IT began as a time of triumph for Cambodia's beleaguered regime. South of Phnom-Penh, Cambodian officers cheered "C'est fini!" and lit victory cigars as troops at last broke a two-month Communist hammer lock on vital Route 4. Hours later Air Cambodge's Caravelle jetliner flagship touched down at Phnom-Penh's Pochentong Airport, a sunny complex eight miles outside the capital. As he stepped out of the Caravelle, moon-faced Premier Lon Nol seemed pleased with his two-day trip to Saigon, during which he and his South Vietnamese allies had made a start toward settling some nagging differences.
Within seven hours satisfaction gave way to shock. In a daring assault that Washington officials grudgingly rated as brilliant, Communist sappers moved mortars and rockets undetected up to the city gates. Then in four murderous hours, they destroyed the airport, the Cambodian air force (about 40 craft) and tons of precious fuel and ammunition while hitting half a dozen other targets in and around Phnom-Penh. The speed, stealth and success of the raids ominously echoed the assaults that in an earlier and darker stage of the war repeatedly ripped places like Pleiku, Bien Hoa and Saigon—and did much to erode the confidence of the U.S. public.
Walls of Flame. The Communists gutted Pochentong with scandalous ease. When the first rockets and mortar rounds came pounding in on the airfield and a nearby army camp at 2:30 a.m., some of the Cambodian guards were killed and the rest took off in fear of their lives. Then one sapper squad of about ten men simply strolled into the main terminal building while another cut its way through the barbed wire on the airfield periphery. At their leisure, the Communists carried powerful satchel charges to nearly every building, hangar and operational aircraft on the field.
Before long, TIME Correspondent Stan Cloud reported, "great walls of orange flame leapt into the moonlit sky, and explosion after explosion sent showers of pyrotechnic sparks into the air." On the airport road. Cloud saw "panic-stricken refugees, clutching children and personal possessions, streaming away from the holocaust. In a field a few hundred yards from the airport, hundreds of them huddled in the predawn darkness while the false sunset of the fire blazed before them. They watched the sky as if it were some huge motion-picture screen."
In diversionary attacks. Communist raiders occupied a railway station and shelled a munitions factory, a pagoda, the Cambodian navy base on the Mekong and a schoolyard in the city itself. On the horizon, the glow of flames could be seen above the town of Kompong Kantuot, 15 miles from the capital but well within its so-called "defense perimeter."