Losing Vietnam (48 page)

On 22 April we intercepted a message: “Request you implement the measures you were informed about previously, that is, all the enemy leaders must be eliminated without fail. As for the provincial leaders, the senior commanders and those who owe us a blood debt, both large and small, you must implement above plan to get rid of them. Request
you implement this plan secretly.” And on 28 April, from Kompong Thom we received the following intercept: FANK officers between the rank of 1st lieutenant and colonel were being eliminated, wives of these officers too, “because our observations revealed that they are no different than their husbands.” District chiefs and assistants plus important people were also eliminated.

There were reports after reports from all areas of Cambodia detailing incidents of communist atrocities. They would separate the military and send them for rehabilitation training at undesignated camps; they propagandized that the soldiers would not be harmed and the rehabilitation training would enable them to come back and help their country. However, upon arrival at the camps, the soldiers were accused of being traitors to the country and its people and were sentenced “by the people” to death by firing squads. Thousands of military men died.
²⁵⁷

The treatment of civilians was harsh in a different way. For example, on 23 and 24 April the town of Battambang was evacuated. The people were moved approximately twenty-five kilometers out, where they were told to start farming. They were not given any food or tools to work with. To cultivate the land, they were forced to pull plows by hand, using eight men to pull each. They were divided into groups of ten and told that the remainder of each group would be held responsible if any of its members escaped. Cholera broke out in many places; without medicine, with little food, and having no hope, many died.

Later in June, those Cambodian refugees who had managed to escape to Thailand and then attempted to return home—men, women, and children—were executed on Route 5, approximately ten kilometers from the border.
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The communists explained the executions by claiming these people were treacherous to the country; they had been brainwashed in Thailand and might be dangerous. They had to be punished as an example, to deter others from escaping, and the severe punishment was given because the country needed a strong and strict government. Well, the government was indeed strict. And so the elimination went on, targeting the intelligentsia, engineers, teachers, military, and those with glasses, among others. Close to a million were killed or died because of harsh living conditions. This was the war's legacy to this formerly peaceful and happy country.

With time, as the Khmer communist forces expanded and became much better supplied, the war in Cambodia grew in intensity. The October 1973 combat intensity factor was 0.73, and in October 1974 it was 4.70, but in the 1975 dry-weather campaign it was almost an order of magnitude greater than in 1974, peaking at 22.30. The enemy continually attacked the Phnom Penh perimeter and along the lower Mekong, and it had to be repulsed. A concomitant to the increased intensity of combat was, of course, a major increase in battle casualties.

The Cambodian conflict was a bloody one. On the friendly side, the troops often were poorly led, which caused unnecessary casualties. Mostly on the defensive, sometimes the troops were not made to properly dig in and to clear fields of fire. Yet they had firepower superiority, and their artillery and close air support took a heavy toll on enemy troops in the attack. Fortunately, this was an unsophisticated environment, devoid of heat-seeking missiles that would have played havoc with the slow-flying aircraft. The enemy was a determined adversary, generally on the offensive. Their commanders had no compunction about forcing their untrained troops into frontal assaults, often utilizing the cover of darkness to gain advantage. In early January we had reports that they placed refugees in the front ranks as screens during assaults. The reported casualties during the 1975 dry-weather offensive are as shown in
table 25
. About 60 percent of all casualties occurred in the defense of Phnom Penh.

Casualty reporting data from Cambodia was usually obtained
from field spot reporting, and it was often difficult to reconcile—the EMG J-2 would have one set of data and the EMG J-3 another. Army reporting was, in fact, generally conservative and normally understated the situation, particularly with respect to the enemy killed in action. We worked diligently with MEDTC and the attachés to rectify any reporting discrepancies. We used the statistical information to portray trends, and for that purpose the inputs were satisfactory. In
table 25
, the friendly statistics are close to correct. The enemy killed in action may be overstated. However, at 3.24, the rates of enemy to friendly killed countrywide were not greatly out of line, considering that FANK was on the defensive, had firepower superiority (especially with the air force), and at the end was facing grossly untrained troops. With respect to the Phnom Penh battles, even when one discounts the enemy killed by 20 percent and takes into consideration the wounded in action, the total enemy casualties closely approximate the number of main force units that initiated the dry-weather campaign. That is why the communists were so desperate for reinforcements and replacements. The 10,667 total FANK capital area casualties during the same period amounted to over one-third of the forces in contact. By any reckoning, it was a bloody war. For the eighteen months between 11 October 1973 and 17 April 1975, the friendly casualties in the Cambodian conflict, as best as can be determined, were 11,393 KHA and 31,267 WHA, whereas the communists had 31,999 KIA.

Table 25.
Khmer Republic—Casualty Recap, 1 January–11 April 1975

Source
: DAMSREP/DAO, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

From 17 October 1973, when Headquarters USSAG started keeping combat statistics, until the fall of Cambodia, FANK had a daily average of eighty-eight casualties, nearly one-fourth of them killed by hostile action, and the communists had an average of fifty-nine killed. The overall reported exchange ratio was 2.81 to 1, and that was probably nearly correct, considering we had no idea of the enemy wounded who died due to primitive or nonexistent medical treatment facilities. The ratio of FANK KHA/(KHA + WHA) from contacts was 0.267, somewhat higher than the 0.212 ratio in South Vietnam. But then, Cambodia's medical and evacuation facilities were not nearly as good.

