What was Operation Menu?
Operation Menu was the secret bombing by US B-52s of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong base areas in eastern Cambodia, a country that was officially neutral in the Vietnam War. The first raid, code-named Breakfast, struck on 18 March 1969, and the campaign ran until May 1970, some 3,600 to 3,900 sorties and more than 100,000 tons of bombs by the official counts. It was hidden from Congress and the public by a system of false reports, and it opened an air war over Cambodia that lasted until August 1973 and cost many Cambodian lives.1
On the night of 18 March 1969 B-52 bombers that had been briefed for targets in South Vietnam turned toward the border and released their bombs on suspected communist base camps inside Cambodia. In Washington it was the afternoon of 17 March; President Richard Nixon telephoned his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to ask when the strike would begin and was told it was an hour away. The mission was called Breakfast. Those that followed were named for other meals, and the whole secret campaign became Operation Menu.2
Background: sanctuaries across the border
Cambodia was neutral in name. Its ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, expected Hanoi to win the war and had broken off relations with the United States in 1965, and he let the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong use eastern Cambodia for bases and for the supply routes of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. From those sanctuaries they struck into South Vietnam and then withdrew across the border to rest and rearm.3 › The Tet Offensive, 1968
Nixon took office in January 1969 promising to end American involvement in the war. Bombing North Vietnam again was ruled out because of the uproar it would cause at home, so attention turned to the Cambodian bases. General Creighton Abrams, the US commander in Vietnam, argued that strikes on them would hit the very bases from which the enemy fought in the South and reduce American casualties as US troops were withdrawn.4
Decision-makers and commanders
This was not a battle of two armies but a campaign decided in a few offices. In Washington the decision lay with Nixon and Kissinger. Secretary of State William Rogers opposed the strikes. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird supported the bombing but doubted it could be kept secret; he later said he had wanted it public. General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, carried the plan through the military chain.5
Sihanouk himself sent mixed signals. Both the Air Force's official history and later accounts record that since an American envoy's visit in January 1968 he had hinted he would not object to attacks on Vietnamese bases in unpopulated areas of his country, provided Cambodians were not harmed and nothing was said in public.6
The date of the decision is told in different ways. HISTORY.com and John T. Correll, writing for the Air & Space Forces Magazine, say Nixon authorized the bombing on 15 March 1969. The State Department's documentary history notes that Nixon and Kissinger both describe a two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on 16 March, at which, in Kissinger's account, Nixon pretended the question was still open although he had already decided.7
The campaign in phases
Breakfast. The first strike fell near the Fishhook, a bulge of Cambodian territory pushing into South Vietnam northwest of Saigon. The sources disagree on its size: the Air Force's official historian Bernard Nalty writes that 59 of 60 scheduled B-52s bombed, Correll gives 48. The crews reported large secondary explosions, and General Wheeler told Kissinger afterward that they had been four to seven times the size of a normal bomb burst.8
The secret system. Every Menu mission was hidden inside an ordinary one. A request for a strike on a target in South Vietnam went through the normal channels, while a second request for the real target in Cambodia went up a special channel to the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense. The bombers, flying at night and guided by Combat Skyspot ground radar, were briefed for the South Vietnamese target; only the pilot and navigator knew they had crossed the border.9
Afterward the radar officers burned the real strike data and filed reports giving the coordinates of the cover targets in South Vietnam, while the true results traveled by back channel. Even the Secretary of the Air Force was not told. A small number of senior members of Congress were privately informed, but Congress as a body was not.10
The menu grows. The later targets took the names Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert and Supper, six base areas in all, four of them in and around the Fishhook. Inside the government the raids were judged a success: by the end of April 1969 Nixon told Wheeler of his great satisfaction, and in March 1970 Kissinger passed on to him the verdict of the Joint Chiefs and of the command in Saigon that the strikes were of great value.11
Leaks and wiretaps. The secret was never complete. On 9 May 1969 William Beecher of The New York Times reported that B-52s had raided supply dumps and base camps in Cambodia. The story caused little stir, but Nixon and Kissinger were furious, and the FBI placed wiretaps on government officials and journalists, 17 people in all, in search of the leak.12
Turning point: from secret raids to open war
On 18 March 1970, a year to the day after Breakfast, Sihanouk was overthrown and replaced by General Lon Nol, who was friendly to the United States. Tactical air strikes in Cambodia began on 24 April, and on 30 April Nixon told the nation on television that American and South Vietnamese troops were attacking the sanctuaries. He presented it as the first move against bases the United States had so far left alone out of respect for Cambodia's neutrality, saying nothing of the bombing.13
The incursion set off the largest wave of protest of Nixon's first term. At Kent State University in Ohio on 4 May 1970, National Guardsmen fired on students protesting against it and killed four. The Menu raids, overlapping with the ground attack for a few weeks, ended in May 1970; by Nalty's count B-52s had flown 3,875 sorties against the six base areas and dropped more than 100,000 tons of bombs, while HISTORY.com gives 3,630 flights and 110,000 tons.14
Aftermath
The bombing did not stop with Menu. After the last American ground troops left Cambodia on 30 June 1970, strikes went on at the request of Lon Nol's government, first against the Vietnamese and then against the growing Khmer Rouge insurgency. Congress finally cut off funds and ended the bombing on 15 August 1973.15
The secret of 1969 came out only that summer. In July 1973 a former Air Force officer, Major Hal Knight, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that while supervising radar crews in South Vietnam he had burned the records of strikes in Cambodia and substituted reports of attacks on the cover targets. The committee soon learned that his case was part of a wider system of falsified records, and in August the Pentagon laid out the figures of the secret campaign for Congress.16
A year later the question reached the impeachment of Nixon. Representative John Conyers proposed a fourth article charging the president with false and misleading statements to Congress about the bombing of Cambodia. The House Judiciary Committee, which adopted three other articles in July 1974, rejected it.17
Legacy and memory
Because the campaign was secret and its records incomplete, the human cost will never be known exactly. Estimates cover the whole air war over Cambodia from 1969 to 1973, not Menu alone. The historians Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, who in 2006 had put the total tonnage at 2.7 million, corrected it in 2010 to about 500,000 tons after errors were found in the Pentagon data, and they stand by Kiernan's estimate that the bombing probably killed between 50,000 and 150,000 people. The political economist Sophal Ear, who escaped the Khmer Rouge as a child, notes that estimates range from 24,000 to a million and that most put the toll in the hundreds of thousands.18
The bombing also emptied the countryside: Ear writes that more than a million rural Cambodians fled to Phnom Penh. Whether it brought the Khmer Rouge to power is still argued. Owen and Kiernan hold that civilian casualties drove survivors into the arms of the insurgents; Ear thinks it cannot be proven that the bombing alone led to Khmer Rouge rule, but that it helped to destabilize the country and gave the movement a recruiting tool. The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in April 1975.19 › The fall of Phnom Penh, 1975
The bombs are still in the ground. Unexploded ordnance from the American air war remains a danger in Cambodia, and clearing it has become a shared task: from 1993 to 2016 the United States spent more than $120 million on removing mines and unexploded ordnance there, and in 2017 its ambassador in Phnom Penh, William Heidt, said that his country's history of bombing was the reason he made demining a priority.20
Notes
A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.
- Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; HISTORY.com, “U.S. bombs Cambodia for the first time”. ↩
- FRUS 1969 to 1976, vol. VI, “Document 41, Editorial Note”; Sophal Ear, “Henry Kissinger's bombing campaign likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, and set path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge”; Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975. ↩
- John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; Sophal Ear, “Henry Kissinger's bombing campaign likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, and set path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge”; Dictionary of American History, “Cambodia, Bombing of”. ↩
- Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; Dictionary of American History, “Cambodia, Bombing of”. ↩
- Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; FRUS 1969 to 1976, vol. VI, “Document 41, Editorial Note”. ↩
- Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”. ↩
- HISTORY.com, “U.S. bombs Cambodia for the first time”; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; FRUS 1969 to 1976, vol. VI, “Document 41, Editorial Note”. ↩
- Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; FRUS 1969 to 1976, vol. VI, “Document 41, Editorial Note”. ↩
- Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”. ↩
- Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; American Heritage, “This Is Not Frivolous, Mr. Chairman”. ↩
- Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; FRUS 1969 to 1976, vol. VI, “Document 215, Memorandum From Kissinger to President Nixon, 27 March 1970”. ↩
- John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; American Heritage, “This Is Not Frivolous, Mr. Chairman”; Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975. ↩
- Sophal Ear, “Henry Kissinger's bombing campaign likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, and set path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge”; Dictionary of American History, “Cambodia, Bombing of”; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; American Heritage, “This Is Not Frivolous, Mr. Chairman”. ↩
- Dictionary of American History, “Cambodia, Bombing of”; Jerry M. Lewis and Thomas R. Hensley, “The May 4 Shootings at Kent State University: The Search for Historical Accuracy”; American Heritage, “This Is Not Frivolous, Mr. Chairman”; Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975; HISTORY.com, “U.S. bombs Cambodia for the first time”. ↩
- Dictionary of American History, “Cambodia, Bombing of”; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; Owen and Kiernan, “Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications”. ↩
- Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”; American Heritage, “This Is Not Frivolous, Mr. Chairman”. ↩
- American Heritage, “This Is Not Frivolous, Mr. Chairman”; John T. Correll, “The Shadow War in Cambodia”. ↩
- Owen and Kiernan, “Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications”; Sophal Ear, “Henry Kissinger's bombing campaign likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, and set path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge”. ↩
- Sophal Ear, “Henry Kissinger's bombing campaign likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, and set path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge”; Owen and Kiernan, “Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications”; Dictionary of American History, “Cambodia, Bombing of”. ↩
- Voice of America, “Acknowledging U.S. Role in Bombing, Ambassador Prioritizes Demining Efforts”; Sophal Ear, “Henry Kissinger's bombing campaign likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, and set path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge”. ↩
Sources
- Bernard C. Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968-1975 (Washington: Air Force History and Museums Program, 2000), chapter 6, pp. 128 to 133, via GovInfo
- John T. Correll, Air & Space Forces Magazine, “The Shadow War in Cambodia” (2017)
- HISTORY.com Editors, A&E Television Networks, “U.S. bombs Cambodia for the first time”
- US Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969 to 1976, vol. VI, “Document 41, Editorial Note”
- Sophal Ear, The Conversation, “Henry Kissinger's bombing campaign likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, and set path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge”
- Dictionary of American History, via Encyclopedia.com, “Cambodia, Bombing of”
- American Heritage, vol. 69, no. 3 (Summer 2024), “This Is Not Frivolous, Mr. Chairman”
- US Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969 to 1976, vol. VI, “Document 215, Memorandum From Kissinger to President Nixon, 27 March 1970”
- Jerry M. Lewis and Thomas R. Hensley, Kent State University, “The May 4 Shootings at Kent State University: The Search for Historical Accuracy”
- Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications”, The Asia-Pacific Journal 13, no. 17 (April 2015)
- Voice of America, Khmer service, “Acknowledging U.S. Role in Bombing, Ambassador Prioritizes Demining Efforts”
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