Hot Contents: Secret bombing of Cambodia by the US

Operation Menu

Operation Menu

Date	18 March 1969 to 28 May 1970
Location	Eastern Cambodia and Laos
Result	Intensification of Cambodian Civil War & failure to prevent North Vietnamese backed forces from operating in the country

Belligerents

United States

Democratic Republic of Vietnam

National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam

Casualties and losses

Khmer Rouge fighters and Cambodian civilians: 40,000 (demographer Marek Sliwinski); tens of thousands (Banister and Johnson); 50–150,000 (Ben Kiernan) NOTE: These figures refer to the entirety of the US bombing of Cambodia, not just the Menu bombings per se

Vietnamese Casualties: Unknown

Background

Breakfast

System

First, the number of individuals who had complete knowledge of the operation was kept to a bare minimum. All communications concerning the missions was split along two paths – one route was overt, ordering typical B-52 missions that were to take place within South Vietnam near the Cambodian border – the second route was covert, utilizing 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. McCain forwarded it to the Joint Chiefs in Washington DC, who, after reviewing it, passed it on to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird (who might consult with the president). The Joint Chiefs then passed the command for the strike to General Bruce K. Holloway, Commander of SAC, who then notified Lieutenant General , Commander of the 3rd Air Division on Guam.

During this time Air Force Major was supervising an MSQ-77 Combat Skyspot radar site at Bien Hoa Air Base, RVN. "Skyspot" was a ground directed bombing system which directed B-52 strikes to targets in Vietnam. 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 and then relayed to the aircraft as they came on station. Only the pilots and navigators of the aircraft (who had been personally briefed by General Gillem and sworn to secrecy) knew of the true location of the targets. The bombers then flew on to their targets and delivered their payloads.

After the air strikes, Knight gathered the mission paperwork, computer tapes etc., destroying them in an incinerator. He then called a special phone number in Saigon and reported that "The ball game is over." 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.

Exposure

Although Sihanouk was not informed by the US about the operation, he remained quiet about the bombing of his country. His silent acquiescence may have been prompted by a desire to see PAVN/NLF forces out of Cambodia, since he himself was precluded from pressing them too hard. After the event, it was claimed by Nixon and Kissinger that Sihanouk had given his tacit approval for the raids, but this claim has since been disproved. On 9 May 1969, an inaccurate article by military reporter describing the bombing was run in the New York Times. Beecher claimed that an unnamed source within the administration had provided the information. Nixon was furious when he heard the news and ordered Kissinger to obtain the assistance of Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover and discover the source of the leak. 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. This was the first in a series of illegal surveillance activities authorized by Nixon in the name of national security. The administration was relieved when no other significant press reports concerning the operation appeared.

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 were cognizant 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." 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.

Revelations

Aftermath

References

Notes

Sources

Unpublished government documents

Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Command History 1967, Annex F, Saigon, 1968.
Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Command History 1968, Annex F, Saigon, 1969.

Published government documents

Head, William H. War from Above the Clouds: B-52 Operations during the Second Indochina War and the Effects of the Air War on Theory and Doctrine. Maxwell Air Force Base AL: Air University Press, 2002.
Nalty, Bernard C. Air War over South Vietnam, 1968–1975. Washington DC: Air Force Museums and History Program, 2000.
Tilford, Earl H. Setup: What the Air force did in Vietnam and Why. Maxwell Air Force Base AL: Air University Press, 1991.

Memoirs

Westmoreland, William C. A Soldier Reports. New York: Doubleday, 1976.

Secondary accounts

Isaacs, Arnold, Gordon Hardy, MacAlister Brown, et al., Pawns of War: Cambodia and Laos. Boston: Boston Publishing Company, 1987.
Morocco, John, Operation Menu in War in the Shadows. Boston: Boston Publishing Company, 1988.
Morocco, John, Rain of Fire: Air War, 1969–1973. Boston: Boston Publishing Company, 1985.
Rotter, Andrew J. ed., Light at the end of the tunnel : a Vietnam War anthology; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991 [isbn 0312045298]; p. 276ff., Shawcross: Bombing Cambodia—A critique.
Shaw, John M. The Cambodian Campaign: The 1970 Offensive and America's Vietnam War. Lawrence KS: University of Kansas Press, 2005.
Shawcross, William, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. New York: Washington Square Books, 1979.
Sorley, Lewis, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. New York: Harvest Books, 1999.

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Secret bombing of Cambodia by the US