The Secret Bombing of 1965 (by Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan)
Thanks to the Air Force database, we now know that the US bombardment started
three-and-a-half years earlier, in 1965, under the Johnson administration. What
happened in 1969 was not the start of bombings in Cambodia but the escalation
into carpetbombing. From 1965 to 1968, 2,565 sorties took place over Cambodia,
with 214 tons of bombs dropped. These early strikes were likely designed to
support the nearly two thousand secret ground incursions conducted by the CIA
and US Special Forces during that period. B-52s -- long range bombers capable
of carrying very heavy loads -- were not deployed, whether out of concern for
Cambodian lives or the country's neutrality, or because carpet bombing was
believed to be of limited strategic value.
Nixon decided on a different course, and beginning in 1969 the Air Force
deployed B-52s over Cambodia. The new rationale for the bombings was that they
would keep enemy forces at bay long enough to allow the United States to
withdraw from Vietnam. Former US General Theodore Mataxis depicted the move as
"a holding action . . . . The troika's going down the road and the wolves are
closing in, and so you throw them something off and let them chew it.." The
result was that Cambodians essentially became cannon fodder to protect American
lives.
The last phase of the bombing, from February to August 1973, was designed to
stop the Khmer Rouge's advance on the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. The United
States, fearing that the first Southeast Asian domino was about to fall, began
a massive escalation of the air war -- an unprecedented B-52 bombardment that
focused on the heavily populated area around Phnom Penh but left few regions of
the country untouched. The extent of this bombardment has only now come to
light.
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