The Anatomy of a Blitzkrieg

Lethal lotus blossoms and belligerent bees

"Please give us orders, please give us orders. Should we attack?"

For two weeks that urgent radio message crackled from a redoubt deep in eastern Cambodia's Mondolkiri forest. The frustrated sender of the plea was the commander of two Khmer Rouge infantry companies. He had been cut off in the forest by Vietnamese troops who had invaded Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea). The broadcast was futile; Khmer commanders were too scattered and too harried to respond to the call. Like most other units in the estimated 73,000-man Communist Khmer Rouge force deployed to face the six-pronged Vietnamese attack, the isolated companies in the Mondolkiri forest had been outgunned and outmaneuvered.

The war, in short, was all but lost. In scattered areas of the country the fighting continued at a furious pace, most notably in Kompong Som (once Sihanoukville, named for Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was hospitalized in New York City with fatigue from participating in the U.N. debate on Hanoi's takeover). In Kompong Som the two sides were fighting street to street and hand to hand for control of Cambodia's sole deep-water port, 136 miles southwest of Phnom-Penh (see map). Vicious fighting continued in the Mondolkiri forest as well, and at Siem Reap and Kampot, where Khmers who had been chased out of the town retaliated by shelling it from surrounding mountains.

Early in the week, Cambodia's scant hope of political salvation was crushed by the Soviet Union, which is allied with Hanoi and supports the invasion. In New York City, the Soviets vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for the immediate withdrawal of "all foreign troops" from Cambodia. Even that resolution was mild, a sanitized substitute for Chinese wording that named the Vietnamese as "aggressor forces." To the embarrassment of the Soviets, the watered-down substitute was the work of seven nonaligned council members;* like others who listened to the debate preceding last week's vote, the seven rejected Soviet Ambassador Oleg Troyanovsky's disingenuous explanation that the invasion was "a true people's uprising" by dissident Kampucheans. It was a hypocritical effort: in earlier Security Council debates, the Soviets had been the fulsome champions of victimized Third World states. In 1974, for instance, they used their veto power to justify the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Earlier, Moscow had led a censure of Israel for attacking Lebanon and twice vetoed motions of condemnation of the Indian invasion of East Pakistan. In their 111th Security Council veto last week, they stood virtually alone against the will of their sometime friends.

With the Khmer Rouge deprived of outside political support and cut off from potential resupply from their Chinese supporters, the question became not whether Cambodia could resist the invaders but for how long. The Hanoi-created Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS), a fighting force of 18,000 Cambodian refugees, had accompanied the Vietnamese into Cambodia; when Phnom-Penh fell in the second week of the invasion, KNUFNS leaders renamed the group the Peoples Revolutionary Council of Kampuchea and set up a government. Last week PRCK announced that as the de facto government it welcomed diplomatic recognition and would accept aid from international sources.

However great the number of PRCK forces, intelligence observers in neighboring Thailand and in Washington were persuaded that the entire operation had been a Vietnamese show, and a superb one at that, exceeding in some respects the best tactics Hanoi ever used against French or American forces in the earlier Indochina wars. In less than a month, traveling at speeds of up to 40 m.p.h., twelve Vietnamese divisions totaling 100,000 men had swept across the rice fields and shifting terrain of Cambodia in an advance that covered 300 miles. So successful was the Vietnamese strategy, in fact, that the story of Cambodia's fall might well become a classic textbook study. "Patton would be proud," boomed the London Observer.

At first it was a border quarrel between Communist neighbors. For two years Khmer Rouge soldiers had been raiding Vietnamese border towns and kidnaping residents; Hanoi intermittently fought back or offered peace terms without success. Finally in December 1977, the angry Vietnamese decided to launch a severely punitive raid into Cambodia. The raid was not totally successful. Some Vietnamese tank columns ran out of gas or lost their way. And while the Vietnamese killed large numbers of Khmer Rouge, they voluntarily pulled back across the border, allowing Phnom-Penh to brag that the Khmer Rouge had repulsed the attack. Hanoi's leaders regrouped to try again. This time, command of the operation went to Viet Nam's army chief of staff, Van Tien Dung, 61, a genial general who likes to make gifts of chocolates, cigarettes and hairpins to his men and women soldiers. Dung is also Viet Nam's best tactician, the pupil of Hanoi's military genius. Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap. It was Dung who masterminded the fall of Saigon in April 1975.

