Cambodia: Triumph and Terror

IT began as a time of triumph for Cambodia's beleaguered regime. South of Phnom-Penh, Cambodian officers cheered "C'est fini!" and lit victory cigars as troops at last broke a two-month Communist hammer lock on vital Route 4. Hours later Air Cambodge's Caravelle jetliner flagship touched down at Phnom-Penh's Pochentong Airport, a sunny complex eight miles outside the capital. As he stepped out of the Caravelle, moon-faced Premier Lon Nol seemed pleased with his two-day trip to Saigon, during which he and his South Vietnamese allies had made a start toward settling some nagging differences.

Within seven hours satisfaction gave way to shock. In a daring assault that Washington officials grudgingly rated as brilliant, Communist sappers moved mortars and rockets undetected up to the city gates. Then in four murderous hours, they destroyed the airport, the Cambodian air force (about 40 craft) and tons of precious fuel and ammunition while hitting half a dozen other targets in and around Phnom-Penh. The speed, stealth and success of the raids ominously echoed the assaults that in an earlier and darker stage of the war repeatedly ripped places like Pleiku, Bien Hoa and Saigon--and did much to erode the confidence of the U.S. public.

Walls of Flame. The Communists gutted Pochentong with scandalous ease. When the first rockets and mortar rounds came pounding in on the airfield and a nearby army camp at 2:30 a.m., some of the Cambodian guards were killed and the rest took off in fear of their lives. Then one sapper squad of about ten men simply strolled into the main terminal building while another cut its way through the barbed wire on the airfield periphery. At their leisure, the Communists carried powerful satchel charges to nearly every building, hangar and operational aircraft on the field.

Before long, TIME Correspondent Stan Cloud reported, "great walls of orange flame leapt into the moonlit sky, and explosion after explosion sent showers of pyrotechnic sparks into the air." On the airport road. Cloud saw "panic-stricken refugees, clutching children and personal possessions, streaming away from the holocaust. In a field a few hundred yards from the airport, hundreds of them huddled in the predawn darkness while the false sunset of the fire blazed before them. They watched the sky as if it were some huge motion-picture screen."

In diversionary attacks. Communist raiders occupied a railway station and shelled a munitions factory, a pagoda, the Cambodian navy base on the Mekong and a schoolyard in the city itself. On the horizon, the glow of flames could be seen above the town of Kompong Kantuot, 15 miles from the capital but well within its so-called "defense perimeter."

In military terms, said U.S. State Department spokesmen, the damage was "minimal." Psychologically, it was a mini-TV? Hospitals were filled with wounded; the dead were so numerous that their charred bodies were simply carted away from the airport in trucks. The official toll, admittedly incomplete, stood at 39 dead (including 26 civilians) and 170 injured (150 civilians). The military side of the airport, where the Cambodians had massed their vintage MIGS, American T-28s. French Magisteres and borrowed South Vietnamese and American helicopters, was reduced to "a junkyard," as one U.S. eyewitness described it. American and South Vietnamese aircraft were also hit.

Terrorism has been on the rise in Phnom-Penh for some time; at week's end bombs blasted a government office and the South Vietnamese ambassador's home. Said a U.S. intelligence officer: "They are going to strangle that city, and it could be done easily." Phnom-Penh's electrical power generators and waterworks are now figured to be high on the Communists' list of targets.

The strangulation process is already under way. Route 4, Phnom-Penh's link to the refinery at Kompong Som, was severed in November by 1,000 North Vietnamese entrenched in the rugged Elephant Mountains. It took more than 13,000 South Vietnamese and Cambodian troops, and considerable U.S. airpower, to dislodge them. The Communists' next highway target, it is speculated, may be Route 5. the capital's access to the rich Cambodian rice bowl.

