Originally posted by Ned
K, the Khmer didn't get "support" because of the bombing. They got support by having the King ally with them and by being supplied heavily by the NV.
K, the Khmer didn't get "support" because of the bombing. They got support by having the King ally with them and by being supplied heavily by the NV.
'I visited refugee camps regularly and consistently heard both accounts. Some peasants didn’t flee at all; the Khmer Rouge used their anger about the bombing to recruit them as soldiers and porters.'
'Lon Nol declared that the entire area east of the Mekong and north of Kompong Cham had fallen under enemy control. Giving the area the rather odd name of "Freedom Deal," he then announced that any personnel or vehicles within Freedom Deal should be considered enemies, and could be attacked without Cambodian approval.
This policy, needless to say, was not well-received by peasants who happened to live in those areas.
The high-altitute B-52s, however, were used against areas where there were no friendly forces or (supposedly) no population centers. Targets were selected by the Cambodian military in Phnom Penh, and then approved by the Seventh Air Force.
The problem, as William Shawcross notes in his excellent book Sideshow, was that it was nearly impossible for a B-52 to avoid hitting populated areas. "...[M]aps used by the bombing panel were only 1:50,000 in scale and several years out of date; the embassy had no recent photography to show the location of new settlements in the massive forced migrations that the Khmer Rouge were now imposing on the areas they controlled.... Inside the embassy, [Political Officer William] Harben was appalled and did what others might have done. He cut out, to scale, the 'box' made by a B-52 strike and placed it on his own map. He found that virtually nowhere in central Cambodia could it be placed without 'boxing' a village. 'I began to get reports of wholesale carnage,' he says. 'One night a mass of peasants from a village near Saang went out on a funeral procession. They walked straight into a "box." Hundreds were slaughtered.'" (Sideshow, pp. 271-272.)'
'The single most important factor in the success of Pol Pot’s revolution, according to most scholars, was the carpet-bombing by American B-52s between 1970-1975. By the time Phnom Penh fell the people of Cambodia were massively traumatized from years of dodging falling explosives that wiped out their villages, families and animals.
....how was a Cambodian peasant to protect himself from a massive cluster bomb falling from an unseen American warplane? And not just once but night after night, week after week? When the Khmer Rouge came to town they didn’t have to ‘recruit’. The people swarmed to anyone who claimed they could stop the bombing.'
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