The open secret about the Vietnam War

was that America didn't just wage it in

Vietnam. All of Southeast Asia was fair

game, as the US unleashed all of its

military might to crush the communists.

The massive bombing of Laos, which

turned it into the most bombed country

in history, is usually forgotten. But

even more unknown is the suffering the

US inflicted on Cambodia. Between 1963

and 1973, the US dropped over 2.5

million tons of bombs on Cambodia and

invaded it for several months. The

memory of this has been buried along

with the tens of thousands of corpses

that Lynden Johnson, Richard Nixon,

Henry Kissinger, and the rest of the US

leadership left behind. In this video,

we will expose the secret war the US

waged in Cambodia. A war that was an

atrocity in its own right, but also pave

the way for the monstrous genocide of

the K Rouge [music] afterwards. If that

sounds interesting to you, then consider

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important historical events like this.

The Vietnamese Cambodian border is a

rough terrain of hills and jungle.

Infrastructure and maps are unreliable

and many villages are unreachable by

road even today. In the late 1960s, many

of these villages were virtually cut off

from the outside world, and the only way

to reach them was to trek through

difficult terrain on foot or drop in

from the air. While they were

technically in Cambodia, the Cambodian

government meant little to the daily

lives of people there. This weak control

made it easy for the North Vietnamese to

slip across the border and establish

bases in Cambodia to strike at US and

South Vietnamese forces. In 1963,

Cambodia's King Seanuk made a secret

deal with Communist China to turn a

blind eye to these bases on his soil.

Bases in Cambodia and neighboring Laos

became an important part of North

Vietnam's Ho Chi Min Trail, which

allowed the North to move men and

supplies to continue fighting.

Inevitably, US intelligence figured out

that their enemy was using Cambodia as

part of the war effort. The US later

claimed that Sihanuk and the Cambodian

government gave Tacit permission for the

US to conduct anti-communist activity.

This strategy of secretly cooperating

with both communist and capitalist

countries while officially remaining

neutral was a core part of Sihanuk's

cold war policy. Other sources dispute

this and say Sihanuk only gave the US

permission to pursue fleeing Vietnamese

troops across the border during combat

engagements, not conduct a multi-year

bombing campaign in his country.

Between 1965 and 1969,

25,565

bombing sorties would be launched

against Cambodia.

US bombers operated largely out of

Thailand. In 1961, they signed a secret

agreement with the Thai government to

get permission to launch from their air

bases. As much as 75% of US bombing of

Southeast Asia was launched from

Thailand. The US employed a range of

aerial strategies. Conventional mass

bombing from B-52s was the standard, but

helicopter missions were also common.

The village of Donrad was on the front

line of these attacks. The village was

hit multiple times in 1969 by

helicopters seeking out Vietnamese

guerillas. US policy in Vietnam

designated areas as free fire zones.

Shoot first, ask who you shot later.

This applied to anything from infantry

right up to attack helicopters.

Survivors of Donat remembered villagers

scattering when they heard the

helicopters coming in. People would

panic. They would run. Sometimes they

made it. Sometimes they would be killed.

one survivor recalled. Survivors

believed that half of the village was

killed or wounded by US attacks. There

were hundreds of other villages [music]

in the same boat. As early as 1968, US

bombers stationed in Allied Thai air

bases were also dropping Agent Orange

over targets in Cambodia and Laos. One

estimate says the US sprayed over

150,000 L of it over Cambodia during the

war. The long-term health effects of

Agent Orange are wellknown. Breathing

difficulties, birth defects, and cancer

to name [music] a few. The US has never

offered compensation to the Cambodian

victims of these attacks.

Agent Blue, an arsenic based herbicide

designed to destroy crops, was also

widely used. [music]

Agent Blue was dropped over rice patties

believed to be used by the Vietnamese,

but the US could never be sure who

really owned them. They decided that the

risk of starving civilians was an

acceptable price to hit the communists.

Systematic use of herbicides was also

seen in Laos and Vietnam, but its use in

Cambodia is harder to track. Hundreds of

Cambodian villagers reported that US

planes had dropped chemicals on their

crops. However, it has been difficult

for researchers to pin down when and

where the US did these attacks [music]

or how much damage they did. Some

attacks are known, though. In April

1969, for example, US bombers dropped

Agent Blue over thousands of hectares of

rubber trees that were vital to

Cambodia's economy. The damage caused a

12% drop in Cambodia's exports [music]

and provoked a serious diplomatic

incident. The US officially denied that

it was responsible and blamed the

Vietnamese.

US attitudes changed on February 22nd,

1969 when North Vietnam launched a new

offensive against South Vietnam from its

bases in Cambodia. President Nixon was

iate and called up his Secretary of

State Henry Kissinger to discuss how to

respond. Both men agreed that Cambodia

had to be bombed more regardless of what

the Cambodian government had to say

about it. From the start, Nixon knew he

did not legally have the power to expand

the war there on such a scale. He also

knew the public backlash would be

intense. Secrecy was the rule, and the

administration made every effort to hide

what they were doing from anyone else.

