Saigon attack ‘shatters Phnom Penh division’

Press, 4 December 1978, Page 8

Saigon attack ‘shatters Phnom Penh division’

NZPA-Reuter Washington A full-scale dry-season offensive by Vietnamese troops has shattered a Cambodian Army division in the worst set-back the Phnom Penh Government has suffered in the 18-month-old conflict, Carter Administration sources have said in Washington. The sources said that Vietnam appeared to be using increased numbers of Cambodian refugees to serve as “resistance forces.”

The refugees, mostly young men, are the nucleus of a Vietnamese effort to spur “uprisings” in border areas to weaken the Cambodian regime. Cambodia’s defeat took place on the week-end of November 18 and 19 near the border town of Snuol, north of Tay Ninh province in Vietnam, one of the areas of the United States invasion of Cambodia in 1970. according to the Administration sources.

They said that a Cambodian division-size unit of 4000 to 5000 suffered a “significant defeat with more serious losses than they’ve taken” since the border conflict began. United States equipment seized by the Vietnamese after the collapse of Saigon, including artillery, tanks, personnel carriers and FlO5 and A 37 fighter planes, had been used by a 10,000-man Vietnamese force.

The Cambodian division commander and senior officers were reported to have been killed and hundreds of others were believed to have been captured, intelligence sources said. More than half the Cambodian division had been lost, they said. Intelligence sources in Washington are puzzled about Cambodia’s effort to fight the Vietnamese in a full-scale battle instead of “drifting away” into smaller guerrilla units, as in the past, to harass the Vietnamese. “This kind of fight is what the Cambodians have attempted to avoid,” said one source.

Dry weather has now come to Indo-Cbina after unusually heavy rains and flooding. Administration officials said that the expected “dry-season offensive" by the Vietnamese had taken on surprising intensity, Cambodians using about nine MiG-19 fighters that been supplied by China. The planes, flown by Chinesetrained Cambodians, had already staged reconnaissance missions and possibly some attacks into Vietnam. The aims of the Vietnamese offensive were to push back as many Cambodian troops as possible from the border, to prepare and spur insurgencies within Cambodia and to attack and destroy Cambodian units.