About this time also the only remaining Khmer newspaper which had not been banned — the Army organ — published an editorial condemning the B-52 bombing and saying that it would be more appropriate for us to bomb North Vietnam, and not our Cambodian ally. I believe this editorial mentioned some civilian casualties or implied that there had been some.
About this time I met Liz Trotta, a rather bold NBC television reporter, with whom one day I watched Tacair bombing a retreating enemy unit on the east bank of the Mekong from the Chrui Changwar peninsula. Refugees with sampans loaded with bedding, furniture, bicycles, and even farm animals were streaming toward us from the far bank, fleeing either the bombing or the enemy or both.
Liz insisted on going to the other side when a Khmer soldier told us it was safe for about a kilometer back of the riverbank, and I accompanied her and her TV crew. We followed Khmer troops of the rearguard in their leisurely pursuit southward, and stopped to question some peasants through a French-speaking schoolteacher. Miss Trotta, having heard the uproar about civilian casualties, asked them if they could cite specific instances of civilian deaths. After some palaver they cited three in that area from all bombings: a farmer who had gone too close in order to rescue his strayed cattle, a bonze, and another villager. Miss Trotta thought this rather a small and unavoidable toll, and did not bother to report it. When she asked the peasants if they opposed the bombing, they said they did not mind as long as it was not on their village. Liz was so surprised that she thought the teacher was giving us a bit of government propaganda, but when I questioned him he quite freely said he had no use for Lon Nol or any of the other politicians either.
(iii) Were they caused by B-52 or Tacair strikes?
Answer: I have no other information other than that given above.
(iv) If B-52, were the rules of engagement respected (i.e. no strikes closer than one kilometer to inhabited areas)?
Answer: It was not until I received this question that I knew what the rules of engagement were. In any case I did not seek or obtain enough detail on the raids to determine this. In the case of the Sa’ang tragedy, however, it is clear that the rules of engagement were respected.
(v) Were these accidents caused or made more likely by use of maps several years old, or by lack of care by the Embassy or the Seventh Air Force?
Answer: I do not think the accidents were due to old maps or lack of care. I believe they were due to factors I will explain in answer to your question (vii) below. You refer only to B-52 attacks, but I feel that in order to be complete I should say what I knew of the rules of engagement in Tacair strikes, about which I knew more, since they were more easily observed.
Conversations in the staff meetings convinced me that we were exercising great care to avoid civilian casualties in Tacair bombing, and I assumed that the same care was exercised with respect to B-52 raids. On one occasion Gen. Cleland complained that the enemy were so confident that we would not bomb villages that they had set up their guns in villages on the banks of the Mekong to shoot at our convoys. I recall that I suggested that smoke bombs be dropped upwind of these positions to blind them. He replied that that had been considered by the “High Command” and rejected as impractical since it would obstruct navigation. Although that might be true only for certain azimuths I did not pursue it, but on the way down the stairs I met the Naval Attache coming up. I told him that “someone” had suggested smoke bombs. He said it was a good idea — it ought to be tried. I then said that “someone” had objected that it would blind the navigators. He scoffed at that and pointed out that they had brought a convoy up in the middle of a moonless night a few nights earlier. I mentioned to Shawcross that the enemy put guns in villages confident that they would not be attacked, but he chose to omit this also.
Rules of engagement were mentioned on one other occasion in my presence. A Jesuit priest, a speechwriter in the White House, arrived and was shunted to me. He was quite interested in the bombing, and I asked one of the Assistant Air Attaches over for a drink, since I could not enlighten him. The priest questioned him quite closely as to whether the rules of engagement were being observed, and even pretended to be a “firebreather” — claiming that there are no neutrals in total war — in order to provoke the Ass’t Air Attache into admitting some departure from the rules. The latter insisted, however, that deliberate violations were rare and minor. He would go no further than to say that a pilot receiving fire from a cluster of huts slightly over the maximum attackable size might stretch a point. The priest asked what the size of the cluster was, and the Ass’t Air Attache declined to give it to him, saying that it was information which could be of great use to the enemy.
(vi) Is the quotation attributed to you accurate? If so, to whom did you make it, when, and in what context?
Answer: There are several, but I assume you mean that in which I said “I began to get reports of wholesale carnage . . .” etc. This was said to Shawcross in my house in 1977, I believe. I think he garbled it slightly. In referring to the Sa’ang raid, I used the expression used by my informant on that raid: “c’était un veritable carnage”. Shawcross seems to have written this down in such a way as to give the impression that such a description applied to all the raids about which I had heard. The context was simply a narration of events. Shawcross is inaccurate in a number of other quotations: When I said that Lon Nol, when Washington was distracted elsewhere, resumed his dictatorship with the usual army backing, Shawcross insérted in brackets “United States” in front of “army”, although I meant Khmer Army. If I had meant United States Army I would have used the word “acquiescence”, although some might think that Gen. Cleland’s threats of terminating U.S. aid made to officers who were discussing a coup against Lon Nol might amount to more than that. Shawcross also says that my proposals were rejected “contemptuously”. I did not use such a word and did not feel that you or Coby were ever contemptuous toward me. The General was another matter. Shawcross also states that officers in the Political Section “like Bill Harben” were unhappy over your allegedly more vigorous prosecution of the “Nixon Doctrine”. I am not sure what he means by that. I do not recall such sentiments in my section. If anything, I found your more vigorous approach a refreshing change.