Dung described his strategy in terms more poetic than military. The invasion was to be a series of blooming lotuses, stretching out their petals from captured headquarters to enfold the troops along the fringes. Expanding on that metaphor, a Thai general commented last week to TIME Correspondent David DeVoss: "The Khmer Rouge are bees without a hive. They still cluster and fly away, but soon they will all go visit the lotus."

Dung's Cambodian campaign began with a series of air strikes on border forces that softened Khmer Rouge defense lines. This was followed by punishing attacks that killed an estimated 17,000 Kampucheans. The ferocity convinced observers that something big was building, but the best guess was that Hanoi was after no more than the eastern third of its neighbor. In early November, Viet Nam signed a 25-year friendship treaty with the Soviet Union. The accord was accompanied by talks between Dung and Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, who agreed in private that the regime of Cambodian Leader Pol Pot had to be destroyed.

Returning home, Dung moved twelve Vietnamese divisions into jump-off positions in Viet Nam and Laos. Air support and logistics were organized. The wavering draftees who had failed in the previous attack were replaced with veteran soldiers.

Finally on December 14 Dung sent two divisions from Tay Ninh over the border northward through the Fishhook section of Kampuchea in a run on the town of Kratie. The maneuver was meant to lure the Kampuchean Communists into assuming that the Vietnamese were gathering for no more than a limited operation. The ruse worked perfectly; the Cambodians were drawn northeastward.

Two weeks later, on Christmas Day, Dung launched his offensive. From Can Tho in the south, elements of two Vietnamese divisions rolled to interdict Cambodian Highways 3 and 4. Capturing the town of Takeo, they moved onward toward Phnom-Penh itself. Two more divisions of about 10,000 men moved out of Tay Ninh, bound for the Mekong Riverside town of Kompong Cham and for the capital. Another division slid in parallel fashion across the Parrot's Beak salient at the border to outflank Cambodian forces between Highways 1 and 7. From Pleiku three additional divisions moved out to attack in the north around the town of Stung Treng. At the same time, Vietnamese troops reportedly stationed in Laos poured south along the Mekong to engage the Khmers.

The attack was an instant success all along the line. The armored divisions captured their objectives except Kompong Som with little difficulty. In an assault on Kompong Cham, the Vietnamese used Soviet pontoon bridges to move an entire mechanized division across the Mekong River. This broke the back of the Khmer defense; 6,000 Khmer troops suddenly found themselves wedged between the onrushing Vietnamese and the Mekong.

The Vietnamese hardly stopped for fuel before they rolled again. Thundering northwest on Highways 5 and 6 in the Nebraska-flat rice-growing area of western Cambodia, they toppled the provincial capitals of Battambang, the country's second city, and Siem Reap, near the temple ruins at Angkor Wat.

By last week the Vietnamese blitzkrieg controlled almost every important town and every major highway in Cambodia. The victorious invaders had also captured some strange spoils of war. In Phnom-Penh they found crates containing ten MiG airplanes; the jets had been a gift of the Chinese, but since no Kampuchean pilot knew how to fly them, the MiGs had never been uncrated.

Throttling back their Soviet T-54 and PT-76 Soviet tanks and ar mored personnel carriers, maintaining air control by means of captured U.S. F-5Es and A-37s, along with Soviet MiGs, the Vietnamese started a second-phase maneuver. They moved along rural routes into isolated areas seeking to surround and wipe out the pockets they had bypassed in the initial rush. Unable to bring ar tillery to bear on such swiftly moving foes, the Khmer offered only brief opposition and then faded back to secondary defenses.

As the Vietnamese last week continued mopping up, no trace of the Kampuchean leadership could be found. Pol Pot himself was reported in Siem Reap. Observers suspected that he and other leaders, acting on contingency plans, had slipped away to the mountains of the Elephant Range along the coast, a favorite retreat in old guerrilla days.

If they have really prepared such fallback positions, the scattered Khmer Rouge could become bothersome bees for the Vietnamese. But that was small consolation; they had lost their country as a result of General Dung's brilliant offensive, and all indications were that there will be a Vietnamese presence in Cambodia for a long time to come.

* Behind the resolution: Zambia, Kuwait, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Gabon, Jamaica and Nigeria.

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