Cambodia hard pressed

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32783, 7 December 1971, Page 17

Cambodia hard pressed

(N.Z.P.A .-Reuter—Copyright) PHNOM PENH, Dec. 6.

At least 100 Cambodians were killed or wounded in the fighting yesterday, and the latest messages from the north-eastern front say that hundreds of Khmer soldiers and civilians were killed during last week’s headlong retreat north up Highway No. 6 between the towns of Baray and Kompong Thom.

The town of Bat Doeung, only 16 miles from the centre of Phnom Penh, has been under attack since before dawn yesterday, but Govern-

ment troops there are holding , out. Kompong Thom is now entirely isolated from the remainder of Government-held Cambodia. \ The rest of the 30-mile stretch of Highway No. 6 has been reoccupied by the North Vietnamese 9th Division after the collapse of "Operation Tchenla Two,” the Cambodian Army’s main monsoon offensive. Three paratroop camps on the outskirts of the town of Chrum, on Highway No. 7 the main road running through the rubber plantations Tn which the North Vietnamese Army hides its supplies in East Cambodia were hit by more than 70 shells before dawn this morning. Some of the paratroops i were wounded. According to the Secretary

of the United States Air Force (Mr Robert Seamans) less than 15 per cent of the supplies entering the Ho Chi Minh Trail over the last year have reached the Communist forces in Cambodia and South Vietnam. On his two-week tour of U.SA.F. installations in Asia and the Pacific, Mr Seamans admitted that bombing the trail alone would not force the North Vietnamese to give up, “But,” he said, “the effectiveness of the air strikes has been illustrated by the absence of any sustained Communist military operations since we have really built up our capability to do a pretty dam sophisticated job on the trail in the last couple of years.” Mr Seamens said that the South Vietnamese now were , flying up to 80 per cent of the attack missions in their own country, and half of all the missions in South Vietnam and Cambodia combined. The U.SA.F. last month had 31,200 men in Vietnam, compared with the South Vietnamese Air Force strength of 47,000. But about 26,000 American airmen remained in Thailand. Most United States strikes against the Ho Chi Minh Trail were being carried out from bases in Thailand and from Seventh Fleet carriers in the Tonkin Gulf. In Washington, Senator Edward Kennedy said yesterday that a new Government study showed that American bombing in Cambodia was contributing substantially to civilian casualties and the wave of refugees fleeing from the countryside. The report, to be filed within two weeks with Senator Kennedy’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Refugees, details food and housing shortages among the hundreds of thousands who have fled to the Cambodian capital. It says refugees leave their homes largely because they fear bombing or because their houses have already been destroyed; and it alleges that the Cambodian Government has understated the number of civilians killed and injured since the fighting spread to Cambodia in March of last year. In Paris yesterday, medical and ecological authorities from 20 countries completed a two-day conference by denouncing “the blind and systematic annihiliation of all human, animal, and vegtable life in the Indo-China war.” The conference also passed a resolution praising “the extraordinary accomplishments of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam.” Among the speakers was an American, Professor Arthur Westing, of Wyndham College, who reported on a new “super-bomb” which he said, was being used by United States forces in Indo-China, and which, when exploded, destroyed all vegetation within a radius of 160 feet Professor Westing said that the bomb, nicknamed “The Daisy Mower” was surpassed in destructive power only by nuclear weapons.