Word: phnom-penh
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...city−has been besieged by Khmer insurgents. During the initial onslaught, government forces were split in two and Communist-backed troops invested more than half of the T-shaped Mekong River town. Late last week the tide of battle turned. The besiegers began to drift away, and the Phnom-Penh government claimed a significant victory. TIME Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand rode a Cambodian helicopter into Kompong Cham, left the scene two days later with a convoy of wounded for the 75-mile voyage downriver to Phnom-Penh. His report...
...most ominous question about Cambodia's future has been: When would the Hanoi-backed Khmer insurgents make their big move? Despite several weeks of concentrated assaults by American B-52s, the rebel forces had been able to move to within ten miles of the capital of Phnom-Penh prior to the deadline. Those sweeping advances suggested that the troops of Cambodian President Lon Nol, once they were denied the support of U.S. warplanes, would be hard-pressed to stave off a major enemy attack...
Last week more than 5,000 insurgents laid siege to a comparable force of government soldiers defending Kompong Cham, Cambodia's third largest city (peacetime pop. 125,000, now about 65,000), approximately 50 miles northeast of Phnom-Penh. Lon Nol vowed that he would not let Kompong Cham fall and dispatched Major General Sar Hor, the highly regarded Minister of Veteran Affairs, to take charge of its defenses. Nonetheless, the insurgents steadily advanced. Using American 105-mm. howitzers captured last month from fleeing government troops, they massively shelled the city, rendering Kompong Cham's airport useless. Government...
Though Lon Nol threw several thousand fresh reserves into the battle, the rebels continued to move toward the city's limits. One government soldier, evacuated to a hospital in Phnom-Penh, moaned: "They just keep coming and coming." At a large textile factory just outside the town-which had been built for Cambodia by China-Lon Nol's troops fled under fire while the workers and managers remained behind, trying unsuccessfully to hold back the insurgent attacks. Inside the city itself, house-to-house fighting erupted around the central marketplace when rebel infiltrators suddenly surfaced. Using armored scout...
Major John Hoskins, 37, of Portsmouth, Ohio, triggered the last bomb, a 500-pounder, over Khmer insurgent bunkers 25 miles northeast of Phnom-Penh. Flying alongside him was Captain Lonnie Ratley III, 29, of Plant City, Fla., who moments later fired the last