Ny was sleeping at home when the bombs started dropping on Neak Luong, 30 tons all at once. She had felt the ground tremble from nearby bombings in the past, but this strike by a massive B-52 Stratofortress aircraft hit the town squarely. “Not only did my house shake, but the earth shook,” she told The Intercept. “Those bombs were from the B-52s.” Many in the downtown market area where she worked during the day were killed or wounded. “Three of my relatives — an uncle and two nephews — were killed by the B-52 bombing,” she said.
The strike on Neak Luong may have killed more Cambodians than any bombing of the American war, but it was only a small part of a devastating yearslong air campaign in that country. As Elizabeth Becker, who covered the conflict as a correspondent for the Washington Post, notes in her book “When the War Was Over,” the United States dropped more than 257,000 tons of explosives on the Cambodian countryside in 1973, about half the total dropped on Japan during all of World War II.
“They caused the largest number of civilian casualties because they were bombing so massively with very poor maps and spotty intelligence.”
“The biggest mistakes were in 1973,” she told The Intercept. “They caused the largest number of civilian casualties because they were bombing so massively with very poor maps and spotty intelligence. During those months ‘precision bombing’ was an oxymoron.” Neak Luong, she concurred, was the worst American “mistake.”
State Department documents, declassified in 2005 but largely ignored, show that the death toll at Neak Luong may have been far worse than was publicly reported at the time, and that the real toll was purposefully withheld by the U.S. government.
Full story: https://theintercept.com/2023/05/23/kis ... eak-luong/
The accidental bombing of Neak Luong, 1973
- Bong Burgundy
- Where Did All the People Go?
- Reactions: 286
- Posts: 2500
- Joined: Sun Oct 29, 2017 12:20 pm
- Location: K440 Channel 4 News
-
- Similar Topics
- Replies
- Views
- Last post
-
-
Still B-52 Craters In Neak Loeung?
by barangPP » Sun Feb 20, 2022 7:24 pm » in Cambodian History and Culture - 14 Replies
- 2224 Views
-
Last post by Eddie
Thu Mar 17, 2022 10:16 am
-