I’m participating in a seminar in Thailand on the subject of Transitional Justice. I’m one of only three Americans (five Westerners) in a group of 30 participants from all over South East Asia. I’m also considerably younger than the rest of the participants, many of whom have been human/civil rights activists, lawyers, judges, etc. for longer than I’ve been alive. Needless to say, I’m learning a lot about a region that I hitherto knew little about (I study mostly Taiwan, China, Japan, and Korea).
One of the things that has come up a lot recently in talking about the ECCC is the US bombing of Cambodia during the early seventies in what was called Operation Menu. I was shocked to learn that the US dropped more bombs on Cambodia than it did on Western Europe during WWII.
What I simply would like to know is if this historical tidbit is common knowledge among older Americans. Is it simply because of my age that I was largely unaware
of the campaign aside from a line in a Ginsberg poem,* or is it that most Americans still aren’t aware of OM and the significance it had for Cambodia?
Also, has there been any move by the US to try to justify the attacks or to apologize for them?
*“bombing Cambodia settled the score when Soviet pilots
manned Egyptian fighter planes”
It was big news when Nixon announced it, and made the covers of news magazines. It was kind of hard to miss at the time, but I’ll bet lots of people forgot it.
I’d say it’s relatively common knowledge. I was a baby when it happened and I know about it. It was the main impetus (even aside from Vietnam itself) for the huge war protests of the early 70s, IIRC.
I would guess it should be common knowledge for anyone over the age of 50 or 55 in the U.S. It was not as well known as the actual invasion of Cambodia that took place the year after Menu began, but since it had been kept secret from Congress (and the Air Force Chief?) it was really big news when Congress opened hearings on it around 1972. The extent of the bombing is probably not widely known, although no one should believe it was a couple of small raids, but that we sent B-52s over the border to carpet bomb various areas should not be a surprise to anyone in that age bracket.
The “more bombs than on Europe” is probably not true, as it confuses the same claim made (accurately) regarding North Vietnam with the specific missions over Cambodia. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey of WWII says that we dropped 2,700,000 tons of bombs (when we include RAF estimates) while the typical figure given for Operation Menu is 109,000 tons. Even if the RAF dropped 2/3 of the bombs in Europe, Cambodia is dwarfed by the WWII action.
Note that:
most of it fell on jungle–it was not targeted at cities (which does not excuse it, but can shape the discussion, somewhat);
it was fairly easy to do considering that a B-52 carried 108 bombs weighing 500 lb. while a B-17 carried (typically) twelve 500 lb. bombs. (Actual weights varied by mission and B-24s caried a couple more bombs than B-17s, and there were lots of medium bombers in Europe, but it is not difficult to see that a handful of B-52s would carry far more ordnance than WWII bombers.) Operation Menu lasted roughly half as long as the U.S. effort to bomb Europe, so we dropped a lot of bombs.
I knew about it at the time because I regularly read Doonesbury, which had a story arc about Phred touring the bombed-out shrines and temples of Cambodia, and then taking hundreds of Cambodian refugees to Washington to lobby for relief.
Phred and his guide come across a museum, and an old couple resembling “American Gothic” but with conical straw hats:
PHRED: The museum! It’s been destroyed!
OLD MAN WITH PITCHFORK: I know, boy. I was the curator.
PHRED: What happened?! The secret bombings?!
OMWP: Secret bombings?! They were no secret! I knew about them! Everybody knew about them! I said, “Look, Martha, here come the bombs!”
I believe the US government attempted to justify it by saying that supplies and personnel from N. Vietnam to the Viet Cong in the south were passing through parts of Laos and Cambodia.
At one point his tour guide managed to locate one small surviving temple, but as they were hurrying over to photograph it, it too blew up under a hail of bombs.
I teach a course about the region, and consistently, it’s my Vietnam vets and people 45 or older who know about it. The majority of the younger students report that the Vietnam War was not covered in their high school history classes. They’re shocked, especially when I show them contemporary news videos about U.S.-affiliated Hmong still being systematically killed off by Laotian soldiers.
I was talking to one of the speakers today (the author of Daughter of the Killing Fields, who was born in Cambodia and lost both of her parents in the conflict), and I mentioned knowing next to nothing about the US’s actions in Cambodia. Then, it dawned on me that we had studied very little about both the wars in Korea and Vietnam, much less the side operations in Laos, Cambodia, etc.
Canadian and yes at least as of the late 70’s I was aware of the bombing campaign.
The NVA had up to that time used Cambodia as a sanctuary for resupply, staging troops , and rest and recreation. It was part of the Ho Chi Minh trail that allowed munitions and personal to be funneled into the war effort.
When Nixon lifted the ban on bombing , he simply legitimized an ongoing state of affairs, the bombing had previously been conducted in a more secret fashion.
With that in mind , I cant see why any administration would apologize for attacking a legitimate target that was only protected via political descretion.
High school history never makes it past WWII, maybe the Marshall Plan. (For that matter, I have no idea what happens in art music after Debussy, either.) I am an extremely overeducated person, age 28, to whom it was not really clear until pretty recently that Vietnam is, you know, a communist country. I knew we left, but, you know, it’s kinda fuzzy.
ETA - Vietnam is at least covered by American film. Korea, a war my dad was actually in, I grew up knowing absolutely nothing about.
Cambodia was neutral in the war. I recall a dialogue in a Doonesbury strip, when Henry Kissinger was teaching at Georgetown and Chinese interpreter Honey was in his class:
KISSINGER: But Hanoi had already violated Cambodia’s neutrality by establishing base camps.
HONEY: With all due respect, sir, neutrality is not like virginity; it does not disappear after the first violation.
KISSINGER: There was no violation! We were there at the personal request of Prince Sihanouk!
ANOTHER STUDENT: Can you recall his exact words, sir? Just for the record?
KISSINGER: He said, “Henry, please drop three times as many bombs on my country as were dropped on Germany in all of World War II.”
ANOTHER STUDENT: That sounds like a mandate to me!
Knew all about it…but then I’m in Tom’s age range so I guess I should at that. Didn’t realize it WASN’T common knowledge, though I guess knowing they don’t really discuss it much in US history kind of explains it. But I’ve seen shows on the History Channel that talk about it…in fact I think there is an entire episode on one of the Vietnam series that talks pretty much exclusively about it.
Are you attempting to argue against the point by citing a (obviously biased) comic strip???
Remember when General Pershing chased Pancho Villa into Mexico without leave of the Mexican government? On its face, an act of war against Mexico, but since Villa was also the Mexican government’s enemy they never made much fuss. The propriety of that particular violation of another non-belligerent country’s sovereign territory is, perhaps arguably, at least a close call. The U.S. bombing of Cambodia is not. It was clearly wrong, whatever military necessity there might have been.
