Word: phnom-penh
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...hardly a siege, and certainly nothing like Corregidor or Leningrad. Still, over the past two months Communist troops have managed to threaten Phnom-Penh with isolation by severing some of its main links with the outside world. The Cambodian capital's plight is an acute embarrassment to the Lon Nol regime, whose eager but not always effective 160,000-man army has been unable to reopen the vital arteries without outside help. Last week, in what has become a familiar pattern since much of the Indochina war shifted to Cambodia last spring, Phnom-Penh...
...Doctrine. The rescue operation involved 8,000 Cambodian infantry and 5,300 South Vietnamese troops, backed by artillery and no fewer than 200 tanks. One force, predominantly Cambodian, drove south from Phnom-Penh along Route 4, the key, 125-mile link with Kompong Som, Cambodia's one deepwater port and site of its only oil refinery. Another force, combining Cambodian infantry and South Vietnamese armor, pushed north from Kompong Som. The pincers closed on the rugged, heavily jungled Elephant Mountains, where 1,000 North Vietnamese regulars from the crack 101st Regiment had been blocking a 25-mile stretch...
Rejected Plan. The Route 4 rescue followed a one-day visit to Phnom-Penh by Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Moorer concluded that the situation was deteriorating, though not really critical. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, who was in Viet Nam for a three-day visit, rejected a proposal to send U.S. transport helicopters to the Elephant Mountains, but he did not rule out such missions in the future...
...officials dismiss the possibility of a Berlin-style airlift for the Cambodian capital. The Communists have not committed the troops needed to pinch off all of its road links at once, but they have hit each often enough to make highway travel risky at best. Northwest of Phnom-Penh on Route 5, rice-laden trucks bound for the city are waylaid fairly frequently. The closing of Route 4 spelled an end to the petroleum supplies that had come by truck from Kompong Som. Some fuel comes up the Mekong by tanker, but not enough to prevent shortages...
...With U.S. encouragement, Asian governments are cooperating, at least to some extent, on common problems. Thailand and Malaysia send out joint patrols to clean up small but persistent insurgent bands along their common border. Thailand and South Viet Nam have formed alliances with Cambodia, albeit extremely uneasy ones, in Phnom-Penh's fight against North Vietnamese invaders. Australia and New Zealand have ceased, as U.S. Consul-General in Osaka Jerome K. Holloway puts it, "to think of themselves as islands somewhere in the English Channel," and are rapidly extending their defense role in Asia...