In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s,
the US Air Force secretly dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of general purpose bombs, carpet bombs, napalm bombs and dart-cluster bomblets on neutral Cambodia. The action had been authorised by the then President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger.
Initially the campaign’s aim was to expose the Ho Chi Minh Trail used by Communist North Vietnamese troops. Therefore, the areas in the east of the country bordering Vietnam were worst affected. Later a massive countrywide bombing campaign was launched to support the pro-American Lon Nol government fight the communist Khmer Rouge.
As a result 600,000 Cambodians died out of a population of 7 million and another 2 million people became refugees. Today unexploded ordnance still remains a risk. Kicking or picking up unknown pieces of metal can have disastrous consequences.
For more than thirty years, it was generally accepted that 539,129 tons of bombs were dropped during Nixon’s four year campaign. The number of air raids between April 1969 and March 1973 was put at 3,530 [1]. These figures, however, have come under scrutiny recently. To explain, we must first go back to 1994.
Since 1994, the humanitarian demining offices in the Defense Security Cooperation Agency have been compiling a detailed database containing extensive Air Force data on all American bombings of Indochina between 1964 and 1975.
These combat missions were conducted in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Included in the database is information about specific mission numbers, aircraft types and numbers, target locations, latitude and longitude coordinates, ordnance types, numbers of ordnance dropped, and additional information on downed aircraft.
The aim of the project is to help to speed up the clearance of unexploded ordnance that still litters the three affected Asian countries. By making this information available to governments and demining organisations, it is hoped that the locations of this deadly debris can be accurately pin pointed [2].
Initially the data was shared with Laos. As expected, it proved to be tremendously helpful. Then in November 2000, during his historic visit to Vietnam, the then US President Bill Clinton shared the information with the Vietnamese government. And again, it has been an invaluable tool.
It wasn’t until 2006 that external analysts began to study the data presented to the Vietnamese government more closely. Buried amongst all the Vietnam War information are all the dates and figures from Nixon’s secret Cambodian missions.
The true scale of the US Air Forces bombing campaign had been vastly underestimated.
The database shows that the bombing began in 1965, under Lyndon Johnson, and not in 1969 as had been believed. It also reveals that
from October 1965 to August 1973, the United States dropped a staggering 2,756,941 tons of ordnance on Cambodia in 230,516 raids [3].
This figure exceeds the 2 million tons of bombs dropped in the whole of World War II, including the two nuclear bombs.
Not bad going for a country that was never even at war.