(vii) Did you cut out a B-52 box, apply it to Central Cambodia, and conclude that nowhere could bombing be carried out without civilian casualties? Is that your view now?
Answer: I did. I did not attend the Air Attache’s briefings, but journalists told me that the Embassy claimed that there were no civilian casualties, and jeered at the idea. Convinced, for reasons given below, that it was impossible to conduct such bombing without inflicting some civilian casualties, I felt the Embassy might once again be creating a “credibility gap”. On the spur of the moment I decided to demonstrate to myself how easily hostile outsiders might make us appear to be cruel and foolish. I tried to orient the B-52 “box”, cut to scale, on my office map and covered a village in Central Cambodia in all positions.
I felt I should apprise someone of this, but had clashed with Gen. Cleland whenever I reported Khmer Army corruption. He had even insisted I burn a memo of Carney’s on front-line bribes for delivery of US munitions, though I felt it might even be a violation of federal law for the Political Section to conceal such information which had come to its attention. So I shunned the military and wrote a memorandum to Paul Gardner, since the title of his “Political Military” Section seemed to indicate some responsibility.
But it was not just this exercise with the map which convinced me that some civilian casualties were unavoidable. Most of my career had been spent on international Communist matters, and I thought that if a public scandal about civilian casualties would hurt our war effort, they would see to it that we did kill civilians, despite our caution. Furthermore I had knocked about rural Java a good deal in the early 60’s, and had encountered mysterious religious processions at night far out in the countryside. While climbing mountains I had come upon small vill
ages hidden under palms not shown on my maps. They were so remote from the national life that they did not know what money was, and dropped it on the ground when I paid them for coconuts. Such villages would have been wiped out in any “carpet bombing” of “uninhabited” areas. In war the problem is worse. People whose draft animals have been commandeered or whose rice has been confiscated go foraging in the jungle for food. They hide in unusual places at night to avoid enemy conscription. Often they are fleeing by night to the safety of the government lines. Some of our reports from the other side spoke of the Communists marching villagers to bases at night to harangue them with political speeches. No air force can know where such people are at any given moment.
So civilian casualties were unavoidable, but far fewer, I am sure, than Shawcross and the others claim. Had they been so great, the reports I received would not have been so vague. It is curious also that, although thousands of Khmers who were living in enemy-held areas at that time have now fled to Thailand, and some have even gone to Europe, Shawcross seems to have made no effort to question them, although he made the effect of bombing upon them a major theme of this book. He did not even speak to So Satto, ex-chief of the Khmer Air Force, as I suggested. Nor did he contact In Tam, who was speaking to dozens of peasants every day recently arrived from the other side — and to enemy emissaries discussing defection. (Actually I suspect that Shawcross’ French is too poor to have done a complete job).
Shawcross quotes me as “appalled” at the time. I was not appalled by the casualties to civilians, which I think were minor and unavoidable, but by the fact that they were in vain in the absence of vigorous measures to stamp out Khmer Army corruption, build an efficient fighting force, ensure the coming to power of the honest and much more capable In Tam, whose popularity as demonstrated in his election victory and his contacts with disaffected enemy held out a prospect of victory. When he described to me his plan of buying off the Khmer Rumdoh piecemeal with FANK ranks and wages, gradually thus reducing the Communists to a minority and isolating them back in the Cardamoms, I thought it workable, but asked him where he would get the money. He replied: “Your own figures, announced in Washington, say that Lon Nol and his officers are stealing the wages of enough men to buy off the whole insurgent army — that is where I intend to get the money.” That would have required strong support from us — and I did not think Congress could raise protests on behalf of embezzlers of US funds and equipment.
The B-52 bombing even made corruption worse. When Cheng Heng pleaded with Lon Nol to act against corrupt officers, Nol told him to calm down, since “the American B-52’s are killing a thousand enemy every day and the war will soon be over.”
With regard to the morality of killing any civilians at all, I feel it was justified in the attempt to save them from a much greater slaughter at the hands of the Communists, who in every country have liquidated far more people than may have been accidentally killed in Cambodia. The bombing of German extermination camps is now debated in retrospect. We are criticized for failing to do so. Would Shawcross object to such bombing on the grounds that “hundreds” of non-combatants would have been killed? In the invasion of Normandy we killed many French civilians. In Sicily we even bombed our own troops. In World War II Mr Shawcross’ country devised a policy of deliberately aiming at civilians, and made the author of that policy a peer of the realm, whereas our country is probably the only one in recent decades in which strict rules of engagement were imposed to avoid or reduce civilian deaths.
