The Khmer National Armed Forces (; , FANK) were the combined military forces of the Khmer Republic, a short-lived nationalist and militaristic state that existed from 1970 to 1975, known today as Cambodia. The FANK was the successor of the Royal Khmer Armed Forces (, FARK) which had been responsible for the defense of the previous Kingdom of Cambodia since its independence in 1953 from France.
General overview Being essentially a continuation of the old Royal armed forces under a new name, the FANK played a more partisan role in the Cambodian Civil War that escalated following the deposition as Head of State of Prince Norodom Sihanouk by a coup d’état in March 1970 orchestrated by his own Prime-Minister General Lon Nol and cousin Sirik Matak. Although the armed forces of the Kingdom had been involved since April 1967 in the suppression of the Communist Party of Kampuchea's rebellion led by Saloth Sar (better known as Pol Pot), up until Sihanouk's overthrow it was considered to have the consensual backing of the Cambodian society, as the Prince was considered the symbol of the people.
History
On November 20, 1953, the French protectorate of Cambodia was granted full independence by France, allowing the young King Norodom Sihanouk to lead the government of the first post-colonial state in French-ruled Indochina. Under the terms of the Geneva Accords signed the following year which ended the Indochina War, French Army and Vietnamese Vietminh guerrilla units still operating in Cambodia were obliged to withdraw from its territory and that a new defense force was to be raised. Trained by the French and equipped by the United States since September 1950,Conboy and Bowra, The War in Cambodia 1970-75 (1989), p. 18. the armed forces of the new Kingdom of Cambodia ( – FARK) were formed mainly by Khmer regular soldiers recently transferred from French colonial units, though ex-Vietminh and former Khmer Issarak guerrillas of Khmer origin were also allowed to join.
Most of the senior members of the Officer corps had been officials in the colonial regime. Lon Nol, for example, served as Commander of the Cambodian Police under the French protectorate. In 1955 Gen. Lon was promoted to Chief-of-Staff of the FARK, and in 1960 was appointed Minister of Defense. Meanwhile, Cambodia was admitted as a protocol state member of the US-sponsored SEATO alliance and under his command the FARK became a bastion of American influence on the Sihanouk regime, particularly because US military aid constituted 30% of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces' budget until the coup against President Ngô Đình Diệm in South Vietnam led Prince Sihanouk to cancel on 20 November 1963 all American aid, and on 15 January 1964 the U.S. MAAG aid program was suspended, then renounced in August 1964 by the Cambodian government when Cambodia adopted a neutrality policy.Ross, Cambodia, a Country Study (1987), p. 241.Chinnery, The rise of the Eagle Flights in Vietnam, the air war over south-east Asia (2016), p. 26.
Following his faction's seizure of a large number of seats of the ruling Sangkum party's representation at the National Assembly in the 1966 general elections, Gen. Lon was elected Prime-Minister, thereby locking the state institutions under the firm grip of the military, just as Sihanouk had apprehended. However, he resigned from the post in 1967 after a car accident, only to return two years later when the monarch mounted a renewed purge against leftist dissidents.
As a representative of the conservative Khmer who had supported the French rule, Lon Nol never accepted Sihanouk's neutralist policy of non-alignment. Though the Prince's sporadic purges of leftist movements would quench Lon's wrath at the growing communist insurgency, what truly worried him was Sihanouk's covert deals with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, which allowed them to establish base-camps on the Cambodian side of the border with South Vietnam and built a massive supply infrastructure (Ho Chi Minh trail). Lon also knew that Sihanouk's balancing appeasement of the US from 1968 onwards by allowing B-52 aerial bombings and ‘hot pursuit’ cross-border raids against NVA/VC base areas within Cambodia would be ineffective in stopping the wider, home-grown communist insurgency. One of the measures he was able to undertake was the build-up of a strong anti-communist faction within the FARK's officer corps that would back him should Sihanouk shift again towards the left.
Alignment with the United States On March 17, 1970, while Sihanouk was absent from the country on a state visit to China and the USSR, Lon Nol assumed power when the National Assembly in Phnom Penh unanimously voted the Prince out of office. Lon Nol automatically succeeded the latter as Head of State on August 18, and although he claimed that the move was constitutionally legal, it quickly ran afoul of the conservative mentality of the Cambodians, many of whom believed that the Prince ruled through divine favour. To further aggrieve matters, Prince Sihanouk, who had sought refuge in China after being deposed, established a political base in Beijing and entered into an alliance with the increasingly Maoist-oriented Khmer Rouge leadership and other leftist opposition groups. In April 1970 these disparate groups formed the FUNK, an umbrella organization dedicated to the armed overthrow of the pro-western Khmer Republic.
