The Pentagon took another step toward open intervention once again in the Indochina war when it doubled its airlift of supplies to the Lon Nol regime February 15.
The Khmer Rouge insurgents have now virtually blockaded the Mekong River, Pnompenh’s main supply line. For the first time in the war, they have mined the river. They have also stepped up heavy artillery fire from the banks, which are almost totally under their control.
The February 10 New York Times reported that nineteen supply vessels were sunk in the previous ten days. Shipping sources cited by the February 16 Washington Post said that crews have now refused to take cargo ships or barges up the river, despite offers of 300 per cent wage bonuses.
Support from Washington is all that has sustained Lon Nol up till now. As his regime crumbles and his armed forces become less and less effective in holding back the popular rebellion. White House strategists face a difficult problem: In the face of overwhelming opposition from the American people, and even from much of Congress, how can Lon Nol be saved?
The Pentagon has sought to disguise the extent of U.S. involvement. In October last year the air force turned over the work of supplying Lon Nol by air from Thailand to a civilian contractor, Bird Air. According to the February 12 Washington Post, this was to avoid going over the ceiling imposed by Congress of 200 U.S. officials in Cambodia at any one time. The Pentagon supplied Bird Air free of charge with five C-130 transport planes – with their insignias painted out. Half the Bird Air pilots are “retired” U.S. Air Force men; the rest are active reservists.
The Washington Post pointed out that Bird Air had “long-time connections with the Pentagon as well as peripheral contacts with the Central Intelligence Agency.” This “peripheral” contact included a large supply operation in the early 1960s during the CIA’s secret war in Laos, which involved training and equipping more than 20,000 Meo hill tribesmen as mercenaries.
When the Mekong River supply line was first threatened in early January, Bird Air stepped up its operations from between two to five flights daily to ten. On February 11, the Pentagon announced that Bird Air would be given another six or seven C-130s, allowing a total of twenty-two to twenty-four flights a day. This would amount to a maximum capacity of 360 tons of supplies daily, mainly ammunition, representing about two-thirds of Lon Nol’s current ammunition consumption.
While Bird Air was organizing the extra pilots and crew for the new planes, the Pentagon itself rented three extralarge DC-8 “stretch” cargo jets, each with a capacity of forty-five tons and capable of making two trips a day. These planes began operations February 15.
To keep the city supplied with fuel and food as well as ammunition, Washington would have to organize a much larger airlift. The U.S. embassy in Pnompenh announced January 16 that it had an emergency contingency plan for such an airlift, but only “as a last resort.” However, the contingency plan may already be in effect. Part of the plan may have been for the airlift to be increased gradually, gauging public reaction at each stage.
The commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Noel Gaylor, visited Pnompenh on February 13 to assess the blockade and the level of military supplies. He met with Lon Nol and the commander of Pnompenh’s armed forces, Lieutenant General Sosthene Fernandez. According to a report in the February 15 New York Times, one topic presumably on the agenda was the U.S. “last resort contingency plan.
But the full consequences of such a massive airlift have been carefully avoided by Pentagon and U.S. embassy spokesmen.
Rockets regularly hit Pnompenh’s airport, and each flight in and out is a dangerous business. According to the February 12 Washington Post, U.S. diplomatic sources in Pnompenh “concede that an airlift of the size of that to Berlin after World War II is completely out of the question, because of the war situation in Cambodia and the lack of protection against antiaircraft weapons.”
If the Pentagon goes ahead with its planned full-scale airlift, which it seems to be building up to, then it would also have to step up its military intervention. In a familiar scenario, the Pentagon would argue that to protect the lives of its pilots, be they “civilian” or military, the insurgent positions from which rockets are launched against the airport have to be attacked, or that the aircraft have to be defended against antiaircraft fire.
If the Mekong remains blockaded, such an airlift is thought to be the only way Washington could forestall the collapse of Lon Nol in the near future. A U.S. embassy official quoted by the February 10 New York Times said that ammunition supplies were down to a “dangerous” level. He added: “If the river stays closed for another two weeks and we don’t get additional supplies by airlift, it would be a lot more than dangerous. It would be critical.”
Fuel and food are also running short. Pnompenh’s power supply has been cut by at least two-thirds and gasoline has been rationed. Rice is also now being rationed, causing the black market price to surge.
The U.S. embassy has ordered the dependents of embassy staff members to leave the city. The embassy also advised other U.S. citizens and foreigners working for the U.S. government to evacuate dependents and other nonessential personnel. The Australian, British, French, Japanese, and South Vietnamese have all made similar evacuation moves.
An embassy spokesman said the dependents were leaving not because of the danger, but because living conditions had grown worse. The U.S. press also attempted to put the evacuation in this light. “Despite the shellings and the blockade,” the February 16 Washington Post reported, “there is no panic here among the Cambodians or the foreigners, and sending the dependents out of the country has become similar to sending the wives and children to a cool mountain vacation retreat in the hot season, as was the practice in the colonial era.”
The Pentagon and the U.S. embassy are in an awkward position. The must downplay the seriousness of the situation in Pnompenh to prevent any panic there but must play up the danger before Congress in an attempt to get increased financial support for the war. This has led to some contradictory statements. As recently as January 7, Sydney H. Schanberg reported in the February 7 New York Times, a senior U.S. embassy official in Pnompenh, when asked during a “deep background” meeting with a newsman if the aid cut by Congress in December had created a critical situation, replied: “I don’t think we’re in trouble. They’re just going to have to be more careful in how they use their resources.”
After President Ford asked Congress on January 28 for an extra $222 million in military aid for Pnompenh, Ambassador John Gunther Dean said that without the supplemental funds the Cambodian army would run out of ammunition long before the end of the fiscal year. “It is not an exaggeration to say that this is a matter of survival for the non-Communist side in this war,” he asserted.
Asked to explain the discrepancy, the embassy said that there had been “a lot of confusion” and “conflicting views” among embassy officials. Schanberg reported that the embassy blamed two unexpected developments for the change: increased costs and the intensity of the insurgents’ offensive. “However,” he continued, “the embassy had predicted the offensive – one is mounted every dry season – and the fighting, according to the embassy’s assessments, is no more intense than last year.” An article by Mike Snitowsky in the January 24 Far Eastern Economic Review reported that this year, “the normal ferocity of [the Khmer Rouge’s] dry-season offensive has given way to a strategy of apprehensive caution.”
Schanberg reported that military analysts in Pnompenh maintain that the trend in ammunition costs was visible when the original request was prepared. The embassy also insisted that transportation costs must now come out of the military aid budget rather than from a special Pentagon budget. Schanberg pointed out that this “raised another question of credibility. Since the beginning of the war the embassy has told newsmen that shipping costs were included; now it would appear that tens of millions of dollars were disguised in the Defense Department’s budget so that the real total of aid to Cambodia has never been given to the public.”
Schanberg reported that Ford’s supplemental request is believed to be more than Pnompenh needs for this fiscal year. It would make the military budget the biggest of the Cambodian war:
“The analysts feel that this raises serious questions whether the Ford Administration is trying to establish a buffer arms stock for next year, when a war-weary Congress can be expected to provide even less aid to Indochina than this year.” In fact, Anthony Lewis disclosed in a column in the February 6 New York Times, Ford wants another $425 million in military aid for the next fiscal year as well.
Another possibility is that the expanded military budget might be intended to finance an escalation of the war, not merely to continue expenditure at its present level.
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1975/IP1307.pdf#page=16&view=FitV,3