There will be a next time, and when that time comes I think we should be more attentive to the problem of public relations and history. We might, for example, shower enemy-occupied areas with leaflets announcing our intention in a general way and urging civilians to avoid enemy military concentrations at night, etc. Still there will be civilian casualties, but we will have visible evidence of concern for their safety.
In retrospect I do not envy you the role you were asked to play, which I am sure you exercised as humanely as possible. Our commissions read that we serve “at the pleasure of the president”. If the press or the public regards some of the results of our obedience as unfortunate, then they should devote their attention to the faults of the system which “program” such occurrences, instead of to the pursuit of villains. Any embassy, under the circumstances, would have come up with about the same cast of characters, doing, or not doing, the same things.
Sincerely [signed] Bill W. N. Harben
Tab C
The Honorable Thomas Ostrom Enders
July 8, 1979
Ambassador of the USA
100 Wellington Street
Ottawa, Ontario K1P 5T1
Dear Tom,
I delayed this response until I finished reading Shawcross’ book which you kindly sent me. My comments on his charges and answers to your questions follow.
First let me say that his description of the 1973 bombing as “indiscriminate” is completely contrary to fact. As one who led his squadron over the beaches of Normandy in World War II and later operated against targets in support of Allied troops on the Western front, I can assure you I have some basis for judging the nature of bombing activities. I state flatly that the precision, degree of control, validity of targets attacked and professionalism of the crews involved in the 1973 Cambodian campaign were as high or perhaps even higher than all of World War II bombing, the 1965–68 Rolling Thunder campaign, or the Linebacker campaigns in 1972 in North and South Vietnam.
There were some accidents, but surprisingly few considering the weight of effort involved (which as the author points out was far higher than World War II).
Every accident my headquarters was aware of was made known immediately, the worst being the off-set bombing error by B-52S against Neak Luong. To set the record straight, B-52S employed this off-set technique on only a handful of missions. The beacons were there primarily for F-111 use. The latter used them successfully throughout 1973 without a single incident. Their equipment, of course, was much better as they were much later generation airplanes. After Neak Luong the B-52S stopped using this practice so the author’s statement “The accident inevitably raised the question of how often such errors occurred in parts of the country where reporters could never penetrate”, is groundless speculation like so much of his description of the 1973 bombing campaign.
Virtually all of the B-52 bombing was precisely controlled by 7th Air Force control systems. They were led in by F-4 LORAN-equipped pathfinders. These lead planes had a demonstrated accuracy by photo-recon confirmation of less than 400 feet miss distance.
The choice of targets was made by my headquarters, The United States Support Activities Group in Thailand. The personnel in the headquarters were skilled professionals from all of the Services (Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force). Many of them had been with me in Vietnam when I conducted the Linebacker operations of 1972. By 1973 we had developed targeting techniques based heavily on reconnaissance and employing sophisticated sensors such as infra-red (IR) and precision radar (SLAR). We had up-to-the-minute photography on all areas of Cambodia in which the bombing was conducted. LORAN coordinates were obtained on all B-52 targets and were completely independent of map accuracy. We bombed in all cases with B-52S by reference to this sensor or photographic information. In all cases the targets were covered by reconnaisances both pre-strike and post-strike. On a number of occasions we turned down FANK requests for targets because our recon showed risks to civilian population we were unwilling to take.
As you will recall, charges were constantly being made in 1973 that we were hitting Cambodian villages. Except for the very few accidents, in not one single case were we able to substantiate such charges. A prime example occurred in June or July ’73 when the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Jerry Friedheim, sent me a message including the full text of an East Coast newspaper article which stated B-52S had destroyed or heavily damaged 10 Cambodian villages causing the villagers to flee. The reporter stated he had per
sonally interviewed many of these villagers. He named each village supposedly involved. Friedheim wanted an immediate answer to the charges. I dispatched recon aircraft to each village and took low altitude photography of excellent quality. In no case could we find any evidence of B-52 bomb drops (the pattern of craters is unmistakable). The majority of the villages were relatively untouched by war damage of any kind. A few near the Vietnam border showed some damage from artillery fire or 250 lb. bombs (dropped only by the South Vietnamese Air Force; we did not use them at all). Even in these cases the amount of damage was relatively small and usually was found at the edges of the towns. This hard photographic evidence was immediately dispatched to Washington with a full explanatory text. It was never used by OSD to refute the story because (I was told later) “the whole incident had died down in the Press and they didn’t want to rekindle it”. I am afraid the author’s charges are based largely on such unsubstantiated evidence.
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