Lon Nol also had to deal with a number of dissident FARK senior officers whom, though sharing most of his views, felt that the overthrow of Sihanouk had been one step too far. Many of these royalist officers resigned in protest from the armed forces' structure when Gen. Lon proceeded to transform with American help the old FARK into the FANK to accommodate the character of the new Republican regime. By contrast, new recruits were readily available from the ranks of the far-right Khmer Serei, a US-backed anti-communist guerrilla group led by the hardline Nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh which had fought against Sihanouk's regime during the 1960s and who always viewed him as a communist crony.
The measures quickly implemented by Lon Nol's administration included the issue of ultimata demanding North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Vietcong units to vacate the bases they had established on Khmer soil, and prevented arms shipments bound to the Vietcong from being unloaded at Cambodian sea ports. These same measures however, coupled by the effects of the joint US Army/Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) Cambodian Incursion launched that same year against NVA/VC sanctuaries in Cambodia, resulted in a heavy backlash. In reality, the newly created Khmer Republic and its ill-prepared armed forces were soon caught off-guard in the early 1970s by the aggressive reaction of the NVA, which had previously limited its actions to providing support to Vietcong units operating at South Vietnam even after its devastating defeat in the January 1968 Tet Offensive. The outcome was that the period of Lon Nol's rule actually saw an increase of North Vietnamese military presence in the lower Mekong and Bassac corridors and in the north and northeast Cambodia, particularly from 1972 onwards. In response to the earlier FANK's failed ground offensives to expel them, strong NVA units launched in turn throughout 1971-72 ferocious counter-offensives on these areas – using heavy artillery, tanks, and SA-7 Grail surface-to-air missiles for the first time in Cambodia –, which dwarfed the Tet Offensive numerically. These massive-scale operations only served to exhaust both sides however, and led to the signing in January 1973 of the Paris Peace Accords which marked the official end of American direct involvement on combat operations in Vietnam. The Accords hit both the Khmer Republic and South Vietnam hard, as the military and financial aid that they received from the US was cut by over fifty percent (though American military personnel in Cambodia continued to coordinate the various military aid programs, sometimes finding themselves involved in prohibited advisory and combat tasks until 1975.Conboy and Bowra, The War in Cambodia 1970-75 (1989), pp. 10-12.) The FANK, which until that date had been armed, supplied, and maintained by American advisors and technicians, now faced a new reality in which they had to repair their own equipment and train their troops as best as they could with far less of a budget.
The Civil War years The FANK suffered its first major setback in February 1971 during Operation Chenla I, an offensive launched earlier in late August 1970 targeting North Vietnamese strongholds in northeastern Cambodia, when a Cambodian Army combined twelve battalion-strong task-force was annihilated by a NVA counterattack that ripped apart many elite Cambodian military units, including some of the American-trained Khmer Krom volunteer battalions recruited straight out of South Vietnam.Conboy and Bowra, The War in Cambodia 1970–75 (1989), pp. 6; 19–20. Almost simultaneously, the NVA hit Pochentong Airbase with a devastating "Sapper" attack, which succeeded in destroying nearly entirely the Khmer Air Force on the ground.Conboy, FANK: A History of the Cambodian Armed Forces, 1970–1975 (2011), pp. 217–218; 226. A second attempt to recover the lost momentum of Chenla I was made in late August 1971 with Operation Chenla II, which saw another FANK task-force being decimated again by an NVA counterattack held later in December that year. Indeed, the final attack on FANK positions during that month virtually wiped out ten infantry battalions (including again the sacrifice of the best Khmer Krom battalions) and resulted in the loss of another ten battalions-worth of equipment.Conboy and Bowra, The War in Cambodia 1970–75 (1989), p. 7.Conboy, FANK: A History of the Cambodian Armed Forces, 1970–1975 (2011), p. 10.
The creation of the Chinese-sponsored FUNK coalition by Sihanouk and the lending of his popular support to the anti-Republican insurgency gave it greater legitimacy in the eyes of the pro-Sihanoukist Cambodian peasantry, many of whom began to flock into its ranks. This move inadvertently also allowed the Khmer Rouge to recruit peasants from the villages on the rural areas under their control that otherwise would have been uninterested. In addition, many politically moderate Cambodians came to dislike Lon Nol's authoritarian (and unstable) republican regime, due to his corrupt ways and oppressive rule that curbed political and civil rights far more than Sihanouk had done.
In the wake of the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords, Lon Nol proved unable to halt the illegal build-up of North Vietnamese forces in the lower Mekong-Bassac area in preparation for a renewed offensive in neighbouring South Vietnam. He also failed to engage in a properly coordinated war effort with either the American CIA or the Southern Vietnamese Nguyen Van Thieu regime.