When one contemplates these numbers and focuses on the carnage, it is clear what the Khmer Rouge leadership meant when it talked of “those who owe us a blood debt.” Unfortunately, the Khmer Rouge knew no bounds in its debasement after the capitulation, and it set
about to systematically kill many of the Cambodian military. We had report after report of bodies seen lying along the sides of the road and in centers of towns, many of them men in military uniforms who had been shot or had their throats cut. We had verifiable information concerning the Khmer Rouge penchant for harsh discipline (read as “atrocities”), and although I anticipated a retribution of three hundred thousand deaths, I never dreamed of the extent of the Khmer Rouge's killing fields.

Table 26.
Combat Data, FY 75

Sources
: “Republic of Vietnam Ammunition Conservation Study,” June 1975, Headquarters USSAG, Nakhon Phanom, Thailand; “Khmer Republic Ammunition Conservation Study,” June 1975, Headquarters USSAG, Nakhon Phanom, Thailand.

I developed the combat intensity formula for the RVNAF above all to determine the levels of combat. It related to artillery ammunition expenditures, since our premise was “Ammunition demands vary in direct ratio to the intensity of combat.”
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By the summer of 1974, FANK had a data reporting system that enabled us to calculate the combat intensity factor for Cambodia on the same basis as for South Vietnam.
Table 26
gives a summary of the FY 75 combat data for both countries.

A review of these combat statistics for both countries in FY 75 is most revealing. It shows, surprisingly, that Cambodia had almost as many attacks by fire per week as South Vietnam, 478 versus South Vietnam's 500. This was because the communists, faced with fixed defensive positions at the enclaves, resorted to attacks by fire to keep FANK under pressure. In FY 75, 26 percent of all attacks by fire (124 per week) were against the major forces defending the Phnom Penh Special Military Zone, and the rest were generally against the enclaves into which the military and the general population had withdrawn.
Conversely, the multitude of RVNAF dispersed military positions resulted in many more minor contacts, with a cumulative large number of casualties. Both conflicts were wars of attrition. Of all ground conflicts, the major contacts were 3.2 percent in South Vietnam and 3.8 percent in Cambodia. However, the average casualties per major contact were 39 percent higher in Cambodia, 56.0 versus 40.4, probably reflecting both the tactics and training of the troops. Overall, as was to be expected, the combat intensity in South Vietnam was 53 percent greater than in Cambodia.

As President Lon Nol was willing to give up control of land to protect the majority of the Khmer population, fourteen major enclaves existed; the largest, of course, was Phnom Penh. This strategy allowed FANK to have defined defensive positions with interior lines; however, it created a severe logistical resupply problem. This issue was solved primarily by the USAF airland/airdrop operations supported by the Cambodian Air Force. Thus, the army was not spread out attempting to protect thousands of villages and outposts, as was the military in South Vietnam.

The success of the enclave strategy created an ultimately fatal mind-set at EMG Headquarters. Lieutenant General Fernandez had stated that the joint staff would never allow a major enclave to be captured, leaving too many battalions to protect the enclaves even though in 1975 the enemy had concentrated its forces on two objectives—Phnom Penh and the lower Mekong. It had pulled its regular battalions away from the enclaves, leaving territorial units to create harassing pressures, hoping to tie down friendly units. Many battalions were unnecessarily kept at the enclaves when they could and should have been utilized at the Phnom Penh Special Military Zone.

The enclave strategy also created a defensive orientation. When FANK attacked out of the enclaves, it was often successful, but it did not sally forth to any great extent. In South Vietnam, however, to keep the enemy off balance, the RVNAF, directed to protect all of its territory, took to the offensive, initiating more attacks than the communists did in FY 75.

As late as 15 April 1975, FANK had seventy-five battalions in defensive positions located at the six enclaves in MR-2, -3, -4, and -9, where the combat intensity was lowest, versus thirty-eight enemy
battalions, mostly understrength territorials. Many of these units were desperately needed at Phnom Penh and the lower Mekong. The only area, notably, where FANK troops did not have a perimeter-type defense with interior lines was in the lower Mekong, and it was there where, because of a lack of combat strength, they could not successfully defend their positions, losing them one by one.

The Cambodians' enclave strategy worked. They took the heavy poundings of the enemy's attacks by fire—Kompong Seila was a good example. When available, the artillery and close air support mauled the enemy, and the ground contacts attrited it. But they could not muster the troop strength to control the Mekong. As their supplies dwindled because of the drastic cut in funding, their morale and fighting spirit degraded.

It is difficult to precisely analyze why the Cambodian efforts failed to hold off the Khmer communist insurgency. Some reasons are obvious. The failure of the Cambodian military leadership certainly was a major cause. The Khmer culture did not lend itself to the hands-on, take-care-of-your-men leadership prevalent in the West. There was a definite innate lack of a sense of urgency at all levels; the joint staff's inability to react to the enemy's interdiction of the Mekong in 1975 is a prime example. High-level corruption was a cancer, particularly with respect to the practice of padding the rosters with ghost soldiers. The army's inability to maintain combat effective strengths in its intervention units was certainly also a prime cause; the government would not even crack down on the great number of desertions until late in the game. Yet, all of these factors were prevalent throughout the entire course of the war.