Historical Context for Vietnamization of Cambodia (e.g. Viettel/Metfone; Hun Sen's rise to power)

Brother Enemy–the War after the War

A History of Indochina Since the Fall of Saigon

By Nayan Chanda

(MacMillan Publishing Co., New York, 1986)

Excerpts from Chapter 10 (A Red Christmas)

A Campaign Begins

The opening shot of the military campaign, however, was fired from the Central Highlands township of Ban Me Thuot.  Seizure of this town in a surprise attack in March 1975 marked the beginning of the “Ho Chi Minh Campaign,” which ended with the capture of Saigon.  The strategically located town was again chosen for a place of pride in Vietnam’s military history.  At midnight of December 24, as bells chimed in the cathedral dominating the small town, General Chu Huy Man, director of the General Political Department of the Vietnam People’s Army (VPA), lifted his pistol to fire a shot in the air to officially launch the campaign.  General Man had come down from Hanoi for the ceremonial launching of an operation to be led by General Hoang Cam.  “General Cam knows eastern Cambodia like the back of his hand,” a Vietnamese official later told me, “because he led all the major military campaigns against Lon Nol in the 1970s.” Under a cold lit, starlit sky, columns of Vietnamese T-54 leading toward Cambodia.  Within five days, the Vietnamese forces had routed the Khmer Rouge garrison and captured the province capital, Kratie.

Kratie is one Cambodian town the Vietnamese knew well.  After “liberating” it from Lon Nol hands in 1970, the Vietnamese set up a military training school where they trained hundreds of Khmer Rouge in commando operations.  Now, nine years later, the Vietnamese snatched the town back from their old pupils to hand over to their newest Khmer allies.

By January 1, 1979, Vietnamese forces advancing from Laos along the Mekong captured the second provincial capital, Stung Treng.  Capture of the two major towns on the Mekong had effectively cut off all four provinces in the northeast from the rest of the country.  Though sparsely populated by Montagnards, the forest-covered hills of the northeast which were the anti Lon-Nol resistance base in the 1970s had again become a “liberated zone” for Cambodia’s newest front.

Meanwhile, Vietnamese divisions from the Seventh and Ninth Military Regions, under the overall command of General Le Duc Anh, began a massive push along Route 1 and Route 7, both leading toward the Mekong River.  Four nearly a week before beginning the tank-led push, the Vietnamese air force mounted an intense bombing attack on the Khmer Rouge positions.  By concentrating some thirty thousand men—half of the Khmer Rouge regular forces—in an arc along the Parrot’s Beak and Fishhook areas near the Vietnamese border, Pol Pot made their destruction easier.  These troops were decimated by a combination of artillery fire and aerial bombing after being picked up by spotter aircraft.  There was surprisingly little resistance from Pol Pol’s peasant army, which knew how to kill with machetes but had not had time to learn fly fighter planes or were quickly pulled out by sea, leaving the untrained Khmers to fend for themselves.  Rows of brand-new MiG-19s painted with the Democratic Kampuchea colors sat in Pochentong Airport, some even in mothballs, when the Vietnamese reached Phnom Penh to claim booty.

Despite the bombing raids, the ground assault was not easy.  Colonel Bui Tin, who watched the battles from a helicopter and took photographs, told me that the heaviest battle of the campaign before capture of Phnom Penh was fought in the Fishhook area.  Fighting raged for two days as the Vietnamese tried to go across a defense perimeter along irrigation canals and minefields.  Once that hurdle was crossed, the Vietnamese moved swiftly up to the Mekong River opposite the provincial capital of Kompong Cham.  The two other big battles of the operation were fought at Neak Luong, the Mekong ferry town on Route 1, and at Tani (Takeo Province) on Route 3, leading to the coast.  A Vietnamese commando unit managed to reach the banks of Tonle Sap River, facing Phnom Penh.  Their attempt on the early morning of January 2 to cross the river and “liberate” Prince Sihanouk from his guarded residence was however foiled.  “They came across the river to kidnap me, but they all got killed,” Sihanouk told me with a sigh of regret.  “At that time I did not know why suddenly that evening [January 2] Khieu Samphan came to tell me, “You have fifteen minutes to get ready to leave.  I was then taken to Battambang and Sisophon.”

By January 4 the Vietnamese had gained total control of the east bank of the Mekong, comprising seven provinces, but the prospect of putting Sihanouk at the head of the Salvation Front controlling this vast “liberated zone” had vanished.

After a day of lull the final order came from the Politburo on the night of January 4:  “Go to Phnom Penh.” On January 6 the Vietnamese units crossed the Mekong at Neak Luong and north of Kompong Cham.  Soviet-built pontoon bridges and big U.S.-made ferryboats brought up the river from Vietnam carried tanks and troops to the western bank.  Soon nine of Vietnam’s twelve divisions, accompanied by three regiments of front soldiers, would close in on Phnom Penh from the southeast and the north.  By the morning of January 7, Vietnamese artillery started hitting the outskirts of Phnom Penh.  All of a sudden two of the capital’s important accesses—Route 1 and Route 7—were blocked by the advancing Vietnamese columns.

[to be continued]