Abridged from Andy Carvin's excellent site, "From Sideshow to Genocide: Stories of the Cambodian Holocaust"

4. US Involvement in Cambodia

In 1969, US military intelligence reports suggested there was a significant NVA base just inside Cambodia - the Central Office for South Vietnam, Headquarters, or COSVN HQ as it was known. In a breakfast meeting at the Pentagon, President Nixon approved of a series of B-52 bombing raids, codenamed Operation Breakfast. On the 9th of March, 48 boxes - approximately 48 square miles of Cambodian territory - were carpet bombed. Over the course of the next 14 months, the US conducted 3630 B-52 bombing raids in Cambodian territory. Each major operation followed on a tradition set out by Breakfast; subsequent plans included Operations Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert, Supper.

Yet despite the months of airstrikes, the bombings did little to curb NVA activities. On the contrary, communist forces crept further and further into Cambodia, and the US bombers followed suit. Significant populations of Cambodian peasants were now at risk, though no one knows how many of them were killed during the campaign. And the Khmer Rouge, previously a weak guerrilla force run by disenfranchised leftist politicians, grew in the wake of the bombings. The war in Cambodia was escalating, spiraling out of control. Sihanouk's days were numbered.

Lon Nol

In early 1970, while Sihanouk was abroad, Lon Nol, who was now prime minister, began a series of conspiratory steps with Prince Sirik Matak to put an end to Sihanouk's regime. They organized anti-Vietnamese demonstrations across Cambodia and gave the Vietnamese an ultimatum to leave Cambodia. When the deadline passed, Lon Nol requested and received shelling from South Vietnamese artillery against North Vietnamese forces entrenched near the border.

Prince Sirik Matak concluded a coup was now in order, and forced Lon Nol to sign an official declaration against Sihanouk. Together, they convinced the National Assembly to remove Sihanouk from power. For the first time since 1941, he was no longer the supreme leader of Cambodia.

This was the end of Cambodian neutrality. Because Lon Nol requested military support from South Vietnam, the US concluded that this meant Lon Nol would even support American military involvement. But Sihanouk would not go quietly: exiled in China, he made a public demand for Cambodians to revolt against the new regime. In Phnom Penh there was little support of his call to arms; but in the country villages, rioting soon broke out in which Lon Nol's brother Lon Nil was literally butchered and cannibalized by the mob. Also coming to Sihanouk's side were the communist forces of China, North Vietnam and the Pathet Lao of Laos, ready to supply his fledgling army with weapons and training.

But who would fight for Sihanouk? The peasants were on his side, but they were poorly organized. The Khmer Rouge, though, seized the opportunity and offered their support for deposed prince. Once a rag-tag guerrilla army, they now had a cause for which the country people would fight. It was the beginning of full-scale civil war in Cambodia.

Because it appeared Lon Nol wanted US military support, Nixon decided to expand attacks into Cambodia in the hopes of eliminating COSVN, the phantom Vietnamese command center the US believed to be operating in Cambodian territory. In late April, 15,000 US troops crossed the Cambodian border as part of a search-and-destroy mission. Public reaction in the US to the invasion was swift. Hundreds of American universities shut down as students protested against the invasion. At Kent State University in Ohio, where Sihanouk had once visited in his campaign for Cambodian independence, students sacked the campus ROTC building. Ohio governor James Rhodes responded by ordering National Guard troops to quell the riots. Within a day, 15 students had been shot by the Guard, four of them killed. Before the week was over, nearly 100,000 protesters had converged upon the White House.

The U.S. Congress, increasingly concerned over the president's lack of interest in seeking their consent regarding military operations, soon passed the Cooper-Church Amendment, forbidding military engagements in Cambodia beyond June 30th. The war in Cambodia was now illegal as far as the Congress was concerned. US ground forces pulled out of Cambodia by the end of June, but the administration continued its B-52 bombing campaign supported by tens of thousands of ARVN ground troops fighting the North Vietnamese within Cambodia. The US encouraged the South Vietnamese air force to engage communist targets in Cambodia, which they often did with little regard for collateral civilian casualties. From the spring of 1970 to January 1973, Cambodia suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. Soon, communist forces occupied the majority of the Cambodian countryside.

1. The Fall of Angkor and French Colonialism
2. Independence, and the Beginnings of War in Vietnam
3. The War Comes to Cambodia
4. US Involvement in Cambodia
5. The Coming of the Khmer Rouge
6. Cambodia Under Pol Pot
7. The Vietnamese Invasion
8. Rebuilding Cambodia