Thai-Vietnamese collision in Cambodia, 1981

This is a spinoff of Dave Howery's "Vietnam invades Thailand" thread.

I don't see a large-scale Thai-Vietnamese conflict coming from the POD he proposes (Cambodian rebels, et al.) But I can imagine a Thai-Vietnamese conflict starting with an earlier POD.

It's this: OTL, Pol Pot was insanely aggressive towards Vietnam and merely obnoxious towards Thailand. TTL, let's reverse these, and have Pol Pot direct his madness towards the feudal-capitalist running dogs in Bangkok.

I think this is a stretch -- there were underlying nationalistic and ideological currents pushing the Khmers Rouges towards a confrontation with Hanoi -- but let's handwave [handwave] and say Pol Pot just happens to be daft in this particular way.

Now what?

Well, I think the Thais would be slow to invade -- slower than the Vietnamese OTL. We're probably talking '80 or '81. So, many more Cambodian dead, alas.

And they'd look for a non-Communist Cambodian resistance movement (probably Son Sann) to be the tip of the spear. Well, so did the Vietnamese OTL! But the Vietnamese then insisted -- in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- that they weren't fighting in Cambodia. Really: they said they were just providing logistical support to Heng Samrin and the other anti KR (really mostly former-KR-turned-anti-KR) Cambodians. Which was so obviously nonsense that it helped turn world opinion well against them.

The Thais, I think, would try to make this a /bit/ more real. So they'd likely spend a year or two building up Son Senn, and maybe grabbing a foothold in western Cambodia.

That done, can SS + the Royal Thai Army go all the way to Phnom Penh?

Probably. Pol Pot had gutted his army. Think Stalin's purges, but five times worse. And also, the KR had little armor or heavy artillery to begin with, and most of what they did have had broken down by ''78 from lack of parts and maintenance.

Worse and worse, formal KR doctrine was a weird mishmash of Maoism and triumph-of-the-will. Basically, they downplayed the importance of things like armor and airpower in favor of the almighty guerrilla. After all, the US had unleashed fantastic airpower against them, and Lon Nol had had armor, and they'd still lost the war. Right?

So, yeah: any halfway decent army could take them out. But the Thais were a weaker force than the Vietnamese, and not configured for a large-scale offensive campaign. So it would probably take them months instead of six weeks.

Meanwhile, what's Hanoi doing? Well, it's unlikely that Pol Pot will have played nice with the Vietnamese. If we flip his OTL attitudes towards Vietnam and Thailand, then he's been plenty obnoxious enough. So the Vietnamese probably won't intervene to save him.

But they still won't be too happy to see a neighboring Communist regime overrun by feudalists and counterrevolutionaries. So upon consideration, I think that what happens is, once the Thais are clearly winning, the Vietnamese invade anyway. Glance at a map and you'll see that Phnom Penh is much closer to the Vietnamese border than to the Thai side. So, Hanoi can let the Thais fight their way halfway across the country, and then intervene with a knockout blow. Think Poland in '39, kind of thing.

Now a key question becomes, is there a plausible Communist alternative to Pol Pot? OTL there was, because he'd purged the Eastern Zone cadres in advance of war with Vietnam, and some escaped the purges. If that hasn't happened, then maybe the Vietnamese don't have a puppet.

But, hell, they'll come up with someone; Communist regimes were creative that way. So they invade and install *Commie in Phnom Penh. They may first try reasoning with Pol Pot, but that's not likely to work so well. So they may break new ground in socialist brotherhood by taking the son of a bitch out, popping a cap in his evil, torturing, genocidal ass, and then reporting that Comrade Pol died valiantly at the head of his troops after bequeathing leadership of the Revolution to his dear Viet brothers in arms. Or some such.

But now the Vietnamese and Thai forces are bumping into each other in the middle of Cambodia...

Thoughts?


Doug M.
 