As Nixon ordered Kissinger, "No comment,

no warnings, no complaints, no protests.

I mean it." Not one thing to be said to

anyone publicly or privately without my

prior approval. Even the pilots weren't

allowed to know what their targets were

until they were in the air. Operation

menu began on March 18th, 1969 with

Operation Breakfast, named for the early

morning Pentagon meeting where it was

planned. 60 B-52 Stratafortress bombers

were dispatched to targets along the

Vietnamese Cambodian border, but during

the mission, most were redirected to

targets within Cambodia itself.

Operation Breakfast was a roaring

success. Nixon and Kissinger happily

approved five further missions,

targeting areas where US intelligence

believed NVA or Vietkong troops were

hiding. Operations lunch, snack, dinner,

supper, and dessert followed, targeting

areas that were known to have civilians

in them, but Nixon and Kissinger

insisted that these casualties would be

minimal. Later, the Joint Chiefs of

Staff confessed that they really had no

meaningful way to estimate civilian

casualties on any of their bombing runs.

Over the next 14 months, Operation Menu

launched 3,000 sorties and dropped

108,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia.

Every day, the orders were delivered in

secret to the air bases, and pilots were

under strict instructions not to talk

about their work. False coordinates were

given on reports to mislead any wouldbe

leakers and most mission related

material was burned at the end of each

day. Despite Nixon and Kissinger's

efforts, though, knowledge of the

bombing slipped out. On May 9th, 1969,

the New York Times exposed the fact that

America had been running secret bombing

campaigns in Cambodia, but the scale and

targets were still unclear. Nixon was

iate. He ordered the FBI to investigate

a number of journalists and aids over

the leaks, which led Nixon to approve

illegal phone tapping to monitor them, a

habit that would take him down during

Watergate. As far as Nixon was

concerned, everything he was doing was

for national security, and anyone who

opposed him was a threat to be monitored

or dealt with. For all the trouble it

took to keep Operation Menu a secret,

the bombings weren't actually

successful. They failed to identify the

communist headquarters they'd been

seeking and made little impact on North

Vietnam's military operations across the

border. If anything, the bombings only

made events worse. The communists fled

deeper into Cambodia to avoid the bombs,

which led to increasing conflict with

the Cambodian authorities and increasing

contact with Cambodia's own Camair Rouge

communists. Shockingly, bombing a

neutral country did more to start new

conflicts than solve existing ones.

Things got much more complicated in

Cambodia in March 1970.

Sihanuk's pivot towards China and the

USSR was an unacceptable shift in

Cambodia's politics for Washington.

While Sihanuk was visiting France in

March 1970, his prime minister Lunol

seized power and declared the formation

of a new Camair Republic that was firmly

anti-communist and pro- US.

Like so many other pro- US coups, the

CIA has long been suspected of having a

hand in events, but concrete evidence

had never been found. Lun's coup was not

welcomed by the Cambodian people. Prince

Sihanuk was still quite popular, and

Lunol seemed to represent a new age of

American colonialism. After they had

waited so long to be rid of French

control, Paul Pod and his Cam Rouge

guerrillas declared their opposition to

Lenol and received a flood of support,

including from Prince Sihanuk. North

Vietnamese forces in East Cambodia also

allied themselves with the Cime Rouge

and declared their hostility to Lun Nol

as well. Naturally, the US began

funneling weapons to Lunol and made

plans for more direct intervention

against Lunol's communist opponents.

America and South Vietnam drew up plans

for an invasion of Cambodia's eastern

border regions between April and June

1970.

The goal was to eliminate the 40,000

estimated North Vietnamese troops in the

region who had it seized upon London's

coup to capture large areas of eastern

Cambodia. Nixon kept the invasion plan a

secret until a few days before it was

launched. He made a public address on

April 30th, 1970, informing the American

people, but the wheels had been in

motion behind the scenes for weeks. The

South Vietnamese had already launched

their invasion the previous day. Even

Congress was blindsided. [music]

The invasion, or as Nixon insisted on

calling it, the incursion, was

concentrated on the fish hook, an area

of Cambodia that juttered into Vietnam.

30,000 US troops and [music] 40,000

South Vietnamese poured across the

border, supported with armor, artillery,

and air power. The only person more

shocked than the Americans was Lun Null

himself, who first learned that his

country was being invaded by watching

Nixon's speech on TV. The invasion

placed countless Cambodian lives in the

firing line. South Vietnamese and

American troops rolled into villages,

searching houses of terrified Cambodians

[music] without consent. Several

villages were damaged or completely

destroyed to deny them to the

communists. The Vietnam War was full of

horrendous cases of what happened when

unsupervised troops were [music] let

near civilians. See our video on Tiger

Force or South Vietnamese war crimes for

two examples. And Cambodia was no

different.

