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With the Khmer Rouge deprived of outside political support and cut off from potential resupply from their Chinese supporters, the question became not whether Cambodia could resist the invaders but for how long. The Hanoi-created Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS), a fighting force of 18,000 Cambodian refugees, had accompanied the Vietnamese into Cambodia; when Phnom-Penh fell in the second week of the invasion, KNUFNS leaders renamed the group the Peoples Revolutionary Council of Kampuchea and set up a government. Last week PRCK announced that as the de facto government it welcomed diplomatic recognition and would accept aid from international sources.
However great the number of PRCK forces, intelligence observers in neighboring Thailand and in Washington were persuaded that the entire operation had been a Vietnamese show, and a superb one at that, exceeding in some respects the best tactics Hanoi ever used against French or American forces in the earlier Indochina wars. In less than a month, traveling at speeds of up to 40 m.p.h., twelve Vietnamese divisions totaling 100,000 men had swept across the rice fields and shifting terrain of Cambodia in an advance that covered 300 miles. So successful was the Vietnamese strategy, in fact, that the story of Cambodia's fall might well become a classic textbook study. "Patton would be proud," boomed the London Observer.
At first it was a border quarrel between Communist neighbors. For two years Khmer Rouge soldiers had been raiding Vietnamese border towns and kidnaping residents; Hanoi intermittently fought back or offered peace terms without success. Finally in December 1977, the angry Vietnamese decided to launch a severely punitive raid into Cambodia. The raid was not totally successful. Some Vietnamese tank columns ran out of gas or lost their way. And while the Vietnamese killed large numbers of Khmer Rouge, they voluntarily pulled back across the border, allowing Phnom-Penh to brag that the Khmer Rouge had repulsed the attack. Hanoi's leaders regrouped to try again. This time, command of the operation went to Viet Nam's army chief of staff, Van Tien Dung, 61, a genial general who likes to make gifts of chocolates, cigarettes and hairpins to his men and women soldiers. Dung is also Viet Nam's best tactician, the pupil of Hanoi's military genius. Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap. It was Dung who masterminded the fall of Saigon in April 1975.
Dung described his strategy in terms more poetic than military. The invasion was to be a series of blooming lotuses, stretching out their petals from captured headquarters to enfold the troops along the fringes. Expanding on that metaphor, a Thai general commented last week to TIME Correspondent David DeVoss: "The Khmer Rouge are bees without a hive. They still cluster and fly away, but soon they will all go visit the lotus."