The most realistic Thai-Vietnamese War to breakout over Cambodia, or elsewhere for that matter is to have Pol Pot not rising to the top in the Khmer Rouge. The KR was an organization created by Vietnamese Communists. They had plenty of pro-Vietnam members. These people were Pol Pot's sworn enemies and they were ruthlessly exterminated by the KR.

So yes, if Pol Pot dies before the KR comes to power, there would be pro-Vietnam KR leaders to vying to take his place. If the KR fail to topple the US backed Phnom Penh regime for example, even if they were delayed a few months - the victorious NVA would sweep into Cambodia at the completing of their own war and install a puppet KR leader. From here on a conflict with Thailand is inevitable. It's only a question of scale.

In your scenario, the Cambodian military under Pol Pot is mediocre and the Thais can handle them. US would certainly offer materiel and training. The Cambodians would get beaten and retreat. The Vietnamese will take Schadenfreuden and do nothing. A humiliated Pol Pot is less likely to annoy Vietnam.

OTOH, should Thailand try to topple the regime, all hell would break lose. The Communist world will not tolerate such a precedent in the Cold War. It doesn't matter if they like Pol Pot or not. It's one thing to replace a Communist leader with another, but an attempt to turn a Communist state into a non-Communist one automatically involves the Superpowers. The Soviets and Chinese will all exert pressure against Thailand. The Thais are not stupid enough to not see this miles away.
 
This is a spinoff of Dave Howery's "Vietnam invades Thailand" thread. I don't see a large-scale Thai-Vietnamese conflict coming from the POD he proposes (Cambodian rebels, et al.) But I can imagine a Thai-Vietnamese conflict starting with an earlier POD. It's this: OTL, Pol Pot was insanely aggressive towards Vietnam and merely obnoxious towards Thailand. TTL, let's reverse these, and have Pol Pot direct his madness towards the feudal-capitalist running dogs in Bangkok. I think this is a stretch -- there were underlying nationalistic and ideological currents pushing the Khmers Rouges towards a confrontation with Hanoi -- but let's handwave [handwave] and say Pol Pot just happens to be daft in this particular way.

Now what?

Well, I think the Thais would be slow to invade -- slower than the Vietnamese OTL. We're probably talking '80 or '81. So, many more Cambodian dead, alas. And they'd look for a non-Communist Cambodian resistance movement (probably Son Sann) to be the tip of the spear. Well, so did the Vietnamese OTL! But the Vietnamese then insisted -- in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- that they weren't fighting in Cambodia. Really: they said they were just providing logistical support to Heng Samrin and the other anti KR (really mostly former-KR-turned-anti-KR) Cambodians. Which was so obviously nonsense that it helped turn world opinion well against them.

The Thais, I think, would try to make this a /bit/ more real. So they'd likely spend a year or two building up Son Senn, and maybe grabbing a foothold in western Cambodia. That done, can SS + the Royal Thai Army go all the way to Phnom Penh? Probably. Pol Pot had gutted his army. Think Stalin's purges, but five times worse. And also, the KR had little armor or heavy artillery to begin with, and most of what they did have had broken down by ''78 from lack of parts and maintenance.

Worse and worse, formal KR doctrine was a weird mishmash of Maoism and triumph-of-the-will. Basically, they downplayed the importance of things like armor and airpower in favor of the almighty guerrilla. After all, the US had unleashed fantastic airpower against them, and Lon Nol had had armor, and they'd still lost the war. Right?

So, yeah: any halfway decent army could take them out. But the Thais were a weaker force than the Vietnamese, and not configured for a large-scale offensive campaign. So it would probably take them months instead of six weeks. Meanwhile, what's Hanoi doing? Well, it's unlikely that Pol Pot will have played nice with the Vietnamese. If we flip his OTL attitudes towards Vietnam and Thailand, then he's been plenty obnoxious enough. So the Vietnamese probably won't intervene to save him.

But they still won't be too happy to see a neighboring Communist regime overrun by feudalists and counterrevolutionaries. So upon consideration, I think that what happens is, once the Thais are clearly winning, the Vietnamese invade anyway. Glance at a map and you'll see that Phnom Penh is much closer to the Vietnamese border than to the Thai side. So, Hanoi can let the Thais fight their way halfway across the country, and then intervene with a knockout blow. Think Poland in '39, kind of thing.

