Operation Menu
Operation Menu was a covert United States Strategic Air Command (SAC) tactical bombing campaign conducted in eastern Cambodia from 18 March 1969 to 26 May 1970 as part of both the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War. The targets of these attacks were sanctuaries and base areas of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN – commonly referred to during the Vietnam War as the North Vietnamese Army [NVA]) and forces of the Viet Cong (VC), which used them for resupply, training, and resting between campaigns across the border in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The impact of the bombing campaign on the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the PAVN, and Cambodian civilians in the bombed areas is disputed by historians.
An official United States Air Force record of US bombing activity over Indochina from 1964 to 1973 was declassified by US President Bill Clinton in 2000. The report provides details of the extent of the bombing of Cambodia, as well as of Laos and Vietnam. According to the data, the air force began bombing the rural regions of Cambodia along its South Vietnam border in 1965 under the Johnson administration; this was three-and-a-half years earlier than previously believed. From 1965 to 1968, 214 tons of bombs were dropped over Cambodia.[1] The Menu bombings were an escalation of what had previously been tactical air attacks. Newly inaugurated President Richard Nixon authorized for the first time use of long-range Boeing B-52 Stratofortress heavy bombers to carpet bomb Cambodia.[2]
Operation Freedom Deal immediately followed Operation Menu. Under Freedom Deal, B-52 bombing was expanded to a much larger area of Cambodia and continued until August 1973.
System[edit]
The number of individuals who had complete knowledge of the operation was kept to a minimum. Neither the Secretary of the Air Force nor Air Force's chief of staff were aware of the bombing of Cambodia.[18] All communications concerning the missions was split along two paths – one route was overt, ordering typical B-52 missions that were to take place in South Vietnam near the Cambodian border – the second route was covert, using back-channel messages between commanders ordering the classified missions. For example: General Abrams would request a Menu strike. His request went to Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC), in Honolulu.[25][26]
McCain forwarded it to the JCS in Washington DC, who, after reviewing it, passed it on to Defense Secretary Laird (who might consult with the president). The JCS then passed the command for the strike to General Bruce K. Holloway, Commander of SAC, who then notified Lieutenant General Alvin C. Gillem, Commander of the 3rd Air Division on Guam.[27]
During this time Air Force Major Hal Knight was supervising an MSQ-77 Combat Skyspot radar site at Bien Hoa Air Base, South Vietnam. "Skyspot" was a ground directed bombing system which directed B-52 strikes to targets in Vietnam.[25][26]
Each day a courier plane would arrive from SAC's Advanced Echelon Office at Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon. Knight was given a revised list of target coordinates for the next day's missions. That evening, the coordinates were fed into Olivetti Programma 101 computers.[28] and then relayed to the aircraft as they came on station. Only the pilots and navigators of the aircraft (who had been briefed by General Gillem and sworn to secrecy) knew of the true location of the targets.[25][26]
The bombers then flew on to their targets and delivered their payloads. After the air strikes, Knight gathered the mission paperwork and computer tapes and destroyed them in an incinerator. He then called a phone number in Saigon and reported that "The ball game is over."[25] The aircrews filled out routine reports of hours flown, fuel burned, and ordnance dropped. This dual system maintained secrecy and provided Air Force logistics and personnel administrators with information that they needed to replace air crews or aircraft and replenish stocks of fuel and munitions.[29]
Exposure[edit]
Although Sihanouk was not informed by the US about the operation, he may have had a desire to see PAVN/VC forces out of Cambodia, since he himself was precluded from pressing them too hard.[30] After the event, it was claimed by Nixon and Kissinger that Sihanouk had given his tacit approval for the raids, but this is dubious.[31] Sihanouk told US diplomat Chester Bowles on 10 January 1968, that he would not oppose American "hot pursuit" of retreating North Vietnamese troops "in remote areas [of Cambodia]", provided that Cambodians were unharmed.[32]
Kenton Clymer notes that this statement "cannot reasonably be construed to mean that Sihanouk approved of the intensive, ongoing B-52 bombing raids ... In any event, no one asked him. ... Sihanouk was never asked to approve the B-52 bombings, and he never gave his approval."[32] During the course of the Menu bombings, Sihanouk's government formally protested "American violation[s] of Cambodian territory and airspace" at the United Nations on over 100 occasions, although it "specifically protested the use of B-52s" only once, following an attack on Bu Chric in November 1969.[33][34]
On 9 May 1969, an article by military reporter William M. Beecher exposing the bombing was run in the New York Times.[35] Beecher claimed that an unnamed source in the administration had provided the information. Nixon was furious when he heard the news and ordered Kissinger to obtain the assistance of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to discover the source of the leak.[25] Hoover claimed that Kissinger had told him that "we will destroy whoever did this".[18] Hoover suspected Kissinger's own NSC aide, Morton Halperin, of the deed and so informed Kissinger. Halperin's phone was then illegally tapped for 21 months.[36]
This was the first in a series of illegal surveillance activities authorized by Nixon in the name of national security. The phones of 13 officials together with four journalists were illegally tapped by the FBI in search of finding the leak.[18] The administration was relieved when no other significant press reports concerning the operation appeared, and the revelation of the secret bombing of Cambodia did not cause any public outrage.[18] Journalist Stanley Karnow asserted that the illegal bugging in May 1969 marked "the first abuses of authority" under Nixon that ultimately led to the Watergate scandal.[18]
Likewise, Congressman John Conyers wrote that the Operation Menu bombings led Nixon and his staff to become "enmeshed in the snare of lies and half-truths they themselves had created".[37] Conyers wrote that Nixon's belief that any action done by the president was justified in name of national security, first asserted with Operation Menu, created the mindset that led him directly to the Watergate scandal.[37]
By the summer, five members of the United States Congress had been informed of the operation. They were Senators John C. Stennis (MS) and Richard B. Russell, Jr. (GA), and Representatives Lucius Mendel Rivers (SC), Gerald R. Ford (MI), and Leslie C. Arends (IL). Arends and Ford were leaders of the Republican minority and the other three were Democrats on either the Armed Services or Appropriations committees.
For those in Washington who knew of the Menu raids, the silence of one party came as a surprise. The Hanoi government made no protest concerning the bombings. It neither denounced the raids for propaganda purposes, nor, according to Kissinger, did its negotiators "raise the matter during formal or secret negotiations."[38] North Vietnam had no wish to advertise the presence of their forces in Cambodia, allowed by Sihanouk in return for the Vietnamese agreeing not to foment rebellion in Cambodia.
Civilian casualties[edit]
There are no confirmed estimates of Cambodians killed, wounded, or rendered homeless by Operation Menu. The Department of Defense estimated that the six areas bombed in Operation Menu (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack, Dessert, and Supper) had a non-combatant population of 4,247. DOD planners stated that the effect of attacks could tend to increase casualties, as could the probable lack of protective shelters around Cambodian homes".[44]
Each of the target areas was small. Area 353 (Breakfast), was only 25 square kilometres (9.7 sq mi) in size and had an estimated population of 1,640 people. B-52s flew 228 sorties into this single area to bomb. Each B-52 carried up to 108 bombs weighing 225 kilograms (496 lb) and spread them equally over a "box" about 1.5 kilometers long by one-half kilometer wide (1 mile by 0.3 miles); thus, nearly 25,000 bombs may have been dropped in Area 353 alone. The other target areas had similar saturation rates of bombs.[45]
Following Operation Menu, Operation Freedom Deal continued the bombing of Cambodia for an additional three years and extended the bombing to at least one-half of the country.[46]