Stealing Headlines. Despite the fireworks at Phnom-Penh. State Department and Pentagon analysts remain convinced that the Communists have no intention of seizing the capital. Rather, they see the raid as a high point in a campaign of harassment aimed at cutting off Lon Nol's contact with the countryside, disrupting vital highway traffic and undermining the authority of the Phnom-Penh regime. An attack in force on the capital, writes Lieut. Colonel Vincent R. Tocci, a Pentagon Asian expert, in the current Armed Forces Journal, "would quite possibly succeed. Yet it would be costly in manpower and material. And then who would rule the country?"

Coming so soon after the allies' Route 4 victory, the Phnom-Penh raid was also a public relations triumph for the Communists. "They stole every headline in the world," said a Pentagon expert on Southeast Asia. "They didn't leave one for Pich Nil Pass." At the same time, however, the Communists took some heat off the Administration as a new controversy erupted over just how the Nixon Doctrine is being applied in Cambodia.

The flap began when newsmen reported that Cobra helicopter gunships. flown by U.S. pilots, had been supporting Cambodian and South Vietnamese troops on the Route 4 operation. Soon it was discovered that many of the Cobras came from an Army unit encamped on Phu Quoc Island, twelve miles off the Cambodian coast. To support the Cobras and supply other helicopters, if necessary, two Navy amphibious ships, the Cleveland and the Iwo Jima, have been steaming in lazy circles offshore. On top of that, an Army major was spotted by news photographers as he was running to board a helicopter near Route 4.

Look It Up. Congressional doves exploded. The Administration, they charged, was fudging on its pledge to use no ground forces in Cambodia and to employ airpower only for "interdiction" of Communist supplies headed for South Viet Nam. In the House, 64 Democrats lined up behind a resolution to ban combat-support operations in Cambodia that require either air-or seapower. Only last month Congress passed legislative restrictions on the use of ground forces in Cambodia.

White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler conceded that U.S. air operations in Cambodia were now "different in scope and somewhat different in nature," but he denied that there had been any change in "the basic framework" of U.S. policy. State Department Spokesman John King smilingly told newsmen that Webster's International Dictionary (Third Edition) defines interdiction as "artillery fire or air attacks directed on a route or area to deny its use to the enemy." Example: Route 4.

Defense Secretary Melvin Laird was more blunt. Forget semantics, Laird said at a Pentagon press conference. Forget the word interdiction. Just call it "air support." He added: "As long as I am serving in this job, I will recommend that we use airpower." By that he meant everything from Cobra strikes to B-52 missions everywhere in Indochina.

The furor over air support sprang from the Cambodian operations, but it is the air war in Laos that has really grown intense. All but a handful of the 1,000 B-52 missions authorized by the Air Force each month in Indochina are now aimed at the Laos spur of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The pounding has pushed the "kill rate" of Communist trucks from an average of 100 a week to something approaching 500. As for combat support, there was no Admin istration denial when Minnesota Democrat Walter Mondale charged that U.S. helicopters recently ferried 1,000 Thai troops into southern Laos.

Oil Slick. But Cambodia is now the center of attention, and the possibility exists that the U.S. will eventually be forced to step up the air war there. Not once in recent months has the Lon Nol regime's 160,000-man army been able to dislodge dug-in Communist troops without calling on U.S. air support. "What we will have to do," said a U.S. official, "is exactly what we did in Viet Nam in 1965--draw the population into the cities and large towns and then turn the rest of the country into a free-fire zone. It's the old oil-slick principle."

But would any new strategy require a new commitment of U.S. ground troops, in violation of congressional curbs and White House pledges? Not as far as Laird is concerned. "We will not--and I repeat it again, not--commit U.S. ground combat forces to Cambodia directly or indirectly," he said last week, not even if Cambodia were to fall. But at week's end Administration officials were emphasizing that a friendly regime in Phnom-Penh is essential to a smooth U.S. withdrawal from South Viet Nam. This week or next Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J.W. Fulbright will hold his first Indochina hearings since last fall, and he is sure to ask Laird and other witnesses the crucial question: How essential?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.