Just one example occurred on May 16th,

1971

when US and South Vietnamese troops

fired on a village with machine guns and

artillery, which killed eight

Cambodians, two of them children, before

looting the ruins. A US investigation

confirmed that US troops had done this,

but the only punishment was two letters

of reprimand sent to the unit's

commanding officers.

As expected, the invasion was hugely

unpopular in America. The war in general

was already unpopular, so the

unauthorized expansion of it into

another country at the cost of more

civilian lives was only going to make

people angrier. students took the lead

in the protests which turned into a

tragedy at Kent State University on May

4th when Ohio National Guardsmen gunned

down four student protesters. The Kent

State protests were a direct result of

US policy in Cambodia and permanently

shifted US public opinion against Nixon

and the war in Southeast Asia. The

invasion failed to locate the elusive

communist headquarters in the region,

and the communists realized it was

easier to just flee deeper into the

jungles than stand.

However, it did disrupt supply lines

through Cambodia and crippled communist

efforts to use it in the war against the

South. On June 30th, 1970, the Senate

passed the Foreign Military Sales Act to

cut off funding for US military

operations in Cambodia. It failed in the

House of Representatives after US troops

were withdrawn from Cambodia on

schedule. While ground troops left in

June, US air operations continued to

support the South Vietnamese and

Cambodians against the communists under

Operation Freedom Deal. Initially, the

US limited its bombing to the East, but

over the following months, they expanded

to hit almost anywhere in the country.

The US effectively waged an undeclared

air war on the Vietnamese communists and

the Came Rouge in Cambodia for the next

3 years. The bombing angered the

Cambodian people, turning them against

the US and the Cambodian government who

were complicit in it. This made them

more willing to support Paul and the Cam

Rouge. As one officer of the Rouge later

said, it was because of their

dissatisfaction with the bombing that

they kept on cooperating with the Kair

Rouge, joining up with the Cam Rouge,

sending their children off to go with

them. Sometimes the bombs fell and hit

little children and their fathers would

be all for the Cime Rouge. As one US

embassy official in Ponen wrote, "In

short, US policy has been unwittingly to

increase the chance for a communist

victory." By 1973,

controversy over the continued bombings

forced Congress to reign Nixon in. It is

often forgotten that the first articles

of impeachment filed against Nixon were

over this undeclared war in Cambodia.

This first impeachment failed to pass in

Congress, but they did pass a law

forcing an end to the bombing by August

15th, 1973.

Nixon and Kissinger ramped up the

campaign before the deadline, and as

much as half of the bombs dropped during

Operation Freedom Deal were dropped in

the last few weeks.

August 15th, 1973 brought US bombing of

Cambodia to a close. The devastation

would last long after that. Thousands

dead. A nation broken by US air power in

a war Washington wouldn't even admit it

was waging and thousands more driven

into the arms of the Cime Rouge as a

result. After two more years of

fighting, the Cime Rouge captured

Ponumpen in April 1975.

The regime would rule Cambodia for four

nightmarish years, leaving somewhere

between a quarter and a third of its

population dead. Ironically, it was

communist Vietnam who would invade and

topple the Cime Rouge in 1979

after the two communist nations turned

on each other without a common US enemy

to unite them. It took years for the US

to fully admit what it had done. In late

2000, Bill Clinton became the first US

president since Nixon to visit Vietnam.

As a gesture of good faith, Clinton

ordered documents relating to the

bombing of Southeast Asia to be

declassified.

Among these documents were the records

of the Cambodian bombings. They revealed

an estimated 2.75

million tons of bombs were dropped in

230,000

separate bombing missions with at least

8,000 of these missions being largecale

carpet bombing. Critics of the US like

Noam Chomsky and William Shorcross have

cited the bombing as one of the worst

crimes against humanity committed by the

United States. It left between 50,000

and 150,000 people dead, but some

estimates run as high as 600,000 or even

a million. Clear information on the

population in the worst affected areas

are not reliable either before or after

the American bombs fell. Both supporters

and critics of the bombing have every

incentive to pick the number that suits

them best. Another 65,000 people have

been wounded or killed by unexloded

bombs since the war ended. The men

responsible never faced consequences.

Presidents Johnson and Nixon retired to

peaceful lives after the presidency.

Henry Kissinger lived to be 100, dying

only in 2023.

He spent the rest of his life completely

unapologetic for what he had done and

[music] downplaying its effects.

It was not a bombing of Cambodia, but it

was a bombing of North Vietnamese in

Cambodia, he later said. Tens of

thousands of graves dug in the Cambodian

jungle would beg to differ. If you want

to learn more about similar crimes

committed by the US [music] and other

countries elsewhere, check out the other

videos on our channel. We also have a

video on what came next for Cambodia

under the Cime Rouge. As always,

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