Now a key question becomes, is there a plausible Communist alternative to Pol Pot? OTL there was, because he'd purged the Eastern Zone cadres in advance of war with Vietnam, and some escaped the purges. If that hasn't happened, then maybe the Vietnamese don't have a puppet.

But, hell, they'll come up with someone; Communist regimes were creative that way. So they invade and install *Commie in Phnom Penh. They may first try reasoning with Pol Pot, but that's not likely to work so well. So they may break new ground in socialist brotherhood by taking the son of a bitch out, popping a cap in his evil, torturing, genocidal ass, and then reporting that Comrade Pol died valiantly at the head of his troops after bequeathing leadership of the Revolution to his dear Viet brothers in arms. Or some such.

But now the Vietnamese and Thai forces are bumping into each other in the middle of Cambodia.

So, we start off with populations. Cambodia is split; eastern Cambodia is Vietnamized, western Cambodia is heavily Thai. (As I said in the original thread, Western Cambodia had been Thai for hundreds of years before the French stole it in 1903. (Thailand actually claimed the whole of Cambodia and Laos but gave up that claim in 1867. Historically Thailand/Siam and Vietnam have been the dominant SE Asian powers and Cambodia and Laos a bone to be chewed between them. The dynamic was that the two country's control of Cambodia and Laos was determined by the relative military strength of each. The profile of Vietnam and Siam was, in turn, determined by threats from outside - China in the case of Vietnam and Burma in the case of Siam. Too much attention to Cambodia/Laos and they'd leave themselves vulnerable to attack. The OTL manoeuverings in the 1980s can be seen as a continuation of this.)

Now there is a "Greater Thailand" strand in Thai politics which envisages return of the parts of Cambodia and Laos taken by theFrench and the four southern provinces taken by the British and now part of Malaysia. It's not a serious thread but its there.

So, we have Cambodia puddling down into chaos, the pre KR regime collapsing (the point about the communist world not accepting the forcible conversion of a communist state is moot, that simply does not apply here. We have order replacing chaos instead). The KR are hitting the Thais in the west of Cambodia, not the Vietnamese in the East. Now, families cross that border, one part of the family lives in Thailand and is Thai, the other lives in Cambodia, is Cambodian but was Thai - and most of the older members still remember being born Thai. Families being families in that part of the world, there is going to be a lot of pressure on the Thai Army to move and, at the very least, get their people out.

Now, in OTL, the Thai Army was tied down doing counter-insurgency against the communist forces in Isaan. They don't have many deployable forces to send into Cambodia. So our point of departure has to be that there is no insurgency in Thailand so the RTA is available for the liberation of western Cambodia.

Now, the Vietnamese have family ties across that border as well. They're going to move in also. So, what we have is the Thais moving in from the west, sweeping across the provinces taken from them by the French up to a stop-line more or less determined by those province boundaries. The Vietnamese Army moves in from the East. The two collide in the middle of Cambodia.

What happens next is, at first easily predictable. There's fighting along the line of contact and the Vietnamese get a serious ass-kicking. The Vietnamese Army was a light infantry Army, its great when its on its own ground, surrounded by its own people and doesn't have to worry about logistics etc. When its off that ground, its efficiency declines greatly - in OTL small Thai units routinely bloodied much larger Vietnamese forces. Even the 1975 invasion of South Vietnam was only made possible by pre-positioned supply dumps of fuel and ammunition.

So, I'd suggest there is fighting, the Vietnamese get the worst of it, then there is some quiet back-room negotiation and Cambodia gets partitioned. West Cambodia becomes a Thai protectorate, East Cambodia becomes a Vietnamese protectorate. That makes Vietnamese-Cambodians happy, Thai Cambodians happy and the rest of Cambodians will just have to lump it.

Over the years that turns into a Far Eastern version of West Germany/East Germany.
 
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