Qualla: Cambodian campaign

Cambodian campaign: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:BorysMapping, CC BY-SA 4.0. It had already gone. On 19 March 1970 the Central Office for South Vietnam — COSVN, the mobile command running the communist war in the south, and the single object American planners most wanted to seize — packed up and moved north. Six weeks later, at nine in the evening on 30 April, President Richard Nixon went on all three American television networks to announce that US forces were entering Cambodia to capture "the headquarters of the entire communist military operation in South Vietnam." His troops had crossed the border ninety minutes earlier, and his own command had already advised the White House that catching COSVN was not feasible.

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Image: User:BorysMapping | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cambodian campaign: The Sanctuaries

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. For most of the 1960s eastern Cambodia was the back room of the war next door. North Vietnamese units had been crossing since 1963, and in 1966 Prince Norodom Sihanouk — hedging against a communist victory he thought inevitable — agreed with Beijing to permit permanent bases on C...

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Image: Public domain

Cambodian campaign: Spring, 1970

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Timgray200, CC BY-SA 3.0. The arrangement collapsed in weeks. Sihanouk was deposed in March and replaced by General Lon Nol, pro-American and militarily weak. On 29 March the North Vietnamese attacked the Cambodian army — at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge, Soviet archives later revealed — and swe...

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Image: Timgray200 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cambodian campaign: The People Nobody Was Fighting

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sergey S. Dukachev, CC BY-SA 3.0. Roughly 400,000 people of Vietnamese descent lived in Cambodia, many in families settled for generations. Lon Nol decided they were useful as hostages against North Vietnamese attack and had them rounded up and interned. Soldiers and civilians went further, and the police helped ...

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Image: Sergey S. Dukachev | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cambodian campaign: Toan Thang

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LÊ TẤN LỘC at Vietnamese Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The incursion came in two thrusts. On 30 April some 8,700 South Vietnamese troops under Lieutenant General Đỗ Cao Trí — who had refused to start a day earlier because his astrologer found the heavens unfavourable — drove into the Parrot's Beak in Svay Rieng. The next morning 36 B...

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Image: LÊ TẤN LỘC at Vietnamese Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cambodian campaign: The Bill

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shelly Zohar, CC BY-SA 4.0. The allies claimed 11,369 enemy dead and 2,328 prisoners; a CIA official later acknowledged the body count included civilians. American losses were 338 killed, South Vietnamese 638; General Nguyễn Viết Thanh, who planned the Parrot's Beak operation, died in a helicopter crash on ...

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Image: Shelly Zohar | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cambodian campaign: What Was Left Behind

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Washington DC: Center of Military History, Public domain. Nixon called it "the most successful military operation of the entire war." The North Vietnamese, forewarned and under orders to break contact rather than fight, rebuilt their logistics through Laos; by 1972 they were supplying the siege of An Loc out of Cambodia again. What did ...

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Image: Washington DC: Center of Military History | Public domain