battalion to another. By the next day, most of the south side of the waterway was in Communist hands. It was not until February that the government regained lost ground and stabilized its lines south and northwest of Phnom Penh. The fighting vividly illustrated the weaknesses of the Cambodian army, which was in fact more numerous and better armed than the insurgents. Thrown into a war it had not expected, the FANK's increase from 35,000 soldiers to a questionable strength of 250,000 men resulted in inadequate training and organization. Established by the French, who had occupied Cambodia for nearly a century, the FANK was still undergoing restructuring and rearming according to U.S. standards. Unfortunately, American tutelage also was causing the FANK to be overdependent on mechanization, artillery and air support.
While the individual FANK soldier was an excellent fighter, his leader left much to be desired. Too many of the officers were incompetent and corrupt, chosen on the basis of cronyism and nepotism rather than for ability. High-level corruption included the pocketing of pay for thousands of nonexistent troops, charging underpaid soldiers for food and equipment (which meant that their families were sometimes forced to accompany them into combat zones to survive), and trading with the enemy. Those factors, along with a politically unstable regime, contributed to a dissatisfied, poorly motivated army.
The Khmer Rouge, conversely, was determined, strictly led and accustomed to spartan warfare. The insurgent group numbered perhaps 50,000 main force troops in early 1974. Its weapons mainly came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from China or were captured. Most of its soldiers were youths from the countryside who were traditionally suspicious and resentful of their urban counterparts. Some of the Khmer Rouge troops were angry victims of FANK combat callousness or had suffered because of the 539,112 tons of American bombs that had cratered village fields between 1969 and 1973. The majority supported Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the "god-king" ruler who had been overthrown in 1970 by the urban elite and who, from exile in Beijing, exhorted his countrymen to avenge him.
The Parti Communiste Khmer (PCK), an extremist faction of the Khmer Rouge, kept a low profile and let the insurgent masses believe in a united pro-Sihanouk front while secretly upstaging and gradually eliminating competing elements within the Khmer Rouge. It would not be until the late 1970s that the world would learn that the PCK chief was Solath Sar, better known as Pol Pot. It is little wonder, given the FANK's fatal weaknesses and Khmer Rouge fanaticism, that the Khmer Rouge was able to take over most of the country and maneuver the government to fight a defensive war after a disastrous military defeat north of the capital in 1971 (see "Chenla II: Prelude to Disaster," in the June 1992 issue).
The Khmer Rouge also intensified attacks on shipping in the Mekong River, the 60 mile-long umbilical cord through which the capital received more than 90 percent of its supplies. During February 1974 alone, there were nine assaults from the riverbanks on 11 passing convoys, the worst occurring on the 18th. Recoilless-rifle and machine-gun fire slammed into the tug Bannock and the barge Mt. Hood. The explosion of the $1.4 million cargo of munitions turned the waterway into a Fourth of July look-alike. More than 50 tons of munitions on a second barge, towed alongside the tug Saigon 40, was ignited by B-41 rockets.
Trumped at Phnom Penh, the Communists turned their wrath on two more vulnerable provincial capitals--Kampot, to the southwest on the Gulf of Thailand, and Oudong, northwest of the capital. Khmer Rouge troops hit Kampot, noted for its pepper farming, from the north on February 26. By the end of the first week of combat, hundreds of government soldiers had deserted, and the outer defenses had crumbled, enabling the attackers to take the city's waterworks. Rockets and mortar shells cascaded into Kampot, forcing half of the frightened civilian population into the countryside. Army howitzers, naval guns and strikes by the nation's modest air force held the enemy back long enough for reinforcements to be helicoptered in from the capital.
At the beginning of March, the FANK's 12th and 20th Autonomous Infantry brigades were directed to punch out to the northeast along the Kampot*Phnom Penh highway--their objective the country's only cement factory. The counterattack fizzled. During the following week, more reinforcements were flown in--two army battalions, naval marines, more 105mm howitzers and a new commander. An unseasonal rainfall and navy supply vessels shuttling between the besieged city and the nearby Ream naval base kept the defenders from succumbing to thirst. Yet government positions continued to fall.
April seemed even less promising, as the insurgents chewed more chunks out of Kampot's northern and western defense perimeters. After pushing back the marines defending the southeastern sector, the Khmer Rouge blocked the two arms of the Kossla River that linked the city to its supply source on the Gulf of Thailand. Further trouble came from weather that hampered air operations. The final straw seemed to be a shell that dropped into the FANK artillery battery's ammunition cache. Some 3,500 shells exploded with a fiery roar that knocked out eight of the howitzers bunched around them. Only the timely arrival of two additional battalions reversed